Swords & Wizardry, NaNoWriMo, and that Dang List

Who, exactly, was responsible for the decision to release Swords & Wizardry two weeks before National Novel Writing Month? I was getting ready to run an online game with some pals back home when I remembered that, in a week's time, my life will be consumed by that thing the innocent call a novel.

So now S&W is on the list of games I want to run, from which no man ever returns.

Okay, so Feng Shui returned. Also 4th Edition D&D. But neither of those were on the list for that long. Iron Heroes has been on my shelf for ages, and once came within a few hours of seeing play, only to have me decide I was insufficiently prepared and ditch it in favor of the madness that became Gnome Town. Traveller and Encounter Critical seem headed towards the same fate.

Someday I'll run all of those games.

But Swords & Wizardry is a little more than just "a game I want to run." It's a cleaned up, modern version of OD&D.

OD&D has been on my mind for a while. It'd be worth playing just for it's historical value, the game that started it all. But I've also been reading Sham's Grog & Blog and Grognardia, and drinking the rules-not-rulings, do-it-yourself, old school kool-aid. It reminds me of the way I used to play games, hacking stuff together at lunch that seemed like it would work, not worrying too much about game balance or GMing technique.

But OD&D, the three little brown booklets, is intimidating. I've put off picking up the PDF for a while, because I've had other stuff going on but also because I was worried about how much work it would take to piece together how to play. I know there's a lot missing out of the S&W PDF, a lot of the weird essential charm that makes OD&D what it is, but it's neat and it's clean and it's exciting. It's got me thinking some things that I don't always think -- not "how can I use these neat things in my game?" but "what neat things can I make for my game?"

That alone makes Swords & Wizardry too cool to just languish on the list. With any luck, I'll pick it up again after NaNoWriMo, in that post-novel rush of crazy ideas.

All The Characters Are The Same! or Why I Spent Six Hours Reading The Expanded Psionics Handbook

As I hinted at the end of yesterday's discussion of some of 4E's limitations, there's another more important distinction between 4E and 3e. In the new edition, each character has roughly similar capabilities. Sure, there's the striker/defender/leader/controller thing, and the variations on each of those themes, but it's all pretty much doing damage and deciding when to use your encounter powers and whether to burn your dailies. Occasionally you stick some interesting effects on the monsters, and there's a fair bit of moving around, but it's all just variations on a theme. It's a fun theme, and if the DM is on the ball you can get a lot of mileage out of it by changing the environment and monster behavior, and even more by building different characters in different ways.

But it's all one kind of fun.

There are a lot of different ways to generate varieties of fun -- call those ways the dimensions of fun, if you like fancy phrases -- and 4E drops a lot that 3.x had. One of the big ones, the one it had to give up to get the tactical complexity it's designed around, is variation on the mechanics behind character powers. 3.x has feats, skills, Vancian magic (of divine and arcane quality), psionics, incarnum, shadow magic, truename magic, binding, whatever that dang Tome of Battle stuff is, plus a bunch of class specific doo-dads like bardic music, rage, and dragon shaman auras all stuffed under "special abilities." All of which makes characters a lot harder to build, and a lot harder to predict how everything in the greater system will interact, but it allows for tremendous variety in the way the game plays. It also opens up a lot of headspace, creating a convenient source of ideas on how societies and environments might interact with the powers that drive them.

4E has one way. It's a good way, but it's not the only way.

It's Like the Best Apple Pie in the World When I Want More Than Just Those Damn Apples

Okay, so maybe being over 4E doesn't quite mean I'm going to stop thinking about it. Particularly, I've been trying to figure out what exactly it is that bugs me about it. This is a game I had all kinds of crazy fun running, and could easily have all kinds of crazy fun running again. So why don't I have much interest in it anymore?

That has more to do with obsession cycles than any intrinsic feature of the game, but my gut feeling answer is that it's much more limited than 3rd edition and its variants.

