Magic 2013 Pre-Release Report

I spent most of this weekend at or recovering from Magic 2013 pre-releases. I have a great game store (Comics & Gaming in Centreville) and the Friday night post-FNM midnight pre-release was a great time. (Had to spend all of Saturday in bed or on the couch, and I'm still not fully recovered mentally, but totally worth it.) Sunday wasn't quite as good since it was mostly a different crowd and people were kinda hung over, but it was still fun, especially since I won prizes for the first time ever-- 5 packs after going 3-1 with a black/white life-linking deck. I probably could have gone 4-0 if I'd played better, but I'm still happy about that.

Some cards I liked, and am looking forward to first-picking in draft:

Rancor: I got blown out by this, Odric's Crusader, and 2 Captain's Calls in my first game on Friday night. It won't be nearly as good in draft once people learn how to counter it, but it's still sick.

Ring of Xathrid: Get this on Nighthawk Shaman or Tormented Soul and bad things will happen. Won me almost all my games.

Nighthawk Shaman: See above. Lifelink is good and it seems like there's a lot of it in draft. Paired with evasion and removal and it wins games. Nighthawk gets you the whole package.

Murder: Have I mentioned that I really like black in this set?


And a very special honorable mention to Duress, which won me my first match on Sunday. It revealed to me my control deck-playing opponent's Planar Cleansing into Stormtide Leviathan game plan, and knocked out the Planar Cleansing. Stormtide is surprisingly easy to deal with if you have a few turns to plan for it and a deck that runs 2x Murder and 1x Public Execution. Hold back a game-winning creature the 2nd game and you're good.


I'm looking forward to drafting versions of two decks I saw this weekend: A better version of the BW lifelink deck I ran Sunday, and something like the GW aggro deck I saw a fair amount of running around on Friday. So far I'm not super-impressed with Exalted, but I love almost everything else the colors do, and green has some sweet tricks going for it as well.

In general I'm pretty psyched about M13 as a draft format-- I was definitely ready for something new after like 7 weeks of triple AVR. While I made a lot of play mistakes this weekend, and desperately need to improve my ability to keep track of the board state, I also feel like I've made some serious progress in the last couple of weeks. (Perhaps due to the Duels of the Planeswalkers I've been playing on my iPad? The puzzles in particular have really helped me expand my thinking about Magic.) I'm really starting to think in terms of a game plan, and beginning to learn how and when to hold back creatures and whatnot, instead of just dropping everything as soon as it I get the mana for it.

Crazy Traveller Campaign Set Up

So say I wanted to run a Traveller campaign. And say I wanted to do it with an irregular player base-- potentially a large one, and potentially one divided between an online and an offline group, or even several offline groups.

One option would be to do like Jeff Rients and have everybody be the crew of one big ship (or other relatively stable focal point). Divisions in the player base (as opposed to simply irregularity of attendance) can represent either different shifts on one very large ship, or the different crews of one or two different ships.

This solution is a pretty good one, but the problem with it for me is, I haven't run a lot of Traveller, or played a lot of Traveller. If I'm going to run Traveller I want to do "normal" Traveller and explore that for a while, and "one massive ship with a giant crew" feels too high concept for me. I think of Traveller as a game about independent operators, probably with their own small ship, trading and fighting their way across the galaxy. "One big ship" would be a cool campaign, but it seems more like "Traveller-- the Trek way" or "Traveller-- the WH40k way" than straight up, old-fashioned, truck-drivers-in-space Traveller.


So what to do?

A potentially much crazier option would be to just have a big player/character pool of relatively "normal" Traveller characters. If they've rolled up ship shares or enough credits to buy into a ship, then they're attached to a ship (maybe the same one as a few other characters-- they can work that out themselves at character creation). If they haven't, then they're independent operators-- freelance mercenaries and the like. I keep track of what system each ship is in, and when, and which characters are or were on each ship.

Whatever offline adventures I run are assembled in the normal fashion. Online, sometime before every session I randomly determine which character is the "expedition leader" for that session, in the manner that I think Zzarchov was using at one point and the way Jeff is running his magical Mormon campaign. If that player has a particular mission they want to execute we can do that; otherwise, I hand them a couple of patrons they've been in contact with recently and they choose one. Then they're in charge of getting together the rest of the group to take on the mission. They can add anyone from their character's ship, and anyone in the "shipless" part of the pool (we'll come up with some explanation for how they came to be working with that group that week). They can add characters attached to other ships (and potentially those second ships as well-- sometimes, you just want an armada) if they're close enough by that it makes sense.

With a small group this wouldn't really be necessary, of course. You'd just have the one ship. But the method of "select mission lead" and "mission lead selects mission" would still be useful, I think, for focusing the sessions themselves so you can get to the action quickly, and so that I have a day or two to prepare.

With a bigger group, you'd just have a handful of ships tooling around the subsector/sector. There'd be a bit of paperwork to keep all the ships and the characters roughly on the same timeline and to keep the world integrated, but I think that's a doable with a variation on the system Ben Robbins used to keep track of his incredibly complicated large player-base superhero game.

The really neat thing is that this opens up the possibility of having a bit of a trading sub-game for Captains of ships and other interested players-- between sessions, by e-mail, they can direct their ship's movement and buy and sell and whatnot. If they don't turn in their moves before I need to normalize everyone's locations for a session, then I can just say they were shipping standard freight along normal trade routes.

I'm not sure yet if I'm actually going to pull the trigger on this. I spent the weekend getting to step 11 on Rob Conley's Traveller sandbox guide, so there's definitely some enthusiasm for this potential campaign. At the very least, it's something I want to have in my back pocket for if I'm ever called upon to run a quick one-shot. Eventually, I want to have a binder containing a Traveller scenario with pre-rolled characters and a megadungeon suitable for brand new players, so I can take that baby with me and be ready to game with a couple of options wherever I go.

