DIY Corner: Make Your Own Random Tables

It's really a rite of passage: you have these options, these choices, and you want to use them all on your hapless players, but you can't decide, and then all at once, it hits you like a Thunder Wave spell, and you think, "I'll just make a random table! It's easy! I've been listing things off my whole life!"

Then you get started. And you write some stuff down, and then you erase a couple of entries, because you want them to be a the top and bottom of the list, and one thing leads to another and the next thing you know, you've got an unruly mess, but it's a table. Your first. And it's glorious. You think to yourself, "Now, at last, I truly am a Jedi Knight Dungeon Master."

It's a rush, and maybe you think, that was so much fun, I'll do another. And another. And another and another and another, and...then one day, you're writing up some notes for your next game and you realize, "this is just another random table." That's okay, too. But I will always have a soft spot for the all-powerful random table. Few things are as useful and also as easy to create. They can really flavor your game in unique ways because it's 100% created by you.

Since I prefer to work away from the computer for all sorts of neck-beard-y reasons, I wanted to utilize this newfangled technology but still keep it lo-fi whenever possible. So I made this up: It's a worksheet for making d20 (or any other integer) tables. One side has the numbers 1 to 20 listed, and the other half of the sheet is made of graph paper. Why graph paper? Because sometimes I like to make little charts, or draw a dungeon room, or do a little statistical math, and I don't want any of that in the margins of my nice list. Sometimes I want to brainstorm before I make that list. That's where the graph paper comes in. It soothes my fevered brow. Let's me organize my scrambled thoughts. Helps me see the problem a little clearer.

When I'm done brainstorming and mucking about, I can write my d20 (or any other integer) list, taking time to put the entries where I like them, and then if I want, I can fold that scratch sheet back and run the table, as is. Clean and simple.

It's not much, but it's free. If you can use it, be my guest.

Most recently, I decided I wanted my group to actively conscript their crew for their ship, but I didn't want to waste a lot of table time on it. So I made a list of 20 candidates, with just a basic string of information and one personality characteristic that I could throw at them when they met the crew member. I had each player roll and tell me the result, and I did a little interaction with each crew member. It worked very well and helped establish for them that these crew members were NPCs and not cannon fodder. They've all got a favorite, too. God help me if a mutiny breaks out.

So, that's the DIY Corner for this we--

"But Mark, what about d30 tables!?"

Well? What about them?

"Those are totally a thing, too, you know!"

Yeah, I know, but the d20 tables are so much cleaner. So very...

"But you put a picture of that old-as-dirt Armory d30 table book up there! What are we supposed to think?"

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: d30 dice are the Spinal Tap of polyhedral dice.

Me: You've got percentile dice, you've got d20s, what do you need the d30 for?

Nigel: Well, it's ten more, innit? You're rolling dice, you get to twenny, there's nowhere else to go, so what do you do?

Me: You reach for the D30.

Nigel:  Exactly. The D30.

Me: But what if you just used percentile dice, or maybe cut your choices back to the top 20 and have a kick-ass d20 list instead?

Nigel:...this is a d30.

*Sigh*

Okay. Fine. Here. It's a d30 Table Worksheet. Orientation is different, but the concept is the same. Don't say I never did anything for you, Nigel.

Railroading and Sandboxing: In Conclusion, Jargon is a Crutch

These vocabulary words are useful in that they summarize complicated concepts, and that leads to greater communication. But we live in a time where everyone skims, and no one is very good at reading for context anymore, and subtlety is gone and nuance is out the window, and…I guess what I’m saying is, “Sandbox” and “Railroad” are positioned in our current lexicon of geek patois as Yin and Yang, a positive and a negative, one to emulate and the other to assiduously avoid at all cost.

I’m here to tell you not to drink that Kool-Aid. As we have grown and matured into not just a hobby but a pastime with numerous social applications, a developing and evolving vocabulary is essential for critical study, creative writing, and even in the classroom. But we are still talking about Dungeons & Dragons, in the end.