This is mostly nonsense. 4th Edition isn't significantly less complicated than 3rd Edition, it just increases tactical complexity at the expense of character complexity. With the exception of fighters, rogues, and other non-magic-using characters, 4E characters have fewer moving parts than their 3.x counterparts, and there's much less variety in the kinds of parts they use. However, this reduced complexity means its easier for the designers to ensure that all those moving parts have interesting interactions with each other, and that the characters have interesting interactions with the rest of the party. 

Which means, for pure combat, and even combat with motivational doo-hickeys (I'm fighting for the queen!) backed up by interaction scenes, 4E is superior. 3.x characters have an unfortunate tendency to find one best strategy and use it in every fight, to suck up table time with calculation, and to blow through opposition, though that last is mostly because the CR system rests on some assumptions that aren't supported by the game as she is actually played. On the DM side, 4E has much better support for making fights interesting, from making monsters easier to tweak and run to gearing its environmental design advice towards making terrain that gives players interesting choices.

On the other hand . . . 4E doesn't do a whole lot beyond that. There are precious few non-combat abilities, and it's impossible to build a character that doesn't focus on combat. It does have the skill challenge system, which I like a great deal and could see using to use to run a game by itself -- because it's a seperate system that's been bolted on to the main, power-based core where most of the game's complexity resides. 

If you want to run a game that revolves around exploration, or bullshit hi-jinks, or anything else where the point of combat isn't to have fun with the fight itself but to cause problems for the players, then whenever combat does come up it will invariably pull attention towards itself and away from the main point of the game. And if you don't use combat much, you're looking at a character sheet that you never use and making lots of character decisions that are never meaningful. 3.x often has the same problem, especially when you start adding in splat-books, but that's a function of the particular moving parts in the system -- what spells your wizard picks or whatever -- rather than being cooked into the arrangement of the moving parts themselves. It doesn't intrinsically assume, no matter how you build a character, that the character will be about "combat and occasionally some other stuff."

When I wrote this post, it ended up being crazy long, so tomorrow I'll pontificate about another, related difference between 3.x and 4E. As a player of mine used to say, "All the characters are the same!"

It's Not All About "Unified Mechanics"

I'm not interested enough in it to actually register and post, but there's an amusing discussion going on at RPG.net. Apparently, some contend that the only reason people play older editions of D&D is the nostalgia factor. If it's what you played in your childhood, that makes up for the obvious inferiority of a system without unified resolution mechanics. Or whatever.

Which puzzles me, because I started gaming as a kid with 3rd edition, but nowadays I play 2nd edition AD&D. I won't go as far as to call myself "old school," but there are a lot of things I like about the playstyle, and the older editions in general. I also know two guys my age who play 2nd exclusively, despite starting with 3rd, and will take any opportunity to declare 2nd's superiority. 

It's possible that us whippersnappers are just absorbing older gamer's nostalgia; I'm interested in playing older games mostly because of what I've read in the old school blog-o-sphere, and one of the other guys I know started playing 2nd edition when his neighbor gave him four or five boxes of books and miniatures and stuff. But I really do think that they're different games, different enough to be worth investigating.

I used to tease that guy about playing such an obsolete game. I assumed that the differences between 2nd and 3rd, and between 2nd and 1st, and between 1st and OD&D, were mostly a matter of fixing things that were "broken," and making the game more intuitive. That was the intent behind most of the changes, but there's a lot of really interesting stuff that got left behind along the way -- the troupe style of play, campaign-centered (as opposed to character-centered) play, irregular parties, and genre bending, just to name a few ideas that have changed the way I think about D&D, and gaming generally.

(Completely unrelated side note: I think "whippersnapper" is a pretty good term for those young, hip gamers who are getting into the old school scene. But that's just because it would give me an excuse to say "whippersnapper" a lot.)

The Battlestar Game: Getting to Know a New Group

That Battlestar Galactica game I'm in is going pretty well. We just had the second session last night. They've both been short, off-the-cuff affairs--the DM has walks downstairs and says, "Hey, you guys want to game tonight?" It's kind of refreshing, used as I am to long, rigourously scheduled weekly games.