Deckbox!

I've been playing tons of Magic lately and I spent the weekend loading almost all of my collection into Deckbox. (There are a couple of strays that have yet to be categorized, and somewhere I have Thrun, the Last Troll, Mirran Crusader, and one of the swords. This vexes me.)

If you happen to be of the Magic persuasion yourself, everything that mtgtrader values over 25 cents is on my tradelist--and pretty much everything in my inventory is for trade as well, but I wanted the tradelist to match my trade box/binder for ease of reference. I have some fairly broad goals for my collection beyond just my wishlist-- I'm thinking about getting into Standard after the next rotation, but I haven't settled on a deck I want just yet. So I'm interested in really anything that I might be able to trade to someone else for cards I want in the future.

Recent Gaming

I've been doing surprisingly little gaming recently. There's the Buffy game and the GURPS game and little bits of craziness in between, but that's been about it. Which for me isn't that much-- remember that I went 3+ nights a week for a good chunk of college.

I've been doing a lot of board gaming. Well, a fair amount, anyway. My friend/co-worker/neighbor Andy has a bunch of board games and we've been slowly working through them. Lately, it's been:

• 7 Wonders -- My current favorite. Played that one for the first time this weekend. I like how different it is from most of the games we play, and how much the landscape upon which you pick your strategy changes based on what your opponents/neighbors are doing.
• Stone Age -- Another favorite. Unfortunately, only played this one once. Reminds me a lot of Puerto Rico and Agricola except that when you get to the "good bit" where you can actually do things, you're only halfway through the game.
• Smallworld -- The simplest game that we play, and really good for that. This one handles the mix of skill levels/interests we sometimes have at the table the best. This one was my "favorite" before we played Stone Age, and it's still up there.
• Arkham Horror -- Fun, but very complicated, and some members of the group have played it much more than the others. Which causes problems, above and beyond the problems that co-operative games in general cause us.
• Pandemic -- Fun, but waaaay too co-operative for this group.
• Puerto Rico -- The game about slavery! See: Stone Age.
• Agricola -- The game about subsistence farming! See: Stone Age. Also, when I first played this game I'd consumed 2 Michelob Ultra Dragonfruit (to my unending sorrow) so I'd probably like it and understand it much better if I was sober.
• Illuminati -- Played this one for the first time in high school. (Game design class.) Still a classic.
• Twilight Imperium -- Fascinating. Unfortunately, takes way too long for a weeknight, and tough to get enough people together who are into that kind of thing to make it worth it.
• There are probably some others that I'm forgetting right now.

I keep meaning to start up the text game I was running for Trollsmyth again, but life keeps interfering. I've discovered over the past couple of weeks that I am terribly, terribly sensitive to disruptions in my routine.

I'm currently planning/pondering my summer game. My little brother will be back from college in a few weeks and I want to run something with and for him while he's down here. That's what that GrimDark Racing business was all about. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find my copy of the GURPS corebooks and there's a little bit of prep-work that I'd want to do before he gets back next weekend.

So, instead, I might just run Regular Fucking D&D. I've got that itch again-- the hexcrawl, wilderness exploration, race-and-class, dungeoncrawl itch. I flipped through a copy of the 3e Forgotten Realms guide and that got me thinking in terms of straight, "high fantasy" D&D for the first time in a while. It bugs me that this is something that I keep wanting to run even though I've never had any particular success with it.

Campaignery

This was originally an e-mail to one of my players.


In the GrimDark Future, There Is Only Racing

You're a racing team in an over-the-top cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic future. Some of you are drivers, some are mechanics, one or more is possibly a financer (we'll have to talk about where exactly the team you put together gets its operating capital from), and others might have more exotic skills, depending. You might run more than one character so we can be sure to have at least 1-2 drivers and a mechanic in every session.

Each session is a single race. Activities include: Repairing/upgrading your vehicles. Repairing/upgrading yourselves. Haggling over parts & medical care. Arguing over who gets to drive in the race and who's fault it was the the XL-SR5 is banged up and won't be ready for the next one. Advancing personal subplots. Investigating the other teams. Sabotaging the other teams. Dealing with sabotage by other teams. Doing shady-ass things to get cash. And, of course, driving!

System: Probably GURPS. I'm familiar with it, most of the potential players are familiar with it, it would have sufficient crunchy detail to make the vehicles interesting, and if it doesn't already have a crunchy racing system it wouldn't be too hard to come up with one.

In the GrimDark Future, There Is Only Home Invasion

I forgot to mention-- I have Leverage, the RPG! It's about running cons & heists. So yeah. You're a crew of conmen and thieves in an over-the-top cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic future. Every session is organized (in a way partially controlled by the system) around a heist. Exactly how Robin Hood vs. grimdark mercenary you are is up to you.

System: Leverage, obviously. With a few hacks to make it Cyberpunk ready but that actually should be super-easy.

In the GrimDark Present, There Is Only This Shitty Bar Full of Vampires

You're all neonate vampires. You're connected because you all hang out in the same bar-- for various political reasons it's safe for neonates there. Probably vampire owned, possibly an official Elysium. You are kinda sorta friends, in a human/drinking buddy kind of way.  Vampire life is organized around feeding rights, parceled feudal-style by the Prince to the politically connected or personally useful. Your problem: You don't have any feeding rights, so you have to beg them from your sires/other older vampires in exchange for dubious favors.

Activities include: Feeding. (It won't be played out every time, but definitely the first few will be done in detail.) Bargaining for access to other vampire's demesnes. Holding up your end of those bargains. Sneaking into demesnes you're not allowed to feed in, and dealing with the consequences if you get caught. Tying up loose ends from your mortal lives. (Or ravelling them out, as the case may be.) Maneuvering to get granted your own demesne. Possibly, investigating suspicious-ass things and getting involved in vampire politics in other ways. Negotiating with each other about feeding rights/other issues.