In the introduction to the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, Mike Carr asks the rhetorical question, “Is Dungeon Mastering an art or a science?” Again with the binary choice! Why can’t it be both? I posit that it is, in fact, a balancing act (on the teeter totter or whatever metaphor you wish to use). Carr goes on to make a few points, which I will repeat in brief:

If you consider the pure creative aspect of starting from scratch, the "personal touch" of individual flair that goes into prepar­ing and running o unique campaign, or the particular style of moderating o game adventure, then Dungeon Mastering may indeed be thought of as on art. If you consider the aspect of experimentation, the painstaking effort of preparation and attention to detail, and the continuing search for new ideas and approaches, then Dungeon Mastering is perhaps more like a science - not always exacting in a literal sense, but exacting in terms of what is required to do the job well.

Esoteric questions aside, one thing is for certain - Dungeon Mastering is, above all, a labor of love. It is demanding, time-consuming, and certainly not a task to be undertaken lightly…But, as all DM's know, the rewards are great - an endless challenge to the imagination and intellect, on enjoyable pastime to fill many hours with fantastic and often unpredictable happenings, and an opportunity to watch a story unfold and a grand idea to grow and flourish. 

…Dungeon Mastering itself is no easy undertaking, to be sure. But Dungeon Mastering well is doubly difficult. There are few gamemasters around who are so superb in their conduct of play that they could disdain the opportunity to improve themselves in some way…Take heed, and always endeavor to make the game the best it can be - and all that it can be!

My takeaway from that, back then, and now, is to not get locked into one way of thinking. Adam West as Batman had an array of aerosol can oceanic threat repellents in his Bat-Copter. I bet you a million dollars he never had a reason to use the barracuda repellent spray. But I’m sure he’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Do not fear the railroad. Do not be overwhelmed by the sandbox. They are tools to be creatively used, not fixed states of being that are never altered when set in motion. The biggest realization you can come to as a DM is this: You’re making all of this shit up as you go.

And for the record, I think Dungeon Mastering is emphatically and unequivocally an art.

RPGaDay 2019: 22 Lost

So, this is fun: Conan and Valeria encountering a dinosaur-like creature in the classic “Red Nails:”

Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the huge mouth. The head, bigger than that of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground, while the serrated backbone rose higher than Conan could have reached on tiptoe. A long spiked tail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion, trailed out behind. "Back up the crag, quick!" snapped Conan, thrusting the girl behind him. "I don't think he can climb, but he can stand on his hind legs and reach us—"

So, it’s basically a dinosaur, right? And if you can’t quite see it that way, Barry Windsor-Smith sure could. Here’s a page from his critically-acclaimed comic book adaptation of “Red Nails.”

click to enlarge

I told you that to tell you this: whenever I see the world “Lost” I assume that we’re going to be talking about dinosaurs. It’s inevitable and a little strange, but Lost, to me, is one half of the term “Lost World,” which means, in literary terms, Dinosaurs!

I love dinosaurs. If you don’t have a favorite dinosaur, you need to leave. I am serious. Dinosaurs are Monster Kid 101. They are a part and parcel of fantasy and science fiction both and stories of dinosaurs (from Lost Worlds) interacting with the humans that stumble across them are part of a sub-genre that is literally over a hundred years old.

Dungeons & Dragons understood this, and dutifully included stats for the most classic dinosaurs in the AD&D Monster Manual.  Here’s a very classic-looking T-Rex from Diesel for TSR’s Monster cards from 1982 (think flash cards for AD&D monsters with only slightly better color artwork than the black and white masterpieces in the Monster Manual).

TSR also published a classic module (by Zeb Cook and Tom Moldvay, no less), called The Isle of Dread, and it’s a classic Lost World wilderness hex crawl adventure on a strange island full of dinosaurs and other exotic creatures right out of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle by way of Ray Harryhausen.

Dinos in D&D. Boom. Done. Everything should be platinum. I should be happy, right? Right? Well I can't get happy. It's physically impossible for me to get happy.

Maybe it’s my weirdly Puritanical streak when it comes to high and low fantasy. If we’re talking knights and wizards, I think dragons, not dinosaurs. After all, the game is called Dungeons and Dragons, not Dungeons & Dinosaurs. Why, then, does it not bother me when we insert Dinosaurs into modern-day settings (Jurassic Park) or the wild west (The Valley of Gwangi) or the Pulp era (King Kong).