The system itself is sort of weird, and I don't yet have a real good handle on the odds involved, but I don't think we're using it as written anyway. I've never played with this GM before, or with two of the other three players, and it's the first time I've ever joined a new group as a player since I first started gaming. I'm used to responding to new player styles as a GM, but adjusting to them as a fellow player, while trying to get the hang of a another GM's style, is not something I'm used to.

This GM's style is very different from mine. We're all Viper pilots on an old Battlestar, with the campaign starting just before the Cylon attack the on colonies. That just happened last night, but most of the game up until that has revolved around the specific, minute-to-minute activities of our characters on the ship. Trying to get enough sleep, hanging around in bars, going to the gym, interacting with NPCs, getting into fights. The first session largely revolved around one character trying to get revenge on an NPC (who outranked him) for vomiting on his dress uniform. There's also a lot of "party splitting," and one-on-one interaction; when we get off duty, one guy might go to the officer's rec, another to the gym, and another to shower and bunk, and the GM goes around and resolves each scene in its turn.

I tend to skip over this kind of thing, unless the player's specifically initiate it. I'm usually busy trying to get back to "the action." But well handled, it's really quite engaging. I do worry, based on a couple of comments the GM has made about how he has the campaign "written up," that the game will end up being scripted events with these kind of character interludes in between, but that'll be a problem only when it starts getting boring. Right now, I'm having fun getting a look outside my usual gaming scene.

And -- I'd planned to write this post about how I'm the only woman in the group, which is a new and exciting experience for me, but I'll leave that until next time.

Games Up the Wazoo

The mysterious explosion of gaming has spread. Last night, a couple people I know wandered into the campus coffee shop with Burning Wheel, and next thing I know I'm agreeing to a weekly fantasy game. Add this to Yesteryear, and the irregular Battlestar Galactica game I was also more or less randomly recruited into, and I've got a lot of gaming going on.

Unfortunately, this means I'm thinking about putting my own Traveller game on hold. I'm still having fun working on it, and I'll continue doing that, but I've got enough going on besides gaming that I'm not sure I can justify setting aside two weekend nights for it. A weeknight game might work out a little better, but that's more likely to run into other people's schedules.

On the other hand, if I can figure out a way to tap into the rest of the college gaming scene, I might be able to put together a large group, ad hoc schedule, West Marches kind of game. There's talk of a gaming club, and while I'm generally dubious about the value of such an organization, it would be handy for this kind of project. 

I might use Traveller for that game, if I can figure out a way to reconcile the "return to home base at the end of the session" requirement with the whole spaceship thing. It might also be a good excuse to finally download OD&D and take a look at getting that together. Or go back to 3rd, and really make it my own.

I know this must make me sound incredibly flaky, hopping from one idea to another and never getting anything done, and I am. I'm still negotiating this strange new idea that my entire social life doesn't need to revolve around roleplaying, I'm enjoying getting to be a player for once, and I don't feel like doing the work to run a game right now. I'll get back to it, but I figure it's better to back off a little and take a look at how other people run their games, rather than drive myself crazy about not running the game that I should be running.

Notes & Nostalgia

I ran my first campaign almost entirely off of handwritten notes on graph paper. I carried them around in a couple of folders, and worked on them during classes. I occasionally e-mailed things to my players, and kept a few long term notes on my computer, but I printed out almost everything important I wrote on the computer and stuffed it into the folder.

I didn't write up as many notes for the next couple of campaigns after that (I'd started doing work in my classes) but they were still mostly handwritten. Even if I wrote them on the computer, I kept all my need-to-play session notes in folders and binders and notebooks. One somewhat less successful campaign even revolved around a box of 3x5 cards.

Then I got a laptop. The one real campaign I've run since then was almost entirely based on computer notes; basically just the maps, and a couple of player generated notes in a binder. Which was great, especially for in-game notetaking. (And, most especially, handling initiative. "Sort alphabetical" was my best friend in the whole world.) I could have gotten more use out of it if I'd organized my notes a little better, or kept them in a format I could search through better, but my notes have always been a mess, no matter what their format.