System: Vampire: the Requiem, naturally.

Regular Fucking D&D

This one's still kinda rattling around in the back of my head so I'm not sure if it's ready to run yet. But I was reading the Forgotten Realms book the other day and I was all like "you know, I've never run a 'normal' fantasy campaign, but I bet I could do that."

Broken magic castle would be a good basis for a dungeon, yah. And I guess if I'm going to do "normal" D&D that implies that there should just be like a little village nearby and a bigger city somewhere further away.

System: S&W/OD&D (or ACKS, now that I think of it)

ATTENTION MISCREANTS

Joceyln the cabbage-growing peasant has had a VISION. The slitherous ST. SERPENTOR has come to her IN A DREAM and told her to GO FORTH! and retake THE SNAKE MUSEUM from the fiendish WHITE APES that therein dwell, so that it may be consecrated as a monastery in HIS name. She seeks fearless companions to aid her in this worthy quest, and to share in the TREASURE!

The expedition will take place on Saturday Friday 7pm Eastern / 23:00 UTC (follow the link to the Event Time announcer for times around the world) on Google Plus. I'm playing, Trollsmyth is running. The game is run under the FLAILSNAILS conventions. Jocelyn is a 1st level Labyrinth Lord character built with Stuart Robertson's Paladin subclass. Trollsmyth will be running a bastard version of Moldvay/LL, with his usual house rules. Check out his blog for more details about the world.

EDIT: Trollsmyth informs me that characters above 3rd level will be subject to handicapping, per FLAILSNAILS conventions.

Why Sexy Costumes For Female Superheroes Piss People Off

Just to be clear, I'm talking about an emotional response. I don't have a problem with Jim Lee drawing sexy women. He's good at it, and he should continue to do the world that service. I'm just trying to explain where the counterargument comes from.

And this really isn't in response to Zak's post, specifically, but to some of the comments on it, and on comments that I've seen pop up in this kind of discussion elsewhere.

So.

Has everyone here seen Transformers? The first live action movie.

Don't go see Transformers. Let's all just pretend that we've seen Transformers.

There's this scene where Megan Fox's character is fixing Bumblebee, before we know that he's Bumblebee. She's leaning over the car. She's wearing this revealing outfit. Bare midriff. Etc. And the camera moves up and down her body in imitation of where Shia La-whatever's gaze is presumably travelling, and where (attracted-to-lady-bits) part of the audience is following.

I'm not going to rewatch the movie to be sure but I'm pretty sure there's not an equivalent scene where we see Sam from his girlfriend's perspective.

Okay. Does this make sense in the movie? Yeah. Sam is the main character: the camera represents Sam's perspective.

But it does imply that the audience is assumed to be male, too. Again: Okay. Sure. Giant trucks smashing into each other? Guy stuff. Guys and girls are different, like different movies, making some for one and some for the other, no big deal.

But like, just staying in the realm of action movies for a minute, you get to the point where you're like, Jesus--

Every time I go to see a movie with a male protagonist blowing stuff up, he's a sexual actor and we see the chicks around him from his perspective and sometimes he's hot so that's cool and sometimes he's just some average-ish dude who the ladies are all nuts about for no well-defined reason and that's annoying.

And every time I go to see a movie with a female protagonist blowing stuff up, she's either super-hot and we see her from her male companion's perspectives, or she's like a mom figure and she's all badass in defense of her family/husband/children and that's cool but not really all that sexy.

I say this as a woman who likes guys. I like to look at guys and have sex with guys and it gets frustrating sometimes that a lot of media doesn't do much for me or represent me or even really acknowledge that I exist. Especially when it's not just action movies but advertisements and media that's presumably "for" me. Or media that is absolutely for me, like RPGs.

It's not something I personally get pissed off about these days, and I understand why it happens and I don't think it's some vast conspiracy to keep women down. But it frustrates me.

Quipstar

I don't usually post about my personal life or work here and I plan to keep it that way, but I thought I'd just post a few of these to let you know what's been keeping me busy and away from the blog for the last couple of weeks. Also, because it's fucking awesome.

The guy in the backwards baseball cap is my man Andy. He was in my old high school group and he got hired here shortly after I did.

What people have on their iPads is our software, live. It's sorta hard to tell but the same software is also running on the podiums. (Or rather, as it's a web-based app, on a server in the back room. The computers in the podiums themselves are mostly running Firefox, plus some stuff for the buzzers and whatnot.) It's a clinical documentation app with a ton of medical data in it. Contestants are using it to answer medical and medical coding questions.

"Inga" is an anonymous health IT industry news blogger. She's in disguise so that her secret identity isn't revealed. Her security detail is two of our programmers. Her martini glass is filled with green M&Ms because she's a diva. You'll notice we set up a whole extra big screen TV to her left so we could show a live video feed of her shoes.

I'm in this one. Set up the day before the convention opened.

Post-show inventory and office clean-up is probably going to eat up next week's computer and work time, and just recovering from Las Vegas (Medicomp parties even harder after the show than we do during it) is going to take most of this weekend, so don't expect me to be back to blogging and whatnot for a bit. 

Why D&D Has Lots of Rules for Combat: A General Theory Encompassing All Editions

D&D, in all editions, has a lot of rules for combat. That's generally what the majority of the game's rules are for, even when it's got fairly detailed rules for non-combatty type things. That doesn't mean that D&D is "about" combat, though, at least in all editions. Sometimes, in fact, it means that it's very much not about combat.

Obviously, sometimes D&D is about combat. 4E is the big one here. If you're not spending a decent chunk of your sessions fighting monsters in 4E, you're playing waaaaay outside of what its designers intended for it. This is a function of the complexity of the rules 4E has related to combat: in 4E D&D, you have a lot of interesting decisions to make inside of combat, and you're not risking much by initiating it. Your guy has a lot of neat things he can do in combat, the rest of the party has a lot of neat things they can do in combat, and the monsters, terrain rules, encounter design guidelines, and other DM advice and features of the game make it fairly easy to set up a particular kind of "interesting encounter." And the DM has to step outside of what the game rather strongly recommends to even be able to kill the PCs. It's tough to do accidentally.