Two reasons come to mind. One is that those other examples above all make use of a Lost World, whether by natural accident or man-made engineering. Lost Worlds have dinos, and that’s all the explanation you need. Also, in every other instance listed above, Dinosaurs were the apex predator, the aberration, the monster in a monsterless world. This is not true in Dungeons and Dragons; it creates an ecology where you have to figure out why the dinos haven’t eaten all of the monsters or vice-versa. After all, aside from the treasure hoarding, a red dragon and a Tyrannosaurus Rex have more or less the same diet, the same habitat, the same mannerisms, and certainly the same pants-shitting size and scale to terrify players.

The T-Rex can’t fly, cast magic, or breathe fire. You know, so it’s like a dragon, only...not as cool. And dinosaurs should never be not cool. Ever. 

Tim Truman's cover art for The Isle of Dread reprint.

But…stay with me now…what if there were no dragons? If instead of dragons, your big bad was the T-Rex, that becomes your default for the “oh, shit” moment when you realize the necromancer you’re supposed to fight has a pet therapod.

I’m thinking of a heroic fantasy world, where sorcery is more uncommon, and the humanoids are out in full force. The monsters of the world have managed to tame the dinosaurs in this world to act as beasts of burden and war mounts. It’s Dinotopia, only with Goblins and Drow. Dwarves charging into battle on Triceratops. Orcs riding allosauruses. The Lizard folk use Pteranodons as winged mounts. Monster armies are bad enough, but when the monster armies have conscripted dinosaurs, they become the stuff of nightmares.

Humans have none of those advantages, but maybe they are more adept at psionic abilities, and they use massive dino-killing siege equipment, as well as clockwork automatons scavenged from the wreckage of the last great war. High magic has disappeared in the wake of the rise of chaos. One of the campaign goals may be to find the source and re-awaken it to jump-start the Age of Wonder. It would mean the death of the dinosaurs and bring magic (and dragons) back into the world.

But before that happens, you have twenty levels of characters periodically running afoul of a pissed-off Stegosaurus and running like hell to escape the spiked tail swinging in a deadly arc, smashing trees apart as it does.


I would play in that game. Hell, I may have to write it.

RPGaDay 2019: 15 Door

Erol Otus, ladies and gentlemen. 

 DM:                       There’s a door to your left. It’s about eight feet tall, and about five feet—

PLAYERS:             We go left. Through the door.

DM:                        Don’t you want to listen at the door first?

PLAYERS:             We’ll just kill whatever’s in there.

DM:                        Okay, well, the door is locked.
PLAYERS:             I attack it with Thunder Wave. (rolls dice) 19 points of damage!

DM:                        (sigh)

Few dungeon trappings are more iconic than the door. The alpha and the omega, the apex and the nadir and oh Gods and Monsters can we just get on with it?

The closed and locked door no longer captivates like it once did, back when dungeons were an existential labyrinth. Years ago, I had a player who tapped every door with a ten foot pole, you know, “in case it was trapped.” Every door. When I broke his ten foot pole during a melee encounter, he obligingly started shooting every door with an arrow, you know, “in case it was a mimic.”

These kids today, boy, I tell you what…

Video Games have ruined a generation of gamers for listening at doors and picking locks and all of that cool detail-oriented stuff we did when the world was young. Now it’s just kick and punch. My not-so radical solution is to get rid of the doors completely. That is, only put a door in front of them when they hit something you need to surprise them with, or a cool set piece, or something memorable of that nature. Doors they can’t immediately break through, and doors they certainly don’t want to just barge through. Some examples:

The door is an arch filled with opaque mist.

The door is a thick, heavy curtain that muffles sound.

The door is actually a window made from Wizard Glass, crystal clear and difficult (but not impossible) to break.

The door is a different brick pattern that irises open and closed when a command word is uttered.
The door has an illusion spell on it that makes the interior of the room appear very different from what’s really inside.

There is no door, but all of the openings into every room are centered on the wall so that there is space on either side of the door for, um, furniture, or statues, or anything that might cast a shadow across the floor, or NOT, as the case may be.

I realize that a lot of these things sound like traps, and that’s because they certainly can be. I think it’s fair game to take a weakness in the party and exploit it one time for fun—and to learn, too, of course. I don’t propose you kill anyone with a rigged door, but I think a properly rigged door in the right place—say, a treasure room or private library—would benefit from resisting the standard “we kick it open and rush in.”

I miss the ten-foot pole days. Mostly I just miss ten-foot poles. 

Old school Sutherland art. From B1. As Basic as Basic gets. What's that guy carrying? Ten Foot Pole.