I love the convenience of keeping track of my campaigns on the computer. I like being able to take advantage of my typing speed, and I'd like to try using a wiki, or some other fancy new Web 2.0 organizational scheme.

But I miss scrawling out NPC organization charts, monsters, the random ideas I have for next session. I miss sitting down with paper, pencil, and a couple of books. I like having a big stack of paper, or a binder to flip through. And I especially like being able to work without any of the distractions that come along with the computer.

I do wonder, though, if that feeling is mostly nostalgia. There are a lot of technical advatages to working partly or entirely on the computer, but it's not how I did my notes when I was 14, and caught up in my love for this crazy new game that I had discovered. Before I knew what I was doing. Before I worried how to do my notes.

Edited 9/22/08, for the grammar.

A Low Level Game?

I'm thinking low-level is the way to go with the Traveller game. Not so much in power level -- I don't plan on messing with character creation, at least on the first outing -- but in money, equipment, and variety of adventure.

Partially this is because I've been spending a lot of time looking at the trade tables. I expect they won't get quite as much attention once we start playing -- we'll too busy with the adventures, see -- but they still look like an interesting way to generate some on-the-fly excitement, and a quick way to decide where to go next. As long as they need cash, there's always something to do. Traveller has some handy mechanisms for keeping that need active -- mortgages and so on -- so this shouldn't be too hard.

Mostly, though, I want the PCs to have a sense of a larger universe. This goal may change once I get into the game and start seeing what clicks with my player group. But at least going into it, I want there to be a sense that there are things going on -- interstellar politics, trade deals, matters of empire -- that are just way out of their league. Not particularly important things, in the backwoods part of space they'll be in, more faraway, might matter if they cared things, but things nonetheless.

Random World Generation Official Verdict: Awesome

Planets I have made so far:

• D79A65-7 S NI Wa. Gola Tau. Run by the engineers who keep the environment bubbles working. They will challenge you to duels!
• C683589-8 A NI. Degenerate agrarian communists. Currently being pestered by one of their neighbors (to be decided, as I fill in the sector) who keeps trying to set up a puppet government to take them over.
• C7838AF-4 S P Ri Lt Amber. Deutsches Reich. They got hold of some old Nazi propaganda tapes, liked what they saw, and now they have tourists swarming all over what the travel agency calls "Hitler World."
• E2108CE-4 P Lt Na. Holo. Religious nuts trying to keep their atmosphere generators together with duct tape.
• C555300-6 Ga Lo NI. Sukka. A bunch of Heinlein-ian farmers, mostly notable for the guy calling himself "the King of Cold" who keeps bothering space travelers and trying to set up his own little kingdom.
  
• B000A53-14 N T I As Hi Ht In Na Va Red. Hox Anoth. Alien space arcology that the Imperium (or whatever) desperately does not want to antagonize.

So yeah, I'd say I'm having fun. No group together to play it yet, but I'm working on it. It may take me a week or two to get the sector sketched out anyway.

On Being A Player -- and a Bit About 2nd Edition

Being a player again is pretty spiffy. I've done a few one shots or short campaigns, here and there, but I ran my last few major campaigns. But now I'm playing Zavijah, a lawful neutral human cleric, in Yesteryear, a PBB 2nd Edition Planescape game, and it looks to be rockin'.

Especially because I'm not running it -- noisms is -- so I have someone to pester with pesky questions. I have schemes to unravel, things to explore, and NPCs to bother. It's a refreshing way to play the game, especially with the triple new of internet play, Planescape, and 2nd Edition.

All three of which I quite like. Planescape, of course, is awesome, and it's nice to be able to sit down and compose one's actions, rather than being driven by violent competition with the rest of the table. And I'm enjoying 2nd Edition more than I'd expected to; I doubt I'll ever run it, but character creation was surprisingly enjoyable, freed from the mechanical considerations of feat choice and skill point optimization.

