Answers for scottsz

Because he doesn’t have comments turned on. Not that I can blame him.

Yes, the story I’ve heard is that the Powers That Were at TSR felt the maps were the principle object of value in the modules, and so were printed blue to prevent photocopying. I imagine the modern digital world would have caused cardiac arrest in the folks who made that decision if they could have glimpsed the future.

D&D in libraries – You see that a lot here in Austin, but of course that’s Austin and, again, of course, the flavor on tap is 4e. Many also host dance lessons (salsa and other latin forms) because, according to the librarians, the places are crawling with kids but it’s getting hard to draw adults. Yeah, I wouldn’t have guessed that, either.

Erik Mona – I did watch the whole thing, and what fascinated me was how different his experience was from mine. I’ve very, very rarely encountered anything like organized play. Nearly his entire experience with RPGs has been centered around organized play, from the library club to the Living Greyhawk thing, and into his current work with Pathfinder. This implies a very top-down attitude towards gaming. The purpose of an RPG company, from this point of view, is to craft an experience for the participants. Mona is clearly a bibliophile, but yeah, books, not solutions, because solutions implies far more active agency on the part of the play group than I think the top-down model can embrace.

This should come as no surprise to anyone. Pathfinder is, after all, built on the idea of gorgeous, intricate, epic railroads. While they allow for, and even encourage lots of scenic loops and tangents, there’s an absolute path to be followed from one adventure to the next. I love the look of their books and a lot of their ideas, but when you get down to it, Pathfinder is the anti-OSR. Fight On! is a jumbled mess because the assumption is nobody can guess what’s coming next in your game. You might need a classic dungeon level, or you might need a penguin PC race, or you might need stats for purple death rays.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m still happy to flip through the stuff Paizo puts out, and even steal some of it for my own games. It’s just not predicated on a model that fits the way I actually play. I’ll create my own experience, thank you very much. Or, to be more accurate, my group will create our own experience. My job, as I see it, is to supply mystery, verisimilitude, stability, and impetus. The players bring curiosity, energy, and action. We toss that in a pot with creativity and some setting elements, with rules and assumptions to keep it nice and gelled, and we have magic.

Adventure paths provide the mystery, verisimilitude, and impetus, and only rely on the DM to present what’s given to the players. The DM is, of course, free to elaborate, embellish, and alter the material given (though only to a point; change or add too much and you fall off the path) but they don’t need to. For a certain style of gaming and for certain groups, I’m sure that’s magic as well.

I don’t think it’s worth getting annoyed at Mr. Mona for what he said in the lecture. Most of the first half-hour was about what he saw at TSR and WotC, some of which served as object lessons for how things shouldn’t be done. It was also a talk about the industry, and so it focused primarily on the concerns of the industry. (Though, again, seeing how much organized play was a factor in his gaming, the line between industry and hobby may not be as clear to him as it is to others.) So I’d only caution about throwing out any babies with that bathwater.

Mona on Tech and RPGs

NeonCon has posted a lecture by Erik Mona titled "RPGs in the 21st Century." It's interesting, especially from the publisher-side view of things. He does spend some time slapping around the computer RPG strawman, but not as much as you'd think. He's far more interested in the possibilities of tech.

Paizo is probably among the best out there at building connections with their audience and making their customers feel like Paizo is their company. What I find interesting is how a similar dynamic is developing in the OSR. I feel invested in the success of folks like Mr. Raggi and Grubman. Mr. Mona's got quite a bit to say about that, including its use as a deterant to piracy and how important social media is to that mix.

What I expect to be really fascinating is the intersection of tech with the "old ways." For instance, it's a lot easier to include a CD in a boxed set than it is in a book. I don't think RPG publishers are ready to start including specialized handheld devices in their boxes, but software is certainly an option, as are collections of clip art, tile sets, and icons for use on message boards and gaming software like MapTool. I've also been contemplating the use of audio files; if the audience is, in fact, greying, that means most of a company's customers may now spend 30 minutes to an hour each weekday commuting. They can't read a gaming book during that time, but they could listen to one. Only, numbers and crunch don't work as well in an audio format, so you'd want to focus on style, setting, and flavor for your audio additions. If the boxed set revolution continues to gain traction, I'd be very surprised if some sort of digital additions didn't make their way into the box sooner or later.

UPDATE: Zak S. makes a strong (and completely different from mine) argument for raising the profile of audio media in our hobby.

Photo by wili hybrid.

Honey Cakes for Cerberus

I think I’ve skirted around the edges of out-and-out saying that when you roll the dice, you’re not playing, and when you’re playing, you’re probably not rolling the dice. Games are about making choices; dice are about random chance. You might be making a choice that affects how the dice are rolled, or making choices based on what the dice have dictated. But, as in craps, the playing part comes before and after the dice do their thing. Sailing, after all, isn’t windspeed and waves; it’s what you do with the sails and rudder.

And, as Oddysey enjoys pointing out, I really like playing with social aspects and confrontations in my games. Whenever the PCs are back in town, or when they encounter an especially dangerous monster, there are usually opportunities for conversation, making deals, and learning more about the world around them. Most modern games have mechanics to handle this sort of thing, either via social combat or influence rolls or the like. I play neo-classical games like Labyrinth Lord, so I don’t have those mechanics…

Well, actually, I do. Those old games came with some very simple reaction tables that could be used to dictate how creatures encountered reacted to the PCs. It’s fairly simple stuff, but most folks I knew way back when ignored them, just like they ignored the morale rules. They’re probably too basic for most folks who enjoy that sort of thing, but combined with the morale rules and a multi-racial dungeon like the Caves of Chaos, they can create a lot of interesting situations to play with.

But again, those sorts of things leave me cold, and I think that’s due to how I build my NPCs. My battlecry after college was “situations, not plot” but what I think I was really getting at was the central importance of conflict to my style of play.
In a nutshell, all my NPCs are in conflict with someone or something. They all have something they want and obstacles that prevent the satisfaction of their desires. This can be something as simple as finding their next meal or as complex as winning passage of a new piece of legislation. The best NPCs, of course, have multiple (and sometimes competing or contradictory) goals. Regardless of their goals, the best way to win a NPCs heart (or, at least, their cooperation) is through their self-interest.

Deciding what my NPCs want is usually fairly straightforward. Some are simply functions of who and what they are: the merchant wants to make a sale, the thief is looking for the big score, the knight wishes to win renown and cover himself in glory, the suitor wishes to win the hand and heart of his intended. Some characters can get more complex. Is the slave’s duty to his master stronger than his desire for revenge against those who reduced him to such a state? Is the goblin’s greed stronger than her loyalty to her tribe? I use my themes to answer those questions. Chatty would probably invoke the “Rule of Cool” while Raggi might decide based on the mood he’s trying to create.

The real fun, however, comes in trying to learn what will motivate an NPC. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is warned in advance how to handle Circe. Sometimes my PCs are that lucky, and they can find someone who will tell them. Sometimes, they have to learn through observing the NPC or learning obliquely of their desires through their habits, past actions, or allies and enemies.