RPGaDay 2019: 12 Friendship

Starting a party of newly-created adventurers off was never easy, especially back when everyone had to have their own reasons to just happen to be in that particular tavern when the merchant comes barging in the door, saying he was robbed. This is doubly difficult if your players are of the “extra special” kind, with unique circumstances and strange NPCs and none of it goes with anything else and you have to struggle to make some kind of connection, however tenuous, to get the party started.

When the hobby was young, no one in Lake Geneva cared how they all knew each other. They had willingly skipped ahead to chapter five when they all agreed to help out the merchant, for suitable compensation, of course.

It was also assumed that, once the merry band of psychopaths got together and killed some shit, they would grow to love one another in the classic spree killer/couple killer idiom; great minds think alike, and all that jazz. It’s one of the reasons why the thief became the rogue and stealing your party’s loot became a no-no with every edition going forward.

A good game from a good company.

During the lean years, when everyone else was making better D&D than the people who owned the game, a company called Dungeon Crawl Classics, came out with one of the first Old School D&D clones, a deliberate throw-back to the first edition of the game, with a few notable style twists. It’s very much worth checking out for all kinds of reasons, but the thing I want to talk about is probably one of the best ideas to come out of the Old School Renaissance: the funnel.

I first heard about this at a Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference some years ago, before I was fully back in the hobby. The Pulps Studies scholars had made friends with the Game Studies scholars and we were talking D&D and someone suggested we just play. So we grabbed an empty conference room, handed out characters and went for it.

It was pretty cool, to say the least, but we were discussing this idea of the funnel and it was like a light went off in my head; players roll up not one, but four characters who are ZERO level. Minimal hit points, no skills, no real stats, nothing else. Just an occupation and maybe, if you’re lucky, a tool to go with it. Cannon fodder.

The idea is simple: all of these zero level characters are from the same place. They all, together, as a group, banned together to investigate some thing that has happened to threaten the safety of the village. Orcs raiding, daughter goes missing, livestock being murdered, you get the idea.

These zero level characters, out of a sense of little more than civic duty, agree to hurl themselves into danger and possibly—make that, certainly—death. In fact, that’s the point. With an average of 2 or 3 hit points, a single hit from a goblin sword is lethal. Oh, sure, three or four zero level characters with rocks and sticks can overcome a goblin, but not before it kills one of the group.

That’s the funnel. It's a game of attrition, like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory Tour. Start with a lot of zero level characters, and at the end of the adventure, you have a few left. They have survived the harrowing ordeal, but at a cost. They watched their friends die, they felt a sense of helplessness when they couldn’t do something, and felt a strong sense of accomplishment for having stayed alive.

Those survivors, then, become the players’ first level characters. If a player has more than one zero-level character, they choose which one they want to use. Their background is a shared thing, and now when they leave the village and strike out on their own, there’s all sorts of compelling reasons why they are adventuring together in the first place.

It’s a cool idea, right? And I can tell you from experience, it’s a hum-dinger way to start a campaign. The game I am currently running used a funnel to get the group together, and it was glorious. For starters, there’s a kind of freedom in not getting too attached to these smaller characters, even though the players all picked favorites anyway. But as a DM, it’s okay to kill these guys. In fact, it’s expected. So you don’t shirk from the crocodile damage when it does eight points, twice what the zero-level guy has, and you make it a spectacular death with the character getting pulled into the swamp, kicking and screaming.

The players, weirdly, loved the deaths, as much as they loved staying alive. Probably because it’s kind of a rarity in D&D. As their ranks thinned out, they started focusing and taking more time to plan and scheme.

After it was over, while we were all brainstorming on background details, everyone’s bonds, ideals, and flaws all revolved around the loss of their friends, or how important friendship was to them, or how they care only about the friends they have and everyone else comes second, and they are playing those details, as well. It’s been glorious. No inter-party skulduggery; they all saved each other’s lives before they learned how to fight and cast spells. No one else gets them like their buddies do. It’s their friendship that keeps the party together.

There are some great examples of funnels out there, but I found this one to be particularly helpful: Fifth Edition Funnel. You can also pick up a copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics and convert their funnel system to your own needs. I recommend starting your next campaign with it, just to shake things up, but also to nip inter-party squabbling in the bud. 