Depending on the quality of the GM, of course, you probably have some interesting decisions to make outside of combat as well, but it's harder to say exactly what you're risking in those situations than it is when you're working within the game's combat system. 4E D&D is a game where you're supposed to spend a lot of your time hitting things.

At the opposite extreme, you've got OD&D/Basic and their retroclones. Combat in OD&D isn't that interesting unless the DM knows what he's doing and the players are active and creative-- neither the games rules nor its advice really funnel play towards "fun" combat. To the degree that combat is interesting, it's interesting because you're allowed to bring in whatever non-combat systems you have for handling problems-- the nets, 10-foot-poles, and spells of physical problem solving-- into the combat. If that's fun in the rest of the game, you're probably going to have fun with OD&D combat, too.

The main function of the combat rules, instead, is to make combat deadly, in a way that's fairly adjudication agnostic. If the DM is doing her job right, she's going to kill your character sometimes, and you're going to know that you deserved it. It needs fairly detailed combat rules because it's relatively difficult to adjudicate combat compared to most of what you do in D&D, and relatively important compared to most of what you do in D&D that it be adjudicated "correctly," or at least in a fairly neutral way. (Among other reasons-- to a degree combat is always complex because combat is inherently interesting).

So here complex combat creates a situation that's the opposite of what it does in 4E: "If we get into combat we will probably die; as long as we stay out of combat we might die but we're not sure" vs. "If we get into combat we probably won't die; as long as we stay out of combat we might die but we're not sure." It doesn't change the fundamental D&D situation of "you don't really know what the DM is up to, and to play and have fun you have to be willing to trust her."

The combat rules create a particular environment for decisions to be made, and they create context for decisions made outside of combat. In 4E, combat is inherently interesting, and the context it creates encourages players to engage in combat. In OD&D, combat isn't inherently interesting, since its intended to create a context that discourages players from engaging in combat without pissing them off if that's what they decide to do. In each case you get different behavior. (Depending on the assumptions that the players themselves bring to the table. I've had players fling themselves into OD&D combat because they didn't understand the rules and they assumed that it was like the video games they were used to, or other games that they'd played.)

For me this is a simple and clear case of some general principles in game design. Just because a game has a lot of rules for something, it doesn't mean the game wants you to spend a lot of time doing that something. Player's may assume that's the case, if they mistake "complex" for "interesting," but they'll eventually learn better if it's not. If a game has a lot of rules for something that's a good sign that it's important, but it may be inherently important or it may be important because it's a failure state or other consequence of normal game play. 3E has fairly complicated rules for death and dying. That doesn't mean that 3E is "about" death and dying to the degree that it has rules about them.

As an aside, I feel like this combat/rules dynamic puts 3E in sort of a weird place. The volume and kind of rules that it has for combat indicate that combat is inherently interesting. For the most part, that's true. But it lacks a lot of the safeguards that 4E has built-in to combat. It's not nearly as deadly as OD&D, but it can still be pretty deadly, especially when the players misjudge the situation somehow. It extends a lot of OD&D's assumptions to their logical conclusions-- OD&D combat can be interesting, if the DM presents it in a sufficiently textured way, and the players have some toys to play with, so D&D 3E provides the texture and the toys. 

Unfortunately, that makes it easy for things to guy awry if the players then take their inaccurate OD&D assumptions to their logical conclusions. Either they'll die a lot and get frustrated, or the DM will low-ball the challenge (and the 3E books don't give a whole lot of guidance away from this tendency) and the combats will get really easy. The underlying physics of D&D's combat can make for pretty boring combat if there aren't any interesting stakes involved; if you're not trying to achieve something in particular, or desperately avoid death. 3E makes it interesting to go "oh hey! this game is about combat!" then have that initial impression confirmed, and play that way until the game gets very boring and the DM gets annoyed.

What If Your PCs Were All on Drugs?

In the comments on Zak's latest post, bombasticus writes:

Now that you mention it, though I almost want to run a really decadent Third Imperium "drift" game, Victor's European Vacation in space where they confront the inherent anomie of existence. And do space drugs.

For some reason this really clicks with me. I immediately thought, "Well what if they were all addicts? That would be a pretty dang great reason for them to go adventuring. They'd need money, and that'd get them into the usual trouble, and then the drugs themselves would get them into even more trouble. It'd neatly explain the usual player character batshittery."

Especially if they weren't all the same drugs. Like if I was going to take this concept really seriously, I'd have a random table that told you what drugs you were hooked on at the start of play. Maybe more than one.

It even explains how the characters know each other: You met through your drug dealer. Or otherwise through that fraternity that always seems to exist amongst users and addicts. It'd be easy to integrate new characters into the game. Which would probably be necessary, for something like this.

Traveller is a pretty obvious system/genre for this kinda thing, but I think it'd work for any sufficiently urbanized setting. D&D and cyberpunk would both be pretty obvious options.

I might do it with Traveller, though, just because I've had trouble with that system in the past (for some reason) and that might help me get a handle on the shape of the campaign. Or not. I've been meaning to run a "wastrel noble scions" game of D&D for a while, and this might be just the thing.

What have I done?

Foxboy is getting old World of Darkness books in the mail. He's got players lined up and he wants us all to be Tremere in a small town dealing with creepy happenings. It was not six months ago that I talked him into playing in an Eberron campaign I was running. Since then he's played some Dark Heresy but a recent move has put that game on ice, so I guess he decided that he needed to take things into his own hands.