And that’s how our adventures grow: the players need to get past Verdinashet, the Dragon of the Forest. They can’t hope to defeat her in combat (not at 2nd level, anyway). The old campaigner at the Oarsman’s Rest can tell them about her love for beautiful musical instruments. The elven glassblower in town can make them a crystal harp, but he’ll need certain rare elements to make the strings, and they may not have the coin on hand to commission the harp yet. But he’s pining in love for a priestess at Uban’s temple…

Art by Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel.

Curses!

This was what I was stumbling around for a few years ago.

Congrats to scottsz for putting it together, along with the time to read enough of the OSR to pull it off. May you rant and rave for years to come.

Savage Worlds Review

When people of the future look back at RPGs at the turn of the century, I think Savage Worlds is going to be the game they hold up as the example of popular design choices for the time. The most surprising thing about the game (and I’m going to be talking about surprise a lot here) is how unsurprising it is. You’ve seen a lot of what’s in Savage Worlds before, and come to expect it from modern RPG design: the unified mechanic, the point-buy and skill-based character creation, the roll-plus-mods-versus-target-number. Considering the praise this game garners, I suppose I expected a bit more than was reasonable. Or maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at all; it is what people seem to want and expect in an RPG these days. I fully suspect that if you plopped someone down at a table with a pad of paper and pencil and told them to write a basic outline for a rules set in an hour’s time, most folks would come up with something that looks an awful lot like Savage Worlds.

Just so we’re clear, I’m reviewing the Explorer’s Edition based solely on a read-through here. I haven’t played the game so there are likely to be issues and benefits I’m overlooking or glossing that folks who’ve actually clocked some hours with the rules will be a lot more familiar with than me.

Right off the bat, however, Savage Worlds impresses as a gorgeous game. The paperback is done up like a journal from a pulp adventure, complete with a frayed paper graphic all along the edges of each page that make it feel like a prop from an Indiana Jones RPG. It’s printed on heavy, glossy paper in full color, and the art ranges from ok to exceptional. The beauty is more than skin deep; the layout is clean, easy to navigate and read, complete with table-of-contents and an index, plus an overview at the end of most chapters that includes a brief description of roll-modifying rules you’re likely to use frequently. The book is only 160 pages long, measures 6.5 by 9 inches, and will fit easily in a briefcase, satchel, or most purses. The fact that it retails for a measly $10 is just icing on the cake. It almost begs you to pluck it off the shelf due to its simple physical portability.

The rules themselves do have a few intriguing wrinkles. First, your stats are not numbers or even modifiers, as in most games, but dice, ranging from the lowly d4 up to the d12. If you want your character to catch a falling Ming vase and the character’s Agility is d8, you’d roll a d8, add any appropriate modifiers, and try to beat a target number. The default target number is 4. (And because your character is heroic, you also get to roll a d6, and you can take the better of the d8 or the d6.) In most situations, these dice explode, which is to say, if you roll the max roll, you roll again, adding the new die roll to the previous, and repeating if you again roll the max possible on the die. This creates some pretty odd probabilities. For instance, while the d4 is clearly limited in its range, it’s also the most likely to explode. This can actually create (admittedly rare) situations where your chances of success are higher with smaller dice.

The game also uses playing cards for initiative. This is a nice little twist that solves the perennial “whose turn is it?” problem. With everyone having their initiative card face up in front of them, anyone can tell at a glance who is up and who is next.

So far, so good, but when a game has to keep telling me that it’s “fast, furious, and fun” (they even repeat it on the spine for goodness’ sake) I start to doubt it. Especially when it does things which, in the past, have made games anything but fast and furious.

For instance, the game assumes the use of miniatures. Yes, you can play without them, but the book strongly suggests that you use them. (This was a bit of a shock for me, having gamed through the ‘90s with the White Wolfies harping constantly about how D&D is more wargame than RPG and you can tell by the emphasis on using minis.) Now I can certainly understand why. The game does not assume the PCs will be acting alone, but will often be with a group of allied NPCs fighting alongside them. This is certainly part of the pulpy tradition the game is trying to emulate (just think of the final battle of nearly any Bond flick). Minis and battlemats are a great way to keep track of where everyone is and who can do what to whom.

But with nearly all the folks I’ve played with, breaking out the minis puts everyone into wargaming mode and play really starts to drag. Folks whip out their rulers to start comparing different tactical options, and Savage Worlds lists ranges and movement rates in inches to facilitate just this sort of thing. Throw in a dice mechanic that makes figuring the probabilities of most actions extremely difficult, and you’ve got a recipe for hour-long combats. (And then, as counterpoint, you have the mini-free mass combat system. While I appreciate that they included one, I’m not too crazy about the way it reduces such struggles to a simple dice-off. Too far one way and then too far the other, in the same game!)

With all that, though, the game just oozes pulp flavor. If you want a game about two-fisted heroes from the pages of a Louis L’Amour western, Ian Fleming spy yarn, Dashiell Hammett detective story, or Sgt. Rock comic, you could do far worse than reach for Savage Worlds. I think it cares a bit too much about counting bullets and the differences between a 9 mm and a .45 to really fit with the modern genre of over-the-top action flicks, but if the movie stared Bogart or Errol Flynn, it ought to be a good match. And I like its vehicle rules enough that I'd probably use it for a Car Wars or other vehicle-heavy setting.

Otherwise, I’m rather mixed on it. On the one hand, I love me some pulpy action. On the other, I do nearly all my playing online these days, which makes the use of cards and miniatures a bit more of a hassle than I generally want to bother with. I fear the game, while intriguing in a number of respects, is likely to join Earthdawn, Alternity, and Shadowrun as books I keep for inspiration and ideas, but not the sort of thing I’m likely to play often.

Photos by wwarby and Marcin Wichary.

Review of Starsiege: Event Horizon

ConDFW was a lot of fun, in spite of some last-minute cancellations due to the “Snowpocalypse” of ’10. (Yeah, Oddysey, I can hear you snickering all the way across the Appalachians. ;p ) One of the highlights for me was the presence of Troll Lord Games. The con is primarily a literary event, and gaming, while usually represented, was a bit anemic this year. I took advantage of that to sit in on some impromptu Castles & Crusades gaming. The game is fun; take out skills and relegate feats to class-based special abilities and you go pretty far to returning a lot of the 1e flavor back into the game. Throwing together some 10th level characters was a snap, and the brief combat we played went fairly quickly. It’s not enough to drag me away from Labyrinth Lord, but it would certainly be contender if I wanted that 1e experience and despaired of acquiring enough of the original books for my gaming group.

They were also selling Starsiege box sets. Yep, before everyone else was jumping on the boxed set bandwagon, Troll Lord was already there. The box itself is attractive, with a very blue, Babylon 5 space-scape and orange lettering. I’m not crazy about the art. It certainly doesn’t make me go, “Ooo! I wanna be on that starship!” But it makes it pretty clear what you can expect to find inside.