RPGaDay 2019: 8 Obscure

As a first generation gamer, I didn’t know how good I had it. Especially since I didn’t have ready access to Lake Geneva, WI, or GenCon, or even the means to do that if I were so inclined. Later, in my late teens, I finally went to a convention by just, you know, going. But in the early 1980s, there wasn’t a map for me to follow. There were two areas of the gaming world; over there, where all of the good stuff was happening; and right here, in Abilene, Texas, which was the middle of By God Nowhere.

AND YET…

There was something weird about Abilene. I don’t know what it was; there were three colleges and an air force base, so some things make sense, like having several hobby shops in a town of 100k (more on this later). But in a cow town in West Texas, hours away from Austin and the Metroplex, I got a hell of a pop cultural education, the likes of which I didn’t grasp until I was an adult.

A quick example: back in the 1970s, there were three channels on your TV: ABC, CBS, and NBC, all broadcast from local TV station (sometimes paired with a radio station, thanks to Ladybird Johnson). If you lived in a large metropolitan area like Houston or Dallas, you got access to a PBS station, as well. There was also some broadcasting found on the UHF channel, but only if your local stations had a transformer.

Abilene didn’t have a transformer. What it DID have was this: we got the three stations in town, ABC, CBS, and NBC, but we ALSO got WFAA, an ABC affiliate out of Dallas. We also got KTVT, channel 11, out of DFW and channel 13, KERA from the metroplex as well.  I had seven channels to choose from as a kid—and while the two ABC channels had the same prime time content, the afternoon and weekend fare on WFAA was ten times better. They played Going Ape week in the summer; All five Planet of the Apes movies, in order. And channel 11 showed all of the Universal monster movies, and the Harryhausen films, and late night horror and SF movies on the weekends. On Sunday night, I could watch Star Trek in syndication and then change over to Dr. Who late night on KERA.

Better than average artwork!
Pinch me, I'm dreaming!

I told you that to tell you this: I had three full-fledged sources for my D&D materials and an underground fourth that still has me shaking my head to this day. We had a Waldonbooks and a B.Daltons in the Mall of Abilene, located at opposite ends of the mall. I got a lot of exercise going between the two. There was also a hobby shop in the other, old people mall, called The Hobby Shop. It was one of three, the other two being a train and a plane store, respectively. This shop was a catch-all, and its wares included plastic models (which I was into, of course), like the Star Wars space ships, and the reason I mention this at all: A whole magazine rack dedicated to all things D&D.

And back then, that meant a bunch—as in, a cornucopia—of small press offerings. This hobby shop is long gone now, but they got a lot of my money back in the day; I bought my first set of dice from that place, and I bought nearly all of my Dragon magazines there. The store stocked TSR products, of course, but they also carried modules and accessories by other publishers; Judges Guild, Gamelords, Flying Buffalo, and the like. There was also a trio of books from Bard Games: The Compleat Spell Caster, The Compleat Adventurer, and The Compleat Alchemist.

Yeah, I never heard of them, either. They DID advertise in Dragon, but I’d already committed by the time I saw their ads. There was something about The Compleat Alchemist that spoke to me. Not sure why. But I had to have it when I saw it, so home it went with me. This was my first time off the reservation, if you catch my drift. I’d never bought a Non-TSR product before.  It felt kinda like I was cheating, but at the same time, there was a real sense of freedom in knowing I wasn’t bound to just one company’s creative output.

This book was one of the first things that really opened my mind up to the possibilities inherent in the game; using some of the things in The Compleat Alchemist made my game a little more unique, a little different. And it made me sort of say, “What else can I do to make my game more interesting?”

I also bought The Compleat Adventurer, but it wasn’t as interesting to me. It was a slew of new character classes, many of whom I’d seen a version of here or there in Dragon or elsewhere. But The Compleat Alchemist was gonzo. It used every single element of historical alchemy and then some. If I’d implemented this as a character class, it would have been the most powerful thing in the game. Seriously. Player character alchemists could make golems and clockwork monsters, as well as craft potions, poisons, powders, and other compounds that did all kinds of wacky things.

Despite my lack of use, the Bard Games books were pretty inspirational to me. They were eventually reworked into a D&D clone set in Atlantis. But those original books were game-changers for me. However, there was another influence on my D&D game that was even closer to home: Dragon Tree Press.