Strategy & (Vancian) Magic

I dig Vancian magic I think it makes sense, has a lot of flavor, and makes it pretty easy to handle magic. It also admits a lot of variations. 3e by default has a bit (compare wizard, sorcerer, and cleric), and a lot of later D&D 3e products were good about this. Reserve feats (as long as you have spell X prepared, you can create magic effect Y at will) are a pretty simple variation; Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic gave you some weirder ones. Even psionics, as implemented in 3e, is pretty much just Vancian magic with a different economy of slots.

My personal favorite is what Monte Cook did with the standard Vancian system in Arcana Evolved. A lot of little changes that really showed how you can stretch D&D's magic. One of the biggest is that all casters, instead of being divided into prepared and improvised casters, are a sort of hybrid of the two. Everyone has access to their full spell list at all times. (And everyone uses the same master spell list; depending on your class and your feat selection, each individual caster has access to specific parts of it.) You "ready" a certain number of spells at the beginning of the day, and then use your spell slots to cast those spells in any combination you like. Since you can also use one spell slot to cast several spells of a lower level, or several slots of a lower level to cast one spell of a higher level, casters have a lot more flexibility in their what they can do each day than is normal in 3e D&D.

Granted, this ups the complexity level of running a caster a lot. When I was running Arcana Evolved, my casters made printouts of different spell load-outs for different kinds of situations, because otherwise what you're doing is basically building a sorcerer fresh at the start of every session. It's not a system I'd recommend for DIY D&D except maybe for high level play. It gets worse when you consider that daily spell selection really only scratches the surface of the new complexity in Arcana Evolved; with three versions of every spell (one at, one a step above, and one a step below the level of the spell) and a bunch of feats that let you modify spells in various ways, there are a lot more decisions to make when building and playing a caster than in vanilla 3e D&D.

Decisions are good. One of the things that I admire about D&D magic is that there are a lot of decisions, they're all pretty meaningful decisions, and for the most part they're also avoidable decisions. In early D&D this is pretty simple. Play a caster or no? Which of two spell sets do you want access to? Accumulating the spells themselves involves a whole series of little decisions and challenges, and actually preparing spells each day gives a consistent and not-overwhelming suite of decisions to make. Then there's casting the spells, and you can get into a lot of creativity there, but most of the strategy is pre-loaded. Your success as a caster revolves around what kinds of situations your experience allows you to anticipate, and your ability to react when your plans go awry.

One of the things I like about later editions of D&D, though, is the way that the more complex spellcaster ecosystem lets you fine tune where you want your strategy, and how much of it you want. In 3e, there are three big spell suites and a secondary one (divine, natural, arcane, and bard) to choose from, and a couple different levels of involvement in each. If you want, you can simplify your choices at-the-table by front-loading them into your build, by playing a sorcerer (or a bard). Playing a cleric is in a lot of ways similar, because if you screw up your spell selection, or if an educated risk in a situational spell choice goes awry, you can always default to a Cure.

Of course, 3e D&D also ramps up the total decisions you have to make a lot, which is kind of a double edged sword. Most of these you're going to make away from the table: Feats and caster special abilities mostly impact character creation and leveling, and the vastly expanded spell list is mostly something dealt with when winnowing your selections for your spellbook or spells known. No matter what class you're running, though, you're going to have more spells to cast, and that does increase the complexity of at the table strategy.

Changing the complexity level of the available decisions, and changing where those decisions get made, is the big thing that you're doing when you start messing around with the D&D spells system. You have a lot of leeway to do that with D&D and Vancian casting in general, because you don't just have a lot of decisions, in the sense that you have a long spell list. The decisions come in chunks. Character creation. Ongoing spell selection. Daily spell preparation. Casting during the encounter.

I really think that's the strength of the D&D spell system. There's a satisfying level of complexity and available strategy, but it's not overwhelming, because you don't have to deal with it all at once. There are a lot of ways to scale it up and down to fit your individual group's preferences, both at the system modification level, and as they make their characters. For a game that's often about the pleasures of logistic strategy gone horribly, horribly awry, that's a pretty good thing.

NaNo & Scrivener

Didn't win NaNoWriMo, which I'm okay with. At about 35k and still working on it. We'll see where that goes. I'm trying to get 10k a week, as a general rule.

I recently moved all my stuff to Scrivener, to test that program out. It's kinda neat. So far I'm mostly appreciating the ability to see my wordcount as I type, and to break out sections in different sub-documents. So far that's mostly just "each day's work is a new note," but I suspect that when I get around to editing it's going to be broke down a lot more like scene. There are actually two separate novels in this project, maybe more. Breaking away from the Word-inspired idea that a big project has to be written all at once, straight through, with no breaks in between has been liberating. Double plus the idea that I have to know what a project is about before I start writing. That's the big thing that I'm glad I've learned from NaNoWriMo now.

NaNoWriMo

I'm doing NaNoWriMo again. That's one reason why I've been quiet lately. (Other reasons: Not gaming as much as I was, not running anything, busy getting settled into work/new apartment/post-college life.)

It's weird. I'd totally sworn of NaNoWriMo the last time I did it. Forever. Succeeded twice, failed twice, decided I'd learned all I could from it and that it was time to move on to Real Writing. And now I'm back at it.

I'm doing it partly because DrRotwang announced he was doing it for the first time, and it's always good to support first-timers. Partly to keep me busy while I get back on anti-depressants/anti-anxiety medication.

Have I mentioned that here? I got whacked with the depression stick pretty bad in middle school. Managed to get that under control at the time, but looking back it was an issue on and off for most of college.

It’s tough for me to get a sense of perspective on it because I don’t have the crippling, free-floating, self-esteem battering emotional regulation issues that have landed a couple of my friends and acquaintances in the hospital recently, and de-railed work and school for others. What I do have is a lot of anxiety and a hard time telling when I’m getting anxious, so it alters my behavior in ways I’m not always aware of. The last six to twelve months have involved a lot of both figuring that out and attempting to get a handle on it. One conclusion I’ve had to draw is that it’s started to affect my gaming (and maybe always has). That’s one of the big reasons I want to get it under control. Not being able to DM because of how nervous making things up on the fly makes me is no fun at all.