What you will find inside is a copy of the GM booklet, called an Operations Manual, four copies of the player booklet, called a Field Manual, a setting booklet (“Victory: 2442”), two nice little d20s, a double-sided character sheet on card stock (clearly for taking to your neighborhood copy shop for reproduction), and some card-stock reference sheets (vehicle record, planet record, and a “trappings cheat sheet”). In short, everything an entire group needs to play the game, short of pencils and paper. I love the fact that they’ve included multiple copies of the player’s booklet for the game, and it seems a great way to load a boxed set.

The booklets themselves are SHORT! The GM book is 44 pages long and the players’ book is 28 pages long, making them even shorter than my beloved Moldvay/Cook D&D books. This is due in part, I’m certain, to the dearth of art. There is some art, but not a lot, and entire pages have nothing but the three columns of text with a few drop boxes. Starsiege isn’t about to win any beauty contests in terms of layout and design. The books work, but that’s about it.

Of slightly greater importance is the complete lack of a table-of-contents or index in any of the books. I can understand the impulse; the books are so short and the rules so simple that referencing them in the middle of play is unlikely and simple to do. Still, I’m gratified to see that the author, Josh Chewning, has posted tables-of-contents on his website.

Before I decided to buy the game, I went online to find some reviews, and one of the first that came up was naturally Dr. Rotwang’s rather glowing description, and I have to echo just about everything he said. Starsiege really is a sci-fi construction set. There are even suggestions for making the game more or less deadly, more or less gritty, more or less wahoo-out-there-superhero-comics. The rules for radiation, for example, are vague enough that they can be tied to pretty much any atmospheric pollutant, and can either result in simple, long-term damage to your character, or wacky, old-school Gamma World mutations, with a built-in mechanism to give you a broad spectrum of results.

My reflex here is to compare it to GURPS, but that’s not really fair to either game. Starsiege is simple, light, broad, and vague. If you’re all about modeling the differences between the Barrett .50, the Sharps Big 50, and the Spencer Carbine (yes, Savage Worlds, I’m looking at you), Starsiege is not your game.

Maybe.

And the caveat is there because of the awesome little trappings system the game includes. It basically gives you quick-and-dirty points-buy system to create just about any little tool, mutant power, gun, starship, ringworld, multi-dimensional planet-eating monster or what-have-you. (Can you say, “Apocalypse Box?”) While the default is to paint with broad strokes, there’s no reason you couldn’t drill down to more detail, though I’m not quite sure yet how much granularity the game will support. But what you can do with it is basically recreate whatever you need to emulate the genre you’re after, whether it’s Death Stars and lightsabers or Klingons and tricorders or datajacks and wired reflexes. The system doesn’t care if your ship is powered by dilithium crystals and has a warp drive or relies on a steam boiler power plant and is propelled by aether screws. It’s a completely effects-based system: how far can it go, how fast can it get there, how many people can it transport, and can it blow things up once it gets there.

And if that’s not enough, it’s got a rather sweet little planetary conflict system, where you can stat out your planets (or interstellar empires or megacorps or spy agencies or war fleets or…) and then have them duke it out for domination of the galaxy.

As a toolkit, it’s shockingly complete for such a little game. It’s not the easiest thing to use (in part thanks to the painfully obvious lack of an editor) and I suspect if you poke it hard enough, it’ll break in lots of places. Likewise, its obsequious genuflections to BALANCE are a bit over-the-top; do I really need to break down every piece of gear to its component abilities and chart out its stats? Certainly not, but it does give me a good place to start, helps me answer questions like “how much should this cost” and will be a great boon to setting-builders who suffer fits of stark terror when confronted with a blank page. There are so many little options, tweaks, and suggestions for other ways to handle things that it’s incredibly flexible. While I was reading it, I couldn’t help but imagine the sorts of campaigns I could create with this, which is a huge improvement over my reaction to Savage Worlds, where I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d build my own rules.

But it is a toolkit. It’s not everything you need to play in one box. The example setting provided is only 24 pages long and includes no maps. It does have a nice collection of weapons, starships, and alien races to play with, but not much more than that. Before you can start rolling dice in earnest, you (or you and your players) will need to sit down and build your campaign. Frankly, that sounds like a heck of a lot of fun to me. I think I’ve found my go-to game for space opera sci-fi.

ConDFW IX

I will be here part of this weekend.

When You Can Snatch the Pebble From My Hand, Grasshoppa...

Wyatt here suffers from DM crises. Not a single crisis, but an ongoing cascade of self-doubt and second-guessing. Yeah, not fun.

I’m going to buck the trend here and say that your players having fun is not the end-all, be-all of good DMing. That’s adequate DMing. You’ve managed to entertain your friends for a few hours. Hurrah! Not bad, but have you given them anything they couldn’t have gotten going bowling or watching a movie or thwacking each other with paintballs over that same span of time? Why RPGs instead of something, anything, else?

To be a good DM, you have to give them that something extra that only RPGs can deliver. That means you need to know what your game is about. I do this with themes, but you can do it with genres or proverbs or whatever floats your boat.

Why is this important? It does two things: first, it puts everyone in a similar headspace so you’re all grooving to the same tune, even if not everyone knows the words. Second, it answers Wyatt’s Spartacus question. Sure, if your game is Gritty Gladiator Grindhouse, Spartacus should get stomped. But if it’s Anime Action Hour, Crixus will mop the floor with Spartacus until the cute sidekick shouts, “I believe in you, Spartacus!” Then Spartacus will find an unexpected reservoir of power deep inside his heart, and he’ll splatter Crixus across the landscape. In the Strong, Silent, Macho Dudes RPG, Spartacus gets pounded into the sand, but he and Crixus find a surprising respect for each other and bond as brothers in the crucible of pure, raw, mano-a-mano combat. And in the Quentin Tarantino RPG, whether or not Spartacus wins or loses isn’t nearly as important as drawing out the tension before the brutal disfigurement we know he’s going to endure at the hands of Crixus.

Once you know what your game is about, your questions answer themselves. Should the goblins charge forth and attempt to swarm the PCs, dying to the last man? Sure, if you’re playing a game about tactical maneuver and logistics. Should they leap out in waves, each wielding bizarre and vaguely humorous weapons that inflict freakish handicaps and transformations on the PCs? Absolutely, if you’re going for a fairytale/looking-glass/labyrinth sort of experience. Maybe they should scuttle behind the walls, like rats, only occasionally revealing their red, beady eyes when in the peripheral vision of the heroes? That certainly works for a more disturbing, psychological horror game.

I suspect Wyatt already has some idea of what his game is about. He’s thinking about this issue, if somewhat tangentially, in his choices of soundtrack. Other things to consider are your choice of game. Do the rules support or impede the sort of play you want? The great thing about most flavors of D&D is that they are flexible enough to support a wide range of styles with just a bit of tweaking. Are the assumptions, characters, and interests of your players compatible with what your game is about? Not every player is a good match for every game. You may need to rework things to accommodate a player, or let that player find a more suitable game.