If you know them at all, you probably know them through their association with David Hargrave and his infamous Arduin campaign setting. But when they weren’t publishing those every versions of Arduin, they had their own modest line of system neutral spells, traps and tricks, artifacts, etc. These little thought experiments were statted out in general terms and they were lethal, interesting, dangerous, and strange, in that order. The publishers of Dragon Tree Press, Ben and Mary Ezzell, published their home-grown chapbooks and sold them at the used bookstore they also ran—in Abilene, Texas.

Their bookstore, Kingston Paperback Exchange, was one of my favorite haunts as a young man. It’s where I bought the first Thieves’ World anthology, where I bought my first Tarzan paperback, and where I bought my first silver age collector’s comic. They also had a spinner rack at the front counter that was their entire game line.

I remember Ben; he was an engineer of some kind, or at least, he dressed like one, with short button down shirts, pocket protector, you get the idea. He also had shoulder-length black hair and a full beard and mustache, neatly unkempt under black horn-rimmed glasses. He knew stuff; he had a computer at the book store that he played Starfleet Battle simulations on, along with Sargon Chess, of course. He also had good book recommendations. But I never quite put it together that he was the guy who published and wrote all of that other cool stuff.

RPGaDay 2019: 7 Familiar

One of the best reasons to be a wizard, back in the days when you had to fend off triceratops on your way to the hobby shop in the mall (I know, I’m speaking in tongues right now), was that you got a familiar at first level (or second, if your DM was being a stickler for those material components). The familiar was a staple of high fantasy and fairy tales, true, but in AD&D, it meant up to four additional hit points—and at first level, that was a HUGE deal. It also meant you got some extra sensory bonuses and, if you were really lucky, you might get a magical familiar that would certainly be a benefit in those early levels as you struggled to stay at the back of the party and not get killed.

5th edition familiars are, by comparison, a little lacking in pizzazz.  Sure, it’s cheaper to cast the spell, and you get more animals to choose from, but they are not special in that way that they are all either celestials, fey, or fiends, as you choose. They still look like a harmless li'l bat, but trust me, they are evil!

You don’t get to add hit points, and you aren’t penalized when the familiar dies. In fact, you can dump it into a hyperpocket whenever you want. It’s potentially useful, but given the expanded list of familiar chdices (including bat, cat, crab, frog, hawk, lizard, octopus, owl, poisonous snake, fish, rat, raven, sea horse, spider, or weasel—but NOT the quasit, brownie, or imp) and the fact that they are all interchangeable, well, who cares about a familiar in fifth edition?

My solution is to bring a little first edition into the spell. Below is the link to my write-up for Familiars. It’s free for you to use. Click here to get it.

Familiars--Homebrew 

If you’d like some more inspiration on how to handle familiars, I would highly recommend the Vlad Taltos series of books by Steven Brust. His titular character has a small flying lizard (a Jhereg) named Loiosh and their relationship is amazing and should give you plenty of examples for how to run a wizard with a familiar.

Also, there’s a great novel by Roger Zelazny called A Night in the Lonesome October. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. A great book about what the help gets up to when the masters are away.

RPGaDay 2019: 3 Engage

A few years ago, I was doing a part-time gig as a creative arts teacher for a homeschool family. One of the young men I was working with was smart, creative, imaginative, and also pretty shy and quiet. I had worked with him previously doing artwork and also with language arts, and I thought we’d try a little experiment to bring him out of his shell: dungeons and dragons.

This was during the time before the 4^th Cataclysm, when all I owned was The Old Books with their secret knowledge and wisdom. I also had a shit-load of dice. So in the interest of keeping it low impact, I introduced the kid to first edition AD&D, old school, as God intended, and we played through a modified version of The Village of Hommlet, only with werewolves and other stuff, because, you know, that’s just cool.

About the third session in, when the town became convinced that there was a werewolf in their midst, I gave my player a homework assignment: come up with a way to catch the werewolf without killing him so they can unmask him. Now, prior to this, he’d been playing along, cautiously, and every time I asked him a question, he got a panicked look in his eyes, until I outlined a few options for him. It was slow going, but he was tentatively enjoying it, even if he kept comparing it to playing Skyrim.

The next week, when I showed up, we hadn’t even sat down at the table before he was explaining to me the plan to catch the werewolf. He’d been thinking about it all week, working it out, formulating strategy, and so forth. I opened the session with “Okay, so the villagers are looking at you. Rorick asks you, “Do you have any bright ideas?”