Medication seemed to help towards the end of school, but then I stopped taking it for various stupid reasons, so now I’m having to go through the unpleasant, why-is-this-making-my-symptoms-worse?!! process of getting back adjusted to it. Writing doesn’t help, exactly, in the sense that it makes me feel better. It keeps me occupied, though, and it helps me feel grounded.

It’s good to get back in touch with that. I did a lot of writing in college. I was an English major, as I will never tire of telling people. But it was a lot of very busy, very harried, very fragmented, very goal-focused, and often not-very-fun writing. I mostly lost track of my old high school habit of carrying a notebook around with me everywhere and writing whatever, whenever, wherever. I have an entire shelf full of these notebooks. If there’s anything you admire about my writing “style,” those notebooks are probably why. I’ve written a lot. Just sheer volume of words.

And, you know, focus and goals and piece completion and all that is good. I’m proud of a lot of the work I did in that English program. Even the research papers, although mostly what I learned from them is that I don’t ever want to go near an English Masters program oh god get it away from me. The reading I had to do for those classes made me a better writer, and I absolutely, positively, one hundred percent am a better writer because of the things I talked about and learned and had to write for my workshop classes.

But I kind of lost that sense of writing as this self-contained thing that lets me structure the world. It was constantly, as Steven King would say, “writing with my door open.” I got better at writing, but I was doing it for classes, for peers, for teachers, for friends. Sometimes for friends I was working on projects with. Not for myself.

NaNoWriMo, and this story I’m working on? Completely, totally, one hundred percent for me. This is good. The story itself is kind of terrible, and it’s tough, but every time I knock out another two thousand words I’ve learned something new about it, and I don’t have to worry about how anyone else is going to evaluate it in two weeks. Or maybe ever. If I show it to anyone else, it’ll be because I want their feedback, and I want to make it better.

There's No Money in D&D

So on Google Plus the other day, in a discussion of why I don't read comics and maybe other people don't too (short version: they're bad, and they're bad because of artist/writer churn), I made the following comment:

I feel like DC/Marvel have the same problem that WotC has, or at least a similar one, in that they own this thing that everyone loves and knows about and looks like it ought to have all kinds of money in it, but in reality is fantastically hard to make money off of because they don't own the part of it that people really care about. They own the names, but they don't own the DMs or the artists or the writers.

This is something I've been thinking about and talking about with people for a long time. I don't really know how serious of a "problem" this is for WotC at the moment -- the internet wisdom is that their corporate masters are desperately unhappy with the level of profit they're generating, but the internet wisdom, generally speaking, isn't.

Still. I think it's interesting that, with the rise of Paizo and Pathfinder, we're getting a look at just what it is that Wizards owns in "D&D." Fundamentally, it's not much.

They don't own the concept of roleplaying, or any of the fundamentals you need to run a game. At one point maybe they owned the rules, but even that's kind of dodgy given the way U.S. copyright law handles game mechanics. They clearly don't now. They can't own the vast majority of what you need to run a game, because that basically comes down to a particular set of skills and talents that aren't all that hard to pick up, if you're willing to work at it.

They don't own dungeons. They don't own dragons. They don't own most of what makes up "standard D&D fantasy" what it is, because most of that was based on older sources to begin with. They claim ownership of illithids and yuan-ti, but it's not like you can't easily make your own without referencing their versions. Which leaves... what, beholders? Rust monsters?

These days, what they own is the ability to put "Dungeons Ampersand Dragons" on their books. What they own, really, is the ability to sell a particular set of tribal signifiers to geeks. They own the best way to sell something to someone who's never played an RPG before. They can sell the stuff that says "D&D" and makes you a part of "D&D." As Zak put it:

I;d say--they own the part that people who will buy shit whether it's good or not want, but not the part that matters to people who actually want it to be good care about.

Forge Monsters

At the behest of noisms. Stats are provided in the form of references to similar Pathfinder monsters, along with any modifications necessary. If you need combat statistics for a bubble worm I'm not sure I can help you.

Crimson Seeker Asp

The crimson seeker asp is a sort of clockwork device, studded with diamonds. When dipped in wine, their color darkens to a deep, blood red, and the asp will unerringly seek out the nearest person from the region of the wine's origin and attempt to bite them. (What constitutes a wine "region" is left to the particulars of the campaign world. It might be as large as, say, France, but could be as small as a particular county or vineyard.) If the region produces on white wine for some reason, you are out of luck: the asp despises white wine, and will be rendered permanently inert if immersed in it for any extended length of time.

In combat, treat as a venomous snake, except that its poison deals 1d4 Wis damage. (For an asp treated with a wine of about 10% ABV. Weaker varieties might deal as little as 1d2 or even 1 points of Wis damage, while stronger varieties might deal as much as 1d8.) After 3 bites, or once it is reduced to 0 hp, the color drains out of the crystals along its back and it becomes inert again.

Bubble Worm

Appears to be a chain of tiny iridescent bubbles. It's actually a sort of creature. It eats secrets (or, failing that, silk). Every secret uttered in its presence is forgotten by one creature who knows it, and the worm adds a bubble to its length. A properly prepared sorcerer can read the secrets from the bubbles, though this destroys the bubble in question. The worm will resist such treatment, as it causes them great discomfort and can even kill them if carried on long enough. (10% chance per bubble read, +5% cumulative for each bubble in a single day.) If it absorbs an entire secret, to the point where no one living remembers it anymore, it lays an egg. The egg is worth 100 gp x the number of creatures who once knew it. It is commonly worn by the nobility as jewelry in certain decadent courts.