I'm sure there are mechanical optimizations in 2nd edition, but I don't know what they are, and I have no intention to find out. At any rate, having no idea what the usual items for the system or the campaign would be, picking proficiencies and equipment was a lot more about what my character would actually know, and less about the optimal character grind I tend to slip into with 3rd, and 4th is actively built around. I can see why people still play the edition, and I'm glad to have joined them.

I Got Traveller Today

Mongoose edition, but hey. I've had it for five hourse, and it's almost made up for the rest of the day.
I mean, I knew what I was getting. I've heard people drop Universal World Profiles. I knew about death during character generation (Not required, but present. It's called "Iron Man" character generation -- the default on a failed survival roll is Horrible Manglement, because peg legs are fun.) I was aware, in a general way, of the charts.

But sitting here, book open to page 160, checking two charts to figure out how many passengers want to go from the space rock you're on to the space rock you want to go? Flipping through the book and finding a table, completely unrelated to the entry on the alien race it's below, about what a character's enemy is up to on the planet they just showed up on? Discovering charts for generating random animals to harrass the part with?

Crazy awesome doesn't even cover it.

Now I just need to figure out what to run with it. The crazy part of me says "Stargate SG-1 meets Star Trek (TOS) by way of Foundation, with a little Star Wars on the side and as much Dune as I can cram into it and still keep the laser battles." The campaign would bear the moniker "Star Truck," and an early session would center around a mysterious spinning cube, encountered in the mysterious reaches of space. Oh, and space marines.

The more serious part of me . . . well, basically agrees. I'd explain it in a way that doesn't hinge on pop culture references, but that's the space fiction I like. Basically, I'm thinking:

• The whole "ancient earth cultures scattered by a mysterious race" theme
• Pulp craziness, the kind that straddles the line between "making a point about human nature" and "laser dinosaurs!"
  
• One or more Imperial whatsits (that a lot of human worlds sit outside of) based on trade in exotic items, transhuman conspiracies, and dukes of planets (also: space princesses)
  
• Lunatic investment schemes by the PCs and/or their employers
• Space battles with ridiculous weaponry, up to and including colored lasers beams that cause computer banks to explode
• Space Marines. With powered armour. And laser swords.
  

I'm both under the impression that this is not too far of from the Third Imperium and not sure exactly how Traveller would handle it, not having read the full book. Even if I modify the mess of ideas I've already got into something a little more system friendly, I do plan on building my own setting, more or less from scratch. Nothing against the Third Imperium, I just feel the need. I know this space stuff pretty well, a lot better than I'll ever know fantasy, and it's been a while since I put together a really crazy new setting.

That, and it's Traveller. If I get stuck, I'll just roll some dice and work out something interesting.

The No Fun Game

Why do some people try to get others to play their game by explaining why the game they're already playing "isn't fun?" That's been the Wizards of the Coast marketing tactic for 4e, towards older editions, and the main effect I've noticed has been a perfectly justifiable increase in grouchiness amongst the people who play all those editions.

WotC (and their overenthusiastic minions) aren't the only ones who do this, though. It seems to be a foundation of the more annoying forms of Forge theory, that D&D isn't fun and all the people who think it is are delusional. And I've had several people try to get me to play Exalted using this strategy.

I don't get it. If those older editions weren't fun, how'd the hobby get started in the first place? (I'm using "fun" broadly here -- maybe better to say "worth playing.") In WotCs case, I think their target audience is people without the history to know any better, just trying to create comparison, but still. Clumsy.

And even leaving aside the stupid insult angle, telling me why my game is bad doesn't give me any reason to play yours. It's sort of understandable that Wizards sees the world as "our new D&D vs. your old D&D," but it always puzzled me that the Exalted players thought that if I wasn't playing D&D, I'd automatically move to their game, like there weren't a hundred other systems out there that I could play.

A Game of One's Own

I'm starting to think about homebrewing my own system. Mostly, I blame Trollsmyth's Moldvay/Basic hack, and Amagi Games. 4e coming out had something to do with it, giving me two related but different games to analyze.