Without missing a beat, my student said, “I tell them, ‘I’ve got a plan, but you have to do exactly what I say or more people will die.’”

All of a sudden, he was in the game, and saying things in character (sometimes deliberately, sometimes cautiously, but still!) and it was very cool to see him come out from under his shell and start thinking dynamically. Later, we talked about it, and he told me he loved being able to come up with his own plan, which is something you can’t do in Skyrim. True that.

This hobby is unique. You never know what’s going to hook a person. But when they engage with D&D (or any other RPG), it’s got a transformative effect on people. 

Lankhmar: An Appreciation

I mentioned this before in my litany of stuff I used to play, but I wanted to drill down on this because I'm going to be talking about campaigns and how I run them and why I run them the way I do. It's mostly because of Lankhmar: City of Adventure.

Back in the 1980s I was a good li'l consumer of TSR's stuff. I kept up with new releases, back when you actually HAD - TO -  KEEP - UP with stuff; there was no button to click, no page to "like." You had to remember to call the hobby shop or the bookstore once a month. You had to read magazines and actually look at the ads. You had to look on the backs of modules for lists of other products. You had to talk to human beings in meat-space. You had to beg rides to the mall (or gas money, when you could borrow the car).

There is a reason, terribly misguided, why some older neckbeards feel a predatory sense of ownership and do that Gatekeeper thingie; it's because they are resentful that they had to do everything that I just rattled off and modern day gamers simply watch YouTube and get much better intel on what's new, and what's coming out.

I am not saying I agree with Gatekeeping tactics, because I don't...but looking back over that list, I understand where some of the ire comes from. Still, it was the 1980s. We barely had cable. There was no internet. Our brains could handle the strain of thinking about stuff we liked, I assure you. So their anger isn't really at new fans, or girls. It's at step-father Jeff who used to call them "fairies" for reading J.R.R. Tolkien and for not taking them to the mall when he clearly wasn't doing anything but sitting around eating Fritos and drinking Busch beer all day..."private contractor," my ass...

Reviewing Strongholds & Followers

 I have been a little busy with real world stuff these past couple of months—the kind of things that are health-related—and so I have not been as active on the blog as I would like. Sorry about that. But I am still working, writing, and thinking about gaming and Dungeons & Dragons in particular. To that end, I will point you to Matt Colville’s YouTube channel, because he eats, sleeps, and breathes this stuff and I find myself in agreement with him, like, 98% of the time, when it comes to running D&D games. This is very likely because we are about the same age and have experienced many of the same things, and also we have very similar tastes regarding First Edition Stuff (such as Appendix N) and how we use it in gaming.

Colville is also very sincere and genuine in his discussions (really a monograph) of running and playing D&D. It shows, and it’s one of the things that makes him so likeable. It almost makes me forgive him for mispronouncing “archetype” every single time he says it.

Reviewing Art & Arcana

You have probably seen or heard about this massive tome on The Internets or maybe seen a review on The YouTubes. Art & Arcana is a ginormous, too-big-for-a-coffee-table Coffee Table book that's really a giant victory lap of sorts for the World's Most Popular Role-Playing Game. Not in a bad way.

This product was released in two versions; the one pictured on the left, a whatever Amazon is charging for it these days $50 investment that is equal parts revisionist history and art and marketing survey. For old-timers, there is a lot of "Oh, I remember that!" and "That's my favorite Module Art!" moments, along with company history that manages to be earnest in not quite dishing the dirt, but happily pointing out the quirks. It's big, it's heavy, it's hard to read. But for those of you who want something a little more upscale, read on, McDuff...

My Unasked-For Thoughts on 5e

Well, they certainly solved the question of
scale. That's a second-level cleric.
I kid! I kid the Player's Handbook.
It's really a third level cleric.

It’s obvious, I think, to everyone reading this blog that I’m currently playing and creating in the fifth iteration of Dungeons & Dragons, or 5e, as the kids call it these days. Part of this was an economic convenience in that it’s what’s out right now, and also one borne of necessity, i.e. that’s what all of the content is aimed at. But it doesn’t HAVE to go down that way, right? I mean, there are a metric shit-ton of Old School inspired systems out there, all using some version of the Basic/Expert edition of D&D or the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Or, if I wanted something insanely commercial, there’s Pathfinder, which is D&D 3.5 re-skinned.  Oh, who am I kidding? There’s no way in HELL I would inflict Pathfinder on anyone. I’m not a monster.