This is important because, once you’ve mastered running a game with a thematic core, you’ll want to move on to the next challenge: helping your players realize their vision of their characters.

Well, maybe you will. Honestly, at this point, we’re talking the bleeding edge of the best of the best. Most DMs never give a second thought to anything like the themes of their game, and wallow in a vague set of pseudo-Tolkeinish assumptions implied, but never really nailed down, by the rulebooks. Simply being aware of such issues raises you above the pack and delivers a superior play experience more consistently for the entire group.

Helping your players realize their visions of their characters is a whole level beyond that. Quite frankly, it requires a level of social acumen I’m fairly sure I don’t possess, which makes it a monumental struggle for me. Others may find that part of it easier, but that’s not the end of the challenges.

First, it assumes your players have some idea of who or what they want their characters to be. Most do, even if it’s just using a particular collection of powers to dominate certain mechanical aspects of the game. What they may not have is a clear and consistent vision. No vision of any PC I’ve ever created has survived the first session of play. Some things simply don’t work the way I expect them to, or circumstances force me to accentuate certain aspects over others. In all honesty, the guy who wants to be a bad-ass monster-mauler with his spiked chain and carefully selected array of combat feats is much easier to deal with than the budding thespian who vacillates like Hamlet over whether love or vengeance is central to their character concept.

Once you and your players think you have something fairly solid, then you have to help them cultivate it. No, this doesn’t mean flopping down like a welcome mat while your players engage in self-indulgent, overly verbose monologues. (Usually. At this point, we’re deep into some very subjective territory. Proceed with caution!) As most writers can tell you, characters blossom brightest when subjected to adversity. It isn’t the moment of sweet snuggling with the holder of his heart that makes a lover, it’s the struggle he goes through to get there, and it’s the romantic tension that’s the fun part as he grapples with the myriad obstacles that seek to thwart him. It’s not how he pounds the bad guys that makes John McClane such a cool action hero. It’s that he’s barefoot , body and soul abused and bruised and bleeding, passing through a hideous gauntlet of physical and emotional abuse while he does so.

It’s a bit like polishing diamonds. You have to know where to cut, how to hurt the characters so that the aspects that are important to the player come shining through. And the player’s ideas might be changing over time. And you’ve got a whole group of players to do this for. So yeah, not easy.

But, if you can pull it off, you’ll have given your players an experience no other media, not movies or books or computer games, can give them.

Art by Jean-Leon Gerome and John William Waterhouse.

Assumptions, Balance, and Death

There’s also been some talk of death around the intrawebs lately. This is partly my fault; last Wednesday night, the Table of Death & Dismemberment claimed its first mortal victim. Context, of course, is everything. This was the second part of a running battle between our heroes and a trio of red slaadi.

Our heroes, by the way, were a collection of 2nd and 1st level characters.
Yeah, I can hear the gasps now, and it’s worse than you think because there was also a vampire sshian not far away who nearly got involved in the fight as well.
So what was I thinking, putting the party in a position where they ended up fighting three slaadi and nearly a vampire as well? What sort of sick, sadistic killer-DM monster am I?

Hey, don’t point the finger at me; none of this was my idea. The players are the ones who chose to go vampire-hunting. In an ancient sewer-system where they knew they could possibly run into slaadi. This was entirely their choice.

(What were they thinking? They knew if they could slay the vamp themselves, they’d reap rich rewards for their success. If they got help in killing it, or passed the responsibility entirely to others, there were certain consequences which they were not eager to face. It wasn’t a bad choice, it was just a gamble that went poorly for them.)

It’s this choice that really gets to the heart of Old School and Neo-classical play. There are few dungeons less linear than the good old Caves of Chaos, the complex of tunnels that provide the heart of the adventuring experience in B2: Keep on the Borderlands. Players can study the caves, scout them out, hunt for clues or ask for rumors at the Keep, and then decide which challenges they want to face. Nothing forces them to pick one cave over another. It is entirely possible for them to get in over their heads if they’re not careful, and even if they are. But for the most part, the challenges they face are entirely of their own choosing.

Somewhere along the line, however, the assumptions changed. It became less the DM asking the players what they wanted to do this time, and more the players trying to “find” or “guess” what adventure the DM had planned. It’s amusing the note the bizarre, passive-aggressive mode this often took. As if unconsciously recognizing the bizarreness of the assumption, the DM wasn’t really supposed to tell the players what the planned adventure was, and the players weren’t supposed to ask. Instead, the DM was supposed to signal the “entrance” to the planned adventure and players were expected to recognize these signals and to dutifully follow where they led.
Ostensibly, this was supposed to make things easier of the DM. Since the DM knew in advance what was going to happen, the DM could focus on the content players would actually encounter. In truth, however, this dumped on the DM a whole mess of responsibilities that 3e and 4e were designed, in part, to make easier. Chief among these was the creation of “properly balanced” encounters.

Since the DM got to decide exactly what encounters and challenges the party would face, it became solely the DM’s responsibility to ensure that every fight was properly calibrated to the abilities of the party. 3e and 4e both have mechanisms for calculating this sort of thing. Such things are rife with unintended consequences, however.

For instance, in order to know what sort of challenges are in the proper range of a group of PCs, they must always be at roughly the same level of power. This means the rules, and not the DM, largely decide what treasure and magic items the PCs get, in addition to which monsters they face. This also makes the death of one or a few of the PCs mechanically intolerable. Either you kill none of the PCs or you kill all of them. Or you start new PCs at roughly the same level of ability as the rest of the group, making death a reasonable choice for a player who’s decided they want to play a different character or decides they wanted their character to go in a different direction somewhere along the line.

And this leads to players phoning it in. After all, if the rules are designed in such a way that they should be able to outfight every foe they meet, why should they do anything else? And since the DM has set them on the rails of the chosen adventure, the players have no choice in strategic decisions, and little reason to bother with tactical ones. In fact, the game actively discourages such cleverness, since it forces players to endure tedious battles that were decided, thanks to their clever thinking, before any dice are rolled.

Obviously, most games don’t devolve to this level of tedium. The inexactness of the encounter creation guidelines mean the players must at least be aware and prepared for the outriders that throw a wrench in their assumptions, while better DMs learn how to gauge encounters against the abilities of their players more than the strengths of the characters. Still, the hobbling assumptions remain, robbing players of making choices, and as has been discussed before, choices are what games are all about.

Art by John Mulcaster Carrick and Felix Louis Leullier.

Would You Say I Have a Plethora of Classes?

There’s been some neat discussion around and about over new character classes for various versions of D&D. In spite of my numerous additions to the field (My LL game currently includes six new classes: rogues, gnomes, pixies, nixies, half-ogres, and witches) I remain rather loyal to the notion that what most folks want to play can be a variation on the primary themes of the original character classes. So while I enjoy adding classes, and it is pretty easy, I try not to go crazy about it. And while I admit there’s a heavy dose of Rientsian “if it’s fun, wallow in it” in my choices, I do try to make certain that my classes fit at least one, if not both of the following criteria.