Vapor Cat

It appears to be an entirely ordinary cat, usually grayish, though sometimes cream colored or even blue. Wherever it goes, fog goes with it. When half a dozen or more gather in a single place, it rains. If a vapor cat gets wet, it dissolves. The puddle-cat maintains its general organization and can slip around at will in this form; with a little work, it can be coaxed into a warm bottle. Poured out in a warm, dry place, it will reform into a cat (though slightly different in appearance, to the discerning eye) and regard the owner of the bottle as its master. They make pleasant (if slightly damp) companions, but are useful only insofar as they are unchallenged at catching magical vermin, which they carry to their master mostly undamaged.

Fur Lobster

Not actually a lobster. It's a large, crustacean-like monster that makes nests for its eggs that it lines with fur. To that end, it is weirdly attracted to fur and hair. The small ones simply seek it out where it's already fallen, or remove it from sleeping creatures. The larger ones can be extremely aggressive, and seek out warm-blooded mammals to attack and eat, the larger and furrier the better. Treat as a giant scorpion, but without the sting, and an uncanny ability to track warm, moving objects over long distances.

Further Obvious Insights

The process of generating situations in the way that I described yesterday is much, much easier for me when the style of the game is a well-established sort of beast. It's stupidly easy in a bizarre mega-dungeon, and it's fairly easy when I'm imitating a game that I've played in myself. Right now, for instance, I'm running a game for Dangerfox that's based on the game I've been playing with Trollsmyth for years. The setting is based on the one that Trollsmyth uses, the situation is very similar to the one I've been playing in for years, and I know the kind of scenes that I want to achieve. Most importantly, I know the kinds of goals that Dangerfox's character needs to have to make those scenes interesting, and I have a rough idea of how to give him the opportunity to develop those goals. If he doesn't, I have some ideas for how to adapt the game to accommodate other sorts of motivations.

That's really what's important here: Player and character goals. I've been making the mistake, in a lot of these games, of trying to get my players to do my work for me -- of looking to them to define the game, on the thought that they'll enjoy it more and it'll be easier for me if it's based on "what they want." Which is absolutely and endlessly true, but it doesn't do me any good if I don't know what kinds of situations to present at the table. I just sit there throwing either random situations based on my notes (or thin air) at them, or "logical" (ish) responses to their own actions, and without any yardstick for what makes a "good" scene I just keep getting more and more nervous, without any idea of what's "right" or any foundation for moving my notes or ideas or whatever else it is I'm bringing to the table into the game. It doesn't really matter if those notes came from me or the players: they're not the point.

Goals, though. Goals are something that only the players can come up with, and that can provide me a firm foundation on which to build something that I know is interesting, and fun, and that I can properly referee. A situation can always be built on the foundation of "here is something the player's want, and here is an obstacle in their way." A more interesting scene can similarly be built out of "here are two things the players want, set up in some way that they can only have one of them." (Unless, of course, they are very clever.) If I know the players (and characters) goals, then I have the game. A lot of my communication with players has historically been about determining what their aims are in-game; lately, I've been thinking as well about how to give them the information that they need to devise interesting goals.

That's another problem with these recent games: I've just been throwing "stuff" at the players in the early sessions, and hoping that they come up with interesting ideas about what to do with it. It'd be much easier, for everyone involved, to come up with a proper adventure, with some pre-loaded goals, at the very beginning, and allow players to develop their own ideas from there, once we're properly into the game. Much less flailing about for everyone.

Probably the most important thought I've had along these lines is that there are certain situations that I just can't render with any fidelity. There are a lot of situations that I either don't know enough about, don't have enough interest in, or can't picture clearly enough in my mind to be able to describe well enough that the players have enough information to make decisions about, in a granular way. In response, I've been attempting to get more comfortable with and confident at abstracting these situations.

For instance: I know nothing about wilderness survival. My spatial imagination is similarly underdeveloped. (Seriously -- my attempts to draw maps of places I spend every day in go hilariously awry because I just can't picture them properly, never mind imaginary places I've never been.) So it's difficult for me to handle a party running around the woods from simply a map and a key. Considering that this is what Trollsmyth, in the Pathfinder game I've been running for him lately, is doing, this has been a bit of a problem. I've discovered, though, that a general idea of the terrain, a random encounter chart, and the Survival skill have been good enough for me to fake it. I can take a point on the map and a few rolls and say, "Okay, here's where & how you found that thing you were trying to get," or "Here's what the area immediately around you looks like, and here's a Problem." I don't have a damn clue what any of the stuff inbetween these little interludes looks like, really, ("You walk for 2 miles through...") but it's enough to run a game on.

A Blindingly Obvious Insight

On Friday I made mention of "figuring out my DMing style," in service to what was really another point entirely. What I was talking about, though, was something else that's been on my mind a lot: for the last couple of years, I haven't really enjoyed running games. Most of the sessions and campaigns I've run have been, to some degree or another, poorly-improvised anxiety-fests that I've found, at best, as least as nerve-wracking as they were fun. At worst, I've killed the session half an hour in because I honestly could not think of what to do next -- or even really think much at all.

This is vexing, because in high school I enjoyed DMing more than most other things. I don't think I'm alone here in saying that I'm pretty omnivorous in the things that I enjoy learning and the stuff that I've gotten good at over the years. DMing is one of the few activities that exercises all of it -- skills social, linguistic, creative, and mathematical, never mind a great deal of random accumulated knowledge -- and that furthermore demands that I be aware, present, and fully operational for any length of time. Particularly when I was in school, being repeatedly warned that I would find whatever fresh hell was waiting for me next year "challenging," and being repeatedly disappointed, this was a pretty vital as at least an occasional feature in my social and recreational life.

I've spent the last year threatening at least occasionally to quit DMing entirely, on the idea that I've grown out of it, or I've found other things to occupy my time, or maybe it just was never as fun as I thought. Fortunately or unfortunately, I find that I just can't quit thinking about the dang thing, so I appear to be stuck with it. So I've been trying to figure out a way to run games without allowing them to become a vehicle for anxiety, at least to the point of unpleasantness.