And then there's my own sense that, someday, this is something that I'm going to have to do. Like running OD&D, or owning a sword. (And learning to use it, of course, but I've already started that; I have good luck with friends.) Someday I will write a terrible RPG and inflict it upon my friends. This is a law of my universe.

But lately it's moved off the back burners, and started taking up a bit more mental time. Especially since all this talk of cyberpunk started. If I were to start a serious project, now, it would be cyberpunk -- or rather, a fully cyberpunk-embracing version of that specific setting that was my first campaign. It's been on my mind lately, and while there were serious problems with that game I think there's a pretty decent setting there, cleaned up by my semi-adult self.

What's more likely to happen is that I'll use that setting for this year's NaNoWriMo novel (again) and run some D&D instead. Might be better to do another novel with it anyway, to get the setting into some kind of coherent form. (Not like it needs another incarnation -- this is one of my few really deep obsessions, along with D&D and Batman.) I may write up some notes as the mood strikes, but my school could really use some more D&D.

What I really want to know is, why does this have to hit during WoAdWriMo?

Powerless 4e

The other day, szilard (of Neitherworld Stories) noted that there are lots of character features that aren't powers in 4e. Which got me thinking: is there a game there?

Take out powers and you'd probably have to redesign classes, to give them a tad more distinction, and I'd want to check to see how many to-hit bonuses attack powers have, to make sure the math still works out right.

But with a few adjustments, it'd work. Combat would have to revolve around stunts, but most martial power effects could be reasonably simulated. Magic might be trickier, but I'd probably use this to run something science-fiction-y anyway.

I don't know that there'd be any point, but it's probably possible. It'd definitely depend a lot more on having the right group than straight 4e.

Challenge: Media Influences

I'm a little late to the party, but here's the deal: James Edward, from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, has challenged the members of the role-playing blogosphere to list at least five media influences on their campaigns, and explain them. Check the links back to the challenge itself to see the power and majesty of the thing. Mine include:

Dune
Not the first book I fell in love with, but one of the earliest, and the deepest. It was one of the first science fiction books I read after discovering the genre through a book report on Asimov and--wow. It's the book I re-read every couple of years, often during NaNoWriMo. It's probably responsible for the amount and intricacy of the politics that tends to work its way into my campaigns, as have its particular vision of transhumanism (both the Bene Gesserit and Tleilaxu varieties) and image of an unconquerable wasteland.

A Wizard of Earthsea
One of the few fantasy novels I've read; my tastes and habits have always run towards the science side of speculative fiction, though that's beginning to change. It's got a cultural depth that I've never quite been able to imitate, beyond working some non-medieval details into my worlds. It's also probably the reason that every time I really think about how magic works in my world, it ends up related to words in some way, though for me it's usually writing rather than speech.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
Flawed heroes! Magic rings! Epic quests! The other fantasy novels I've read, besides Earthsea and Lord of the Rings. Magic tied to the land, wise and seafaring giants, the whole "white gold wielder" thing, prophecy--these things speak to me.

Animorphs
The whole teenagers with superpowers thing was a big deal to me, at the time, and probably still is. Especially teenagers whole honestly like having their superpowers; the Animorphs never complained about having their powers, they complained that they had to deal with evil aliens, and couldn't get any help because they might be anywhere. Being a long-running, ensemble based series, it's a good model for team dynamics, the right mix of tension and co-operation, and how to give each character the right amount of spotlight time. It's also very talky, which is more noticeable in my writing than my DMing, but my ideal games do have a fair bit of chatter, both between PCs and with NPCs.

The Elder Scrolls
By which I mean Morrowind and Oblivion, not having played any of the earlier games. Morrowind, particularly, defines my ideal fantasy tone, a blend of mostly normal medieval/roman and bizarre bug creatures wandering around in the desert. I've tried, with varying degrees of success, to create fantastic ecologies for me games, and especially to use weird domesticated beasts, mostly because there aren't any normal animals in Morrowind, and how cool this is in the game.

Oblivion's influence is the most obvious of any of the items on this list, because I lifted the core of the plot to provide a backbone for the Is This Fair campaign. It worked out very differently, and I had changed enough things originally to make it distinct from the video game, but having a guideline was handy. I did, unfortunately, end up having the plot revolve around an NPC -- which is how it works in the game, but I should have known better. Especially since thinking about Oblivion and its major NPCs helped me work out some basic principles on how to make them important without upstaging the players.

On a less embarrassing note, it's also had an influence on the kinds of game I want to run. A great deal of my interest in sandboxes, with ancient ruins and collectible locations, is due to enjoying exploring Cyrodiil. And I'd like to use a something similar to the Imperial Cult in a future setting.

The Lord of the Rings
Well, duh, right? For the most part, though, I'm not into any specific setting details -- none of the non-human races are crazy enough for my tastes -- except maybe the long-lived line of kings descended from ancient glory days bit. I like the setting in the book, but I don't have a whole lot of interest in emulating it in my games. What I do like is the comradery and courage of the fellowship and the people around them. It doesn't work in every game I run, but I like to encourage it, when appropriate.

Special Bonus Non-Influence: Anime
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, and I've probably incorporated a specific idea from a specific show I've seen a couple episodes of here and there. But a lot of my friends are really into it -- which is why I've seen most of what I've seen -- and I've just never particularly cared. Except for when I was seriously into DragonballZ, but I claim extenuating circumstances.

There are probably some other influences and non-influences I missed, but that's a pretty decent list of the things I'm aware of. Except for "history," I guess, which seemed a little vague to give it's own spot, but I really do love settings and stories based on ancient culture and myth.

Sunshine and Mongol

So I've been watching some movies lately, in between being massively busy and accompanying mental exhaustion. Sunshine and Mongol.

Sunshine was awesome, but frustrating. It could have been one of the best science fiction movies of the decade, maybe ever, except that this ranting over-make-upped Batman villain kept popping up, teleporting around, and strangling people who had just stabbed him. Great. On the bright side, I think a lot of it would have been fixed if they'd just cut out his lines; the movie does use the extra tension well, and without lines he fits in pretty well as just another menace of the sun.

Mongol was neat, and was worth seeing (haven't seen the new Hulk movie yet, but I loved the first one so I'm not to sure about the new, improved, more fight scenes less staring at flowers Hulk) but not so engaging that I didn't spend most of the moving trying to figure out how to make it an RPG setting. A bunch of tribes, all mobile but with home bases, PCs adventuring in part to gain warriors and power, (maybe rivals, maybe siblings or all supporters of one of their number) a mysterious mountain shrine where the gods live -- I need to fiddle with it, but it could work.

4th Edition and the God Format

Got the 4e books. I've got a session going tomorrow (er . . . later today) but I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to say about it beyond "it is/is not fun." I'm still in the "ooh, shiny new book" phase.

I do like the format it uses for the gods, though. Name/alignment/domain and worshipers blurb/commandments. Especially for new role players, and with limited space, the commandments are a good way to get across how you should act if you worship a particular god. It helps that most of them include at least one that lets you know who you should beat up.

To the President Cave!

Last night, at my kitchen table, Tommy Ocean ("Description: George Clooney), Mikaela "Mikie" Daniels (waitress and Buffy fan), Abraham Lincoln (a supernatural creature who takes the form of our sixteenth president because "Abraham Lincoln frees slaves!"),Kazak (an abomination from 2071), and Don Filks Ruth (an assassin from 1865) saved President (Harrison) Ford from Nazi ninjas, but were unable to stop the rest of the Nazis from stealing the Washington Monument and blasting off in it. ("They must be headed for the secret presidential moonbase!")

Yeah, I ran some Feng Shui yesterday. Highlights included a fight in the President cave (like the Batcave, but the bar is better), Mikie stabbing Hans, the main ninja/Nazi, with a flaming American flag ("American flags -- my only weakness!") and a decapitated wooden ninja statue signed by Harrison Ford.

It was pretty fun. It would have run a lot faster if I'd prepped better, but I might not have been able to muster the same level of bizarre-itude if I'd planned things out ahead of time. The players took to the game with enthusiasm, and made up for a lot of my waffling. They did a good job with stunts; thinking up good ones gave them something to do while they waited for their turn, and they figured out pretty quickly that they could invent appropriate items of scenery.

I'd planned for this to be a one-shot, and had been planning to use a series of Feng Shui one-shots in the event of player absence from my upcoming 4e campaign, but the characters came out so well I might just run this as a back-up game instead. The guy who's most likely to go missing wasn't there last night, but if necessary we can have him make a character, too. It doesn't take long. I might, someday, run a full Feng Shui campaign, but for no I'm pretty happy having it as my game-for-when-I-don't-have-a-game.

Wherein I Discuss Puzzles

Trollsmyth has some cool ideas about applications for the timed dungeon doors thing. This is one of the things I love about blogging. Bouncing ideas off of people, and ending up with things that are even crazier than what I come up with. And, of course, it gives me a good clue to what ideas are actually interesting.

The whole thing got me thinking about puzzles. The calendar/timed doors make pretty good RPG puzzles, as long as the GM is willing to keep track of them, and they don't end up making bottlenecks in the dungeon and stopping the session while one person solves them.

If I worked up a labelling system, and turn them into a cipher-type puzzle that gets easier to solve the more doors they solve, the puzzle people would be really happy. But I've also got a player who just likes to take notes, and keep track of things; even after the puzzle had been solved, she'd still get a kick out of being able to tell the rest of the group which door to go back to.

The best part about these sorts of puzzles is that they're fairly well integrated into the game part of the activity. A puzzle based off of the calendar the DM uses, that you can only solve by exploring the dungeon, and rewards you with even more dungeon, isn't the kind of thing you can pick up in a drug store. And of course, building a bit of world info into a puzzle, a challenge the players can solve, gives them a reason to actually pay attention to the background for once.

Even better, though, are puzzles that I think of as "environment puzzles." I give the players some not-immediately-obvious situation, say, some bit of treasure on a pillar in the middle of an underwater lake. I give them a sketch description of the area, maybe make some modifications if they ask a question that suggests a particularly interesting possibility, and they figure out some way to get to the treasure. The fun part, of course, comes with rolling the dice, because then their plans never go quite the way they want.

I figure most people are already doing this. I got a lot of it, originally, from Roleplaying Tips #5: How to Turn Brain Teasers Into Amazing Roleplaying Opportunities. But this is the kind of thing I didn't know, when I first started out, and I'm still trying to work out, after having been at it for a bit: how to play to the medium's strengths.

Character Death and a Good Campaign

I've been reading Jeff Rients' tales of PCs past and their rousing adventures, and something odd occurred to me: I've never had a character die. (Properly, in influencable circumstances, I mean. I've been victim of "rocks fall, everyone dies," but I don't know that quite counts.)

And I've had precious few character deaths on the other side of the screen. Three characters died in the "Desert Campaign," the most combat heavy game I ever ran, and the only one that had anything approaching a dungeon crawl. A couple died in the Gnome Town game I ran, but that was exclusively PC-on-PC violence.

In other campaigns, I had the occasional close call, but I always fudged it. Once I got a guy ressurected by the main villain of the piece (long story, it almost made sense at the time) and once I took the more convential route of "misremembering" how the dice came out.

Part of me feels bad about those incidents--lack of character, or something. Part of me thinks it worked for the campaigns. The way I tend to run games, I get very interested in the characters, and what they're going to do, and the history they're building for themselves. When I'm in the moment, running those kinds of games, even if I've said to myself beforehand that I'm going to let the dice fall where they may, killing them just seems like a waste of time.

On the other hand, fudging at the last minute probably isn't the best solution. But it always worked out alright. Those campaigns went fairly well, everyone mostly ended up having fun.

But the "Desert Campaign" was pretty fun, too. When people weren't arguing with me