But that brings up another factor: I have been running games for newcomers to tabletop role-playing games. Twelve new players in all, spread over several games and campaigns, each one of them familiar with the subject matter, but have never rolled funny-shaped dice before in their lives. Is the current version of D&D a good “first RPG” experience for newcomers?

Playing Games, Part 8: Just When I Thought I Was Out...

Nobody does Pacino from Godfather 3. They all do
Silvio doing Pacino from Godfather 3. 

Several years ago, I was employed by a homeschooling family as their creative arts teacher for one of their kids; a smart, funny, creative young man who was a little shy and needed help with his verbal and language skills. When he was younger, I was initially reading comics with him, which we both got a kick out of. Now that he was older now, he was into video games and Skyrim and all of that stuff. So, I thought, let’s kill a few birds with one stone and try Dungeons and Dragons first edition. He really took to it, and I re-discovered, I did, too.

Classsic Mark Finn: A Few Thoughts About Role-Playing Games

Note: this is a reprint of an old Finn's Wake article. It's because of this that I started this blog. You're welcome.

Dice! Glorious, beautiful dice! The most heavily-fetishized
object at the gaming table by a huge margin.

Watching the third Hobbit movie got me jonesing to play Dungeons and Dragons again. I know a lot of Tolkien purists hate the films, but I don't, because I'm not. Oh, there's stuff I don't like about the movies; don't get me wrong. It's just that I happen to really like the way they've played fast and loose with Tolkien (two adjectives I'd never use to describe his work, which is why I'm not a fan, per se). Never mind the "video game sequence" that seems to be in every movie. Watch the PCs--excuse me, main characters--fight the wandering monst--I mean, the orc patrols--makes me want to roll to hit in the worst possible way.

Classic Mark Finn: Roll to Hit, D&D turns Forty!

Note: this is a reprint of an old Finn's Wake article. Please don't tell me this happened four years ago. I was there. I remember.

 Dungeons & Dragons is celebrating its 40^th year of existence. Wow.

To commemorate the occasion, I had hoped to do an influence chart similar to the one I created for Raidersof the Lost Ark, but there is no time. And besides, it’s less interesting than just posting the list from Appendix N in the back of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Playing Games Part 1: Dungeons and Dragons

These are chits. You had to cut them out yourself.
No wonder old gamers are so angry.

I started playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with my step-brother at the age of 12. Prior to that, I owned a copy of the Basic Dungeons and Dragons rules (what we now call the “Holmes” rules), including the box with B1, In Search of the Unknown, but no dice. Only chits. And to a new player, trying to puzzle through the rules on my own, there was nothing more perplexing and also deeply unsatisfying as drawing chits from a small paper Dixie cup. There’s no way to make that activity cool. Not in 1980. Not now. Not ever.

The obligatory first post

These are just the worst. I really want to start this blog out In Media Res, so let's try that:

...Willingham leaned in and said, "So this large, orange and white striped barnyard cat comes trotting over to you..."

Ray, evidently bored silly with the pace of the game, blurted out, "I disintegrate it."

Willingham's mouth opened and closed, like he did sometimes when he was struck dumb for a response, which, if you know Willingham, is hardly ever. To be fair, all the rest of us were staring at Ray, our collective pie holes agape.

Ray sensed he'd stepped in it, but he also didn't know anyone at the playtest, and so he felt he had nothing to lose. He croaked out again, "Disintegrate."

Willingham sighed, and picked up a handful of dice. "Okay, if you're sure you want to do that..."

Weldon, Brad and I found our voice, and a howl of disapproval went up, but it was too late. The die was cast, and that barnyard cat vanished in a plume of smoke and fur.

Willingham shook his head. "The field mouse says, 'You--You just killed our sheriff!"

We all wearily reached for our dice. The game had come completely off the rails.

_____________________________________________________________

FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER...

My step-father brought home a game one night. It came in a small box, not like a board game. The cover was striking: a red dragon, atop a pile of treasure, was making the snarly-face at a wizard, complete with pointy hat, and a warrior in plate mail with a bow and arrow. Across the top, in circus-display letter, was the name Dungeons and Dragons. It was the 1977 Blue Box. And it changed everything.