The trick seems to be -- based on some very limited success in the past few weeks -- as it is with many things, preparation. The best antidote for anxiety is confidence, and the best path to confidence is sufficient knowledge to support improvisation.

Which brings me back to my original point. When I say "what I want going into the game," I'm not talking about style or system or mood. When I say "preparation," I don't mean notes or characters or locations or any of the junk I've been writing up and thinking about and talking about for any of the games I've run in the past couple of years. What I mean is knowing two things:

1. Given where the last session ended (or the circumstances devised for the start of the game), what's a situation that will give the characters (and/or their players) and an interesting decision to make?

2. Given the range of likely or possible decisions that could be made, what's the next such situation likely after that? (And after that, and after that, and after that.)

In the second place, obviously, this means knowing the characters and the campaign in order to have a sort of feel for where things are likely to go, and to be able to come up with something even if and when the players don't match those expectations. This means knowing the who and the what of the situation in question well enough to make the situation feel "real" to me -- that is, to make the decision seem significant -- and knowing what information I need to communicate to the players to make it seem real to them.

As indicated in the title, this is pretty obvious. This, however, is what makes it important to me: It's important, it's necessary, and despite that I've been struggling with it, and a number of other issues that it implies and is implied by.

Inside the Oddysey/Trollsmyth Hall of Secrets

[[Other people have said stuff like this before, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Especially the bit at the beginning. Also, this started as a conversation about poodles.]]

Oddysey: I'm finally starting to learn my own DMing style, and it really does work better if I know what I want going into the game.

Trollsmyth: YES!!!!1!!eleven!! :D

Oddysey: Jeez... you'd think it wouldn't take me a decade to figure that out...

Trollsmyth: Pfft. I didn't figure it out until 2000, honestly. And I'd been playing since '82, so that's what, 18 years?!? ;D

Well, ok, that's not entirely true. I couldn't articulate it until 2000.

Oddysey: Yeah. Because as DMs, our instinct is to be responsive to the players. That has to be what draws us to DMing.

Trollsmyth: Yep.

Oddysey: But responsiveness, while a requirement for good DMing, can't be the foundational quality for a game.

I mean, my better games have always been marked by the fact that I was bringing so much to the game -- more than made it to the table.

Trollsmyth: Yep, absolutely.

Oddysey: It's not just a matter of "run what you want to run," though.

I mean, for me, I have to have a clear idea of what the game is going to look like before I run it.

I can't be fumbling around in the dark.

Does that make sense?

I don't mean railroading or "writing" the game.

Trollsmyth: No, it makes perfect sense.

There are a hell of a lot of assumptions that go into running a game. And not all are always the same from game to game, even with the same group running the same system.

Oddysey: In a lot of ways I think system is really the least important part of it.

Trollsmyth: Yep. It helps, but...'

I mean, how often does system show up in the Henet game these days? ;)

Oddysey: Yeah.

And like Zak has said, he's played a bunch of different games now with a bunch of different people and there's just as much differentiation between the games run by different people using the same system as there is between different systems.

He's said he doesn't really notice the system much. [[note: I can't find where he said this now, otherwise I'd have linked to it]]

I think probably style of system might make a difference but I don't know that -- especially for a one-shot -- there'd be much noticeable difference between 3.5 D&D and GURPS fantasy.

And none between GURPS and M&M.

Trollsmyth: Nope. And honestly, from 30k feet, there's not a lot of difference between those two.

Oddysey: GURPS would be better for a game where you did a lot of body-switching.

Trollsmyth: Ooo, yeah, it would.

Oddysey: One of the nice things about 4e GURPS is that it's very clear about which attributes go with you and which don't.

And in that case, personality mechanics might actually be good -- it'd give you some handholds to grab.

Trollsmyth: Huh... I hadn't noticed that about 4e.

Oddysey: There's a discussion of it in the body-switching power, I think.

I mean, basically, it's everything that's marked mental goes, physical stays, and social depends on exactly how the switch happens and whether people know about it.

But yeah. Anyway.

Outside of specific edge cases like that, it's better just to use the system that you're comfortable with.

And I don't know, when you get right down to it, how much difference there is between 0e and GURPS besides ease-of-use.

On a campaign level, that's another matter.

Trollsmyth: From 30k feet, there's not much. Even Dogs in the Vineyard shares a lot in common with those, when compared to a game like Amber diceless.

Oddysey: Yeah. Dogs is just crazy-deadly and puts deadliness entirely under the player's control.

Trollsmyth: Yep.

Oddysey: I really feel like us futzing around with system is a distraction from the real issues/decisions involved in finding "the perfect game."

Trollsmyth: Oh?

Oddysey: Not [[just]] us, specifically, but most serious RPG people. We spend a lot of time reading systems and talking about systems and choosing between systems and trying to find the "right" system for a game.

And I think that's a distraction from the real work that needs to be done to figure out what you want a game to be and how to get from here to there.

Trollsmyth: YES!

Oddysey: I mean, okay, to a certain degree, the system is important.

You really can't get the Amber experience from any other game.

Likewise, something like Burning Wheel (or D&D 4e) that has a lot of metagame pieces is going to give you a really different experience from something where it's easier to shove that stuff into the background.

But if you're deciding between two systems that are really just random number generators that you ignore when you get a better idea...

Superhero Rejects

These are the guys our GM won't let us play:

The Boozer, who can control alcohol the way some heroes control water or fire, and creates an aura of drunkenness whenever he consumes alcohol. He can't get drunk himself. He finds this vexing.

Sanity Man, who psychoanalyzes people by punching them.

The Gecko, who has all the power's of a six-year-old's conception of a gecko. He can climb on walls, has a very long tongue, and an aura of fear.

There are more, but we couldn't come up with amusing enough names, so I've forgotten them.