FLUFF
If I’m going to create a new class, it has to fit my campaign setting. Sure, one of the joys of LL is how generic it is within the realms of fantasy, but I’m not making these for addition to the LL core book. These are for my game primarily, and I share them with you because I think they’re cool and some of you might get something good out of them. But my witch class, for instance, is built around concepts that are pretty specific to my campaign. Most folks don’t want to touch gender with a 10’ pole, and I can certainly understand that. It’s one of my favorite themes to play with, and so I have the witch class.

CRUNCH
Mostly, however, I’m trying to do things that the basic classes don’t touch. My gnomes exist to highlight the hireling rules. Witches bring in the 1e druid spells. Rogues let me do funky things with the to-hit tables and offer a magic-dabbler class. Half-ogres offer a powerful bruiser to the players and let me play with my weapon damage rules.

The odd ducks in the list are the pixie and nixie classes. The pixie was a request from a new player (who hasn’t been able to start yet, though the character is done, I think) while the need for a nixie class grew out of a transformation that happened in the game. Because both classes have interesting powers and challenges, I couldn’t simply use elves and say that was close enough, but the elf class was the model for both of them. That said, both fit my fluff and crunch criteria, the pixie being a tiny flier and the nixie having a handful of Aquaman’s abilities.

However, I don’t have a courtier class, or a raconteur calls because I don’t want the dice to do those sorts of things. That sort of thing is for playing out. Just like I don’t want any “social combat” rules, I really don’t want any classes predicated on that sort of thing, either.

Art by Howard Pyle.

Making More From Less

OD&D keeps characters simple. They don't have loads of spells, abilities, or magic items. The monsters are built in a similar way. An orc swings its sword or fires its bow at you, and that's about it. Critters like beholders and dragons are a little more complex, but they're the exception, not the norm. There are no skills to roll, just descriptions of what a character tries to do.

When you pull those things back, you're left with only one option for making a dungeon or adventure interesting: Compelling locations, mysteries, puzzles, weird phenomena, *stuff* that the PCs can poke, prod, and inspect. These are all the things that make D&D compelling. They show off the spontaneity, immersion, and creativity that arise in the exchange among players and DM.

Read the whole thing.

4e DM-free

When I was paging through the original 4e core books, I couldn't help but think how there was a strong possibility that you could play the game with some well-crafted random charts and no DM. Oddysey recently pointed out to me that there's a section about that very thing in the back of the DMG.

And apparently WotC is seriously pursuing that idea.

If you follow the Amazon link, the cover they show bills it as a "board game" and not an adventure for 4e, so it my be an extremely watered-down version of the core rules, simplified into a Hero Quest type configurable board game. And it looks like the "interlocking dungeon tiles" are flat, so not the 3-D pre-painted terrain I'm predicting will herald the final vanishing of the virtual tabletop.

What is Neo-classical Gaming?

Jonathan followed up his post on WotC’s D&D Encounters with a tongue-in-cheek post about all the comments the announcement has spurred. As a footnote, he comments:

I should footnote this post and point out that it is purely hyperbole and for the sake of humor. Except the part about neo-classical games; I still don't know what hell that is supposed to be other than some sort of bourgeois intellectualism about RPGs

Damn! I wish I was bourgeois. Frankly, I’m not even measuring up to proletariat these days!

But seriously, I’m also getting hits from folks entering the phrase “neo-classical gaming” into search engines. As one of the proponents of the term, I suppose I ought to promote it and explain it every now and then.

The term was coined by Stuart Robertson (or, at least, that’s where I saw it first). But my favorite explanation comes from Rob Conley of Bat in the Attic:

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It about going back to the roots of our hobby and see what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

We’re not going to play those games today the way we did then. I wouldn’t want to even if I could. After earning a college degree in history and exploring a wider range of literature, I’ve got all sorts of new and neat ideas to toss into the mix that I didn’t have before. It’s not so much the old games the old way, but the old games a new way. It’s about taking those games, seeing what made them work, as well as casting a cold, critical eye on what didn’t work, and repurposing them for what we want out of RPGs today.

It’s also very much an exercise in social archeology, primarily based on James Maliszewski’s Grognardia. While he may be more willing than most to assume that “D&D is always right,” his eagerness to understand why things were done that way at the birth of the hobby gives us all insights into how games are made, how they are played, and what the assumptions were that created the very first RPGs.

Beyond that, it becomes a difference with too many distinctions, ranging from my own “Silver Age” attempts at building a living, breathing world to Jeff Rients Retro Stupid play to JB’s writing a Companion book to the Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert sets. The unifying concept is only an attempt to retrieve what worked best from the early days of the hobby, and bring it into the sort of gaming we want to do today.

Art by Frederic Edwin Church.

Nixie Class

Following on the heels of my pixie class, here's a writeup for nixies as PCs. This one was actually done a while ago, after one of the PCs in Doom & Tea Parties got transformed by a chaos critter. She's going to be stuck as nixie for a while, but so far she doesn't have any serious complaints.

NIXIES

Nixies (and nox, as the males are called) are aquatic fey who dwell underground. They rarely adventure, but as the guardians of the pathways between Water and the other realms, some are called to journey far from their subterranean communities. They resemble elves, being slight and short (both sexes tend not to grow taller than 5.5') with pointed ears, and almond shaped eyes. However, they also have blueish tint to their skin and green hair.

The prime requisites for nixies are are Intelligence and Charisma. If an nixie has a score of 13 or greater in both Intelligence and Charisma, the character will gain a 5% bonus on earned experience points. If the nixies Intelligence is 13 or greater and her Charisma is is 16 or greater, she will earn a 10% bonus on earned experience.

RESTRICTIONS: Nixies use six-sided dice (d6) to determine their hit points. They may advance to a maximum of 10th level of experience. They may use any shields or weapons, but suffer a -1 to saving throws when wearing ferrous (iron or steel) armour. They may wear armour of other metals (such as bronze, orichalcum, or adamantium) without suffering this penalty. They cast magic user spells as well. They roll saving throws and fight as elves. A character must have an intelligence of 9 or greater to be a nixie.

SPECIAL ABILITIES: Nixies are able to see in low-light conditions as if it were early evening illumination. Nixies can speak with all aquatic creatures and may summon fish to perform simple tasks. They may cast a water breathing spell that lasts for one full day. A group of 10 nixies can cast a powerful charm spell on humanoid creatures. They perform underwater as if under the influence of free movement magics, being completely unhindered by the water around them.



Art by John William Waterhouse, because when it comes to nixies, nymphs, sirens, and sorceresses, he is the man.

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying is Dead

Long live D&D RP. Hyperbole? Depends on your definition of “roleplaying.” I just today had someone tell me that BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 isn’t an RPG because it doesn’t include inventory management. So, if you like, you can happily disagree with what I’m about to write by arguing the semantics.

And honestly, I’m not here to rail against WotC’s new “D&D Encounters” because it sounds like a great idea to me. It’s just not RPGing as I enjoy the hobby, or as it was defined in previous versions of the game.

But then, I’m a horrible customer for WotC. The OSR is proving that I can buy new books and games, but I don’t do it regularly or often, and it appears there are not enough of us to support an industry in the style WotC has become accustomed to. Even worse are the members of the “Lost Generation,” the kids who grew up reading Harry Potter and watching the LotR flicks, now grown up to be “the masses of tweeting, texting, facebooking teens” who are quite happy to free-form RP online with their favorite IPs, without a single rulebook, character sheet, or d20 in sight.

It’s quite clear that WotC is embracing the decline of the RPG industry and leaping to the model of the high-achiever in the wargames industry: Games Workshop. The new focus will be on promoting playing at your local game store, cool toys with a strong tactile factor, and rules based on exceptions that make your character stand out. You could see the groundwork for this as far back as the PHB. Flipping through it, I had the same thoughts I did when building an army for 40k; it was less, “I want to play a ranger like Aragorn” and more “I want to combine these cool powers into an awesome double-play.”

This makes perfect sense, from a business standpoint. WotC is not in the business of selling the fantasy of playing a ranger; they are in the business of selling books, miniatures, and, in the very near future I suspect, scale model diorama and dungeon parts. (Is this, perhaps, one of the reasons the virtual tabletop continues to linger in development purgatory? People are used to getting virtual scenery for free, but will eagerly pay large sums of cash for physical scenery they can use at the table. This may be how they snatch victory from the jaws of failure on that score.) Dark Sun is a great fit for this because it’s chock-full of new races and classes (and thus, nifty new powers and synergies) that can be added to any campaign, even ones that don’t take place on Athas (which strongly fits into their “all books are core now” theme). It means new hero and monster miniatures, and desert-themed diorama bits if they decide to go that route.

There are two big challenges for WotC going forward. The first is maintaining the RPG status of D&D. This is the primary differentiator between themselves and Games Workshop’s products, and they do not want to start a head-to-head fight with that 500 lbs gorilla. The second is avoiding a class and character combo that results in an iron gnome. Note this isn’t the same as creating multi-character combos that are extremely powerful. Those will actually promote people playing in groups and building characters based around synergies. This is good, because it encourages people to come to the store every Wednesday to play, and to invite their friends so they can put together more synergistic combos. This is something even Games Workshop doesn’t have, and could be a real winner for 4e.

It also represents a huge opportunity for the Neo-classical movement. WotC has slowly been yielding the roleplaying field to any and all who would claim it. (Don’t believe me? Google “roleplaying,” which is the preferred formulation of WotC and appears on the cover of the 4e books. Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t show up until page 3, entry 27. They should be on the first page at least, if not the first entry, but they appear after Eve Online, GURPS, an “adult” site, and Furcadia.) There’s not much room in this new business model for the moody atmospherics of Raggi or Jeff’s retro-stupid fun, and Oddysey’s tinkerings with a game based on social dynamics is about as opposite a direction as you can go in.

The reason the OSR is still chugging along, and may even be gathering steam, is because the competition is fading from the field. WotC could crush a Raggi or a Goblinoid Games without even being aware they were doing it. But they won’t, because they’re not even remotely interested in the same audiences. There may be some overlap, but it’s not a natural thing, just like there are overlaps between people who enjoy painting watercolor landscapes and listening to country western music. The “industry,” so far as it is defined by WotC and their ilk, are, as Oddysey says, irrelevant, and growing more so, to the sort of gaming enjoyed in neo-classical circles. Or, to put it another, and I think more accurate way, Raggi and company are the industry now. What WotC does is interesting, but the DMG 3 is less likely to affect my gaming than Raggi’s box set, even if I don’t ever buy either of them.

UPDATE: Oddysey is, of course, a bit faster on the draw than an old fart like me.

Art from MoToMo, pasukaru76, and Luca Giordano.

Town and Country

Back on my post “Romance, Sex, and D&D: the College Years,” Ben asks:

So how did you weave the plotlines between urban/social settings and the wilderness necessary for many dungeon encounters-- or did you keep your dungeon urban as well?

I’m very glad he asked that, because it’s a topic that never would have occurred to me. I really don’t see a strong separation between the urban/social settings and the wilderness. The two wove into each other naturally.

An early adventure in the college game involved foiling a plot by wererats to infect the town guard of a large city with their brand of lycanthropy through the brothels favored by the guardsmen. The adventure started in the city, then moved into the wilderness roughly a day’s march from the city, where the leadership of the wererats had their secret hideout, then back to the city to root out the wererat infestation. So this was an example of having dungeon-esque elements inside an urban environment which were tied to a traditional dungeon out in the wilderness.

In the Doom & Tea Parties game, the action has primarily focused on the ruin-infested island of Dreng Bdan. The only outpost of civilization on the island (that the players know about, anyway) is the city of Pitsh, founded by the priests of Uban for the purpose of exploring the ruins and cataloguing their history as well as securing anything of significant power that might be found there. The governance, economy, and focus of the city is so heavily tied to the activity of dungeon-delving that what happens out in the wilderness has a strong effect on the town. In the solo game, that meant working closely with the Ubanites. In the group game, the players have been trying to hide their activities from the Ubanites. In both cases, these choices have had a strong impact on what the PCs do when in town: how they fence their loot, where they stay, where they shop, and who they go to for information on the things they have found and the places they’ve explored.

In both the college game and the Doom & Tea Parties games, the separation between wilderness and civilization has been fluid at best. Sometimes, the monsters chase the PCs back into the city and cause them trouble there. Sometimes the town does something that has a strong effect on which dungeons the PCs investigate, or how they go about it. This sort of fluid web of interconnections is the core of my style. I basically let the players do and go where they wish. I create adventures for them primarily by asking how what they’ve done has affected those with the reach and power to affect whatever place they end up next.

Rules and Rewards

Over at B/X Blackrazor, JB has recently discussed what he calls his third principle of good game design:

Good game design rewards behavior meeting the objectives of play.

By which he means, an effective game rewards the sort of play that the game is intended to create. To whit, if you make the Tarantino Cinematic RPG, it should involve lots of people sitting around and communicating who they are as people by using pop culture references when discussing matters of morality and psychology, or invoking the creative process, punctuated by periods of horrendous and blood-spattering violence. A Star Wars RPG should be able to handle swashbuckling action between individuals ranging from tiny droids to giant monsters as well as the clash of large armies and massive fleets, while encompassing not just the physical results of such conflicts, but also their spiritual implications as well.

So far, so good, and I’m in completely agreement with JB. He chose as his example the Elf Quest RPG, and I’ll admit that while I’m a fan of the comics, especially the original series as collected in the first four TPBs, I’m going to take his words as an excuse to leap off into areas that I think he only brushed up tangentially against. So this should not be seen necessarily as a criticism of what JB wrote. As I said, I’m largely in agreement with his theme, and believe that a mere character creation and combat system do not an RPG make.

JB is primarily talking about reward systems, but too often people conflate rewards with mechanics. It’s easy to do, because once you’ve mechanized an aspect of an RPG, you’ve made it quantifiable and thus easy to handle in terms of rewards and difficulties. If you have rules that quantify a character’s chi, for instance, it’s then easy to use those numbers in other aspects of the game and control the level of a character’s chi. You can know what amount of chi a character should have at certain points in the game, and you can easily see what sort of obstacles are appropriate for a character who has that much chi.

Life, however, is full of messy things that are difficult to quantify. Measurements of status and prestige, as JB suggests, would have been an excellent addition to the Elf Quest game, but things are very fluid and somewhat chaotic among the Wolf Riders. Cutter is the chief, but that doesn’t stop Strongbow from challenging him constantly. And that, contrary to how things might appear on the surface, is a source of strength for Cutter.

Even worse, however, is that once you quantify something, you stop playing the fuzzy, human aspects of the thing and start playing the numbers. As much as I love BioWare’s games, they tend to boil romance and respect down to a system of potlatch, and while there are certainly historical precedents for such things (like the relationship between a chief and his warriors among the ancient celts), bribing someone to be my girlfriend doesn’t exactly feel like romance to me. Making your romance system more complex only helps if that complexity serves to hide the numbers from the players; taking my lady out for a night at the opera because she happens to be a classical music lover is a far cry from spending $150 (probably the cheapest you can get away with for a night at the opera and a decent dinner) for a +4 bonus on my “Get Lucky” roll. ;p

In short, throwing bonuses at players for going through the motions isn’t the goal. Rewarding and encouraging the sort of play we want should be the goal, and this must often be done obliquely. Old school D&D is about exploration, but it doesn’t reward you for every 10’ of dungeon corridor mapped or unusual geological formation found. It rewards you for gathering treasure and penalizes you for being inefficient about how you gather it.

So in our Tarantino game, maybe every character starts with an artistic obsession and a secret existential crisis that is referenced by those obsessions and a pile of poker chips. Getting another character (that is, the player, in this case) to agree with your argument as to the worthiness of your obsession earns you a poker chip, and two if you can turn their argument towards promoting the worth of one of your obsessions. However, if they guess your existential crisis, you have to surrender most of your chips to them, and those chips are the only things that will keep you alive in the extremely brutal combat that is always threatening to erupt. In our Star Wars game, every strategic-level conflict can include a spiritual goal that might actually be served by losing in the physical realm (“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”). And in our Elf Quest game, perhaps the resolution of individual conflict results in stronger cohesion between an entire group.

The one thing I would stress, however, is that how the game is played is more important than the rules. In the solo Labyrinth Lord game Oddysey is playing in, there was this past year a near TPK. It was, by every measure, a disaster for her character and that character’s companions. However, the end result has been the creation of a very potent and powerful association. Friendship isn’t anything like the right word, but this relationship is one that Oddysey’s character knows she can rely on. There are no rules to cover this situation, no way to measure its worth in terms of EXPs or gold pieces, and yet it has been a large part of the transformation of the campaign. Oddysey’s character is no longer a single, lone individual in a large, uncaring world. She’s now “plugged in,” with all the privileges and responsibilities that go along with it. Neither of us knew the game could go where it’s gone when we started, but by playing off each other, things have taken some very interesting turns. In short, sometimes the best reward of all is to let the chips fall where they will, and give the players something interesting to play with.

UPDATE: E.G. Palmer (aka Mr. Green) riffs off Tarantino gaming to come up with an intriguing way to use music in your game.

The Year Ahead for WotC

Thought y'all might find this interesting. Some will look at this and see it as a good sign for the OSR. I suppose it is. I'm still not entirely certain, however, how you make an entire campaign out of "Tomb of Horrors." I suspect that you build a bunch of dungeons and other such out of a backstory for Acererak. I just can't help but feel it will widely miss the major point. ToH was written with a certain mindset, one that becomes clear to players who are careful and observant and who take their play seriously. Like "Vault of the Drow" and "Shrine of the Kuo-toa," ToH is a blatant repudiation of the stereotypical kill-and-loot style of play. Can you build an entire campaign out of that theme? Especially in 4e? Is the skill challenges system now robust enough to take the strain of supporting a campaign? Hell, is it strong enough to support an entire adventure? Especially considering that, last I heard, they're still built around the assumption that the players will fail more than half of them?

Of course, that still misses the point, since ToH embraces not rolling dice. Heck, even its most infamous trap doesn't invoke dice, even for a saving throw. I doubt WotC has the cojones to build a D&D campaign that is focused on not rolling dice. But I'll be first in line to buy it if they are, just to see what it looks like.

The world of Hard Fun, er, I mean, "Dark Sun" is, of course, not considered something "classic" in the strictist sense, being very much a product of the era of 2e. It is, however, quite pulpish and pleasantly twisted, and a very fitting contribution to our Year of Science Fantasy. I still regret not picking up the original, and I'm curious to see what WotC does with the setting.

Pixie Class

Another class for my Labyrinth Lord game. We're getting a new player and she made the request to play a pixie. Should be interesting, as the fey have been largely on the sidelines so far, though looming large in the calculations of all sides in the current situation. The numbers were largely generated via Paul Montgomery Crabaugh's Customized Classes article from DRAGON magazine of May, 1986.

Pixies are tiny (1.5 feet tall on average) fey with sleek, elf-like bodies, almond-shaped eyes, pointed ears, and butterfly-like wings. They have no issues with nudity, though most tend to wear jewelry and clothing as decoration, so long as it doesn't interfere with their flying.

Most assume pixies are shy, but the truth is they are just cautious, especially around “clumsy big-folk.” In truth, pixies are socially and sexually promiscuous. They live in large communities based around a tree or trees in which they hang their woven-basket homes. While it's fairly common for young pixies to leave the Tree they grew up in to form a new Tree or join another existing one, it's not common for pixies to head out into the wild in search of adventure alone. Still, the rare restless spirit does strike out from time to time, driven by curiosity, thrills, or for more urgent reasons.

Dexterity and Intelligence are the primary attributes of pixies. A pixie who has a score of 15 or more in either attribute gets a 5% bonus to earned experience. A pixie who has a score of 12 or more in both stats gets a bonus of 10% to earned experience points.

RESTRICTIONS: Pixies use six-sided dice (d6) to determine their hit points. They may not wear armour or use shields, and pixie weapons are so tiny that single-handed arms do only 1d2 damage while two-handed weapons do 1d4 damage. So long as they are flying, however, their initiative is 8. A grounded pixie has an initiative of only 2. Because of their tiny size, any equipment tailored for them costs 50% of the normal price. They must have a score of at least 12 in Dexterity and may not have a score greater than 9 in Strength. They stop advancing at 9th level.

SPECIAL ABILITIES: Pixies save as Elves. Because of their tiny size, all foes suffer a -1 penalty to hit them. They can also turn invisible once per day, as per the third-level magic-user spell. Their wings allow them to fly in all but the fiercest of gales. They fight using the Rogue's to-hit tables and have access to magic-user spells. Like elves, they are able to see by mere starlight nearly as well as humans may at dusk.



Art by Luis Ricardo Falero.

Play, Creativity, and Authentic Experiences

For those of you who missed it at Lord of the Green Dragons. There's some themes starting around 19:40 I'll likely touch on here later.

Anatomy of a Campaign

Over at B/X Blackrazor, JB was wondering:

hmm… I wonder how Oddysey and Trollsmyth’s current on-going campaign developed. Odd has said this is the first time she’s played in a campaign that took things to this particular depth of character interaction…were her former games played in the mini-campaign or forced plot setting? Or is their current gaming style simply built on mutual rapport and understanding of narrative agenda needs?

The answer is, not quickly. That's not the sort of play you can start cold. You have to build up to it.

It would be nice if you could just say, "Hey, we're building a social campaign and it's going to deal with x, y, and z." You could, I suppose, pull it off if the DM was willing to give the players extreme amounts of narrative control, and I've done that in the past with a few players I knew very well and had played with a lot before. If you don't do that, however, you end up in a situation where the players don't have anything to talk about. Even if they've read voluminous amounts of campaign material, they don't really understand the setting well enough to interact with it. (Unless that setting is based on a well-known IP, like Harry Potter or some such, which is why such are the most popular themes for free-form RPing, I'm sure.) The background gives players something to talk about, and knowing and being comfortable with the style gives them ways to talk about those things. If either is missing, they're reduced to talking about the weather in the safest and most boring of tones.

My preferred style is open sandbox and very laissez-faire. But such games need a bit of impetus, and if the players are to be comfortable enough to stretch themselves a bit, they need some limitations. There's nothing more intimidating to a lot of people than a completely blank canvas.

In Oddysey's case, I started off with a very open-ended problem for her to solve: being shipwrecked on a strange coast. This got her used to my rather loose, the-DM-doesn't-have-a-plan-so-do-what-makes-sense-or-is-fun-for-you style. When she returned to civilization and was able to choose her own path, she latched on to dungeon-delving. This was great because it was a style she'd not had much experience with, but comes with its own set of very focused goals and geographical limitations. As Oddysey recently commented, however, it wasn't raw monster-slaying and trap-finding. Since it was a solo game, there were hirelings and such to fill out the party, mostly chosen by her. Whenever she mentioned interest in hiring a particular class to join her group, I'd gin up at least three examples (it's so easy in LL that three take maybe a half-hour or so to roll up and write down) with a brief description of their personalities, reputations, and competencies beyond their class. Because there was no one else to interact with (most of the time) there was a lot of interaction with these NPCs. And that's really where we got things rolling.

Up until that point, I wasn't really sure what sort of play Oddysey was interested in. As she points out, most of the traditional assumptions of Old School play, like dungeons, were not very well known to her, so even she wasn't sure what sort of play she wanted, other than something new that she hadn't tried before. So leaving things open and not forcing a certain agenda left it open for us to explore, and we built the playstyle together out of mutual interests.

(And yes, this did mean that certain dungeon complexes were left "uncleared" but that's fine with me. Like Mr. Maliszewski, I've never assumed that clearing the entire locale was the goal, and my players have generally been happy with focused, surgical operations rather than genocidal invasions. ;p )

The one thing I did rigorously enforce was the verisimilitude. I think that really helps, because it gives players things they can rely on, things they can trust. With that bedrock, they can begin to invest in their characters' interests and goals, and from that comes engagement with the world. And once they do that, it's easy to build an entire session around chatting with a rakshasa and a priestess about boys, because the players know who their characters are, how they relate to the rakshasa and the priestess, and why boys would be fun to talk about.

Art by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Moran

2010 Resolutions

I'm not a resolutions kinda guy. I hardly ever make them, and when I do, I rarely share them. However, between Christmas and New Years, I also got a year older. As I slowly drift towards another magic-number age (40!!!), it seems like a good idea to get certain aspects of my life streamlined, lest things I've always wanted to do get left undone for another decade. So, going to try the resolutions thing this year. It certainly seemed to work well for Oddysey.

Hold Fast on Gaming
This one may seem a bit odd, but I'm going to not add any new games to my schedule this next year. Last year, I ended up adding four. The original Labyrinth Lord campaign bifurcated into two groups playing in the same world. There's also a Sword-and-Planet campaign being run with 2e, and I just started playing in Erin's 7th Sea Wave game. That's four games, meaning I've got a solid night of gaming nearly every other evening. If I add any more, it'll not just dominate my social life, it'll be my social life.

While that might be kinda nice in the short term, it's not a good idea in the long run. Variety is the spice of life and the raw fuel for creativity. A wide range of experiences is necessary to keep things fresh and new, and to keep me from falling into any ruts. So, apart from one other game, which I'm already promised to (and anticipating with more than a little impatience ;) ), my RPG dance card is now officially full.

Get Fit for GenCon
The second is like unto my first resolution. 2008 was probably the worst year of my life. Too much of 2009 was spent recovering. I didn't go camping once the whole year, didn't get out as much as I'd wanted, and ate way too much comfort food. Granted, record heat over the summer didn't help much, but still, I've breached the 200 lbs mark. Not a good thing.

There are state parks within driving distance that I haven't explored yet, and familiar ones I've not been to in some time. The green belts are looking better, now that the rains have returned. Nature has always been my best muse, and now that I'm doing a lot more creative work than ever before in my life, I need to be certain I keep those batteries fresh, and my body healthy. The brain is an organ, just like the heart and liver and lungs; being healthy is a good start towards being "mentally awake."

Give This Blog Some Love
Partly, this just means making time for it, but more than that, it means working out a plan for its improvement. It needs some original art, it needs a bit of reorganization, and it needs a bit more SEO. No, I don't plan to turn it into a money-making venture. I have, however, noticed that I get hits from wide-ranging interests: art, archeology, history, anthropology, and, of course, porn. Getting the word out that RPGs are still alive and kicking via the blog probably won't change the world, but it might add a bit of fun to the lives of a handful of folks. That certainly seems worth a bit of effort.

This last year's seen some serious improvements. Probably the biggest is adding art to most of the articles. Most has come from the excellent Art Renewal Center online galleries. I've also gotten more rigorous about linking, which is always for the good. There's still much work to be done, however. I've hardly scratched the surface on getting old posts properly labeled.

I've also done a lot less of attempting to second-guess my readers. The truth is, I have no idea what you'd find interesting. I've been really surprised at the feedback some posts have gotten, and still get, long after their original publication. My style of play is odd, but apparently not so odd that there are no overlaps of interest. I need to post more, and let you tell me what you like and what is just meh.

Finally, I want to get listed on the RPG Bloggers Network. I should have done this last year, but I really wanted to get something more logo-ish on this page first. I've let myself get bottlenecked by that for too long.

Art by John Byam Liston Shaw.