You can get in good with the Gippers but it's gonna piss off the Machine Commune only one group can hold power in the Canyon of Titan, so you'd better choose between the Diamondbacks and the M.A.D. By tying the idea of ranking up your guys to carrying out faction missions, I hope to encourage those kinds of choices. You can't make everybody happy in the Wasteland, and trying is a good way to get dead. Ag Center or Highpool in Wasteland 2, team Angela or Team Patriarch in Wasteland 3, even Brygo or Fat Freddy way back in Wasteland 1. To me, a core strength of the Wasteland franchise is the idea of choice. One of the best pieces of advice I received while working on the game was that I should build mechanics to encourage the kind of play that I want to see. inXile: Were there any particular challenges you faced while drafting the rules? Jim: I put a lot of effort into Chapter 14, Factions & Missions. Lots of rolling multiple dice as a way to resolve various challenges. Admittedly this isn't unique to R&R but it does set it apart. I also leaned heavily into the die pool mechanics. I hope that reading the rulebook makes people genuinely laugh out loud a few times. I hewed as closely as possible to the amazing awesome irreverence of the Wasteland franchise. inXile: What’s something about Robots & Rangers that you think sets it apart from other tabletop RPG games? Jim: The tone. It's a totally playable board game with some interesting mechanics, and I spent far longer than I probably should have making sure that all the math balanced so the game was fair. I wound up designing The Great War game, borrowing a bit from Life. The conceit of this particular series of books was that everything was done from a diegetic perspective, found documents from in the universe. In volume 2, I wanted to tell the history of the Great War between the Autobots and Decepticons that had taken place millions of years before the start of the show. inXile: Have you had a hand at drafting any other games? Jim: The AllSpark Almanac is a series of guidebooks I wrote for the Transformers: Animated television series. At first, I played sporadically, with some older kids and at conventions, but by high school, I'd managed to find/build a regular group, and off we went. inXile: What got you into roleplaying games, and when did you start? Jim: Dungeons and Dragons! It had an allure in the 80s and I begged my parents to buy me the basic set. In 1988, at the age of 12, I discovered Wasteland, and boy oh boy did I love the fictional Arizona of 2087. (Easily the most competent of the bunch.) My love of robots led me to Transformers, and to this day I make my living writing books and stories and articles about Robots in Disguise. Star Wars was a big hit, with R2-D2 being my favorite character. I never really fell out of love with the genre. So when I caught my mom watching TV in the basement and I asked "what's that" and she said "Star Trek" and I asked "what's going on" and she said "well Captain Kirk is exploring the galaxy in the USS Enterprise and they've just beamed down to a planet to explore" my mind was BLOWN! The misunderstanding was soon corrected but the damage was done. See, if cartoons WEREN'T real, I took it to mean that live-action shows WERE real. This wasn't a shocker even to a very small kiddo, but it did lead me to an understandable logical fallacy. You see, when I was about 5 my parents told me that cartoons weren't real. First though, a few words with the author of the aforementioned Robots & Rangers ruleset: inXile: Howdy Jim, tell us a bit about yourself! Jim: Howdy! I'm a big sci-fi nut, have been ever since I was a kid. Well, that time is now upon us, and we’re happy to be able to share this endeavor with Jim as well as the community at large. Not long after Jim began to share his drafts of the game rules with the community did our devs start to poke around in them and consider when might be an appropriate time to dig in themselves. He's also responsible for creating a fleshed-out (and officially unofficial) version of the Robots & Rangers tabletop ruleset. Both a super-fan of the franchise and an accomplished writer in his own right, Jim has been a regular presence in the Wasteland social channels, offering assistance and strategic advice to new players there. Of the many active members of the Wasteland 3 community, one of the more helpful has been Jim Sorenson. And here's the interview: In Wasteland 3, if you chose a specific path to deal with Faran Brygo’s Little Vegas, you’d be treated to a group of kids assembled to play a tabletop game they called ‘Robots & Rangers.’ Though not fleshed out within Wasteland 3, the general idea here was to show that tabletop gaming still survives even in the broken world of Wasteland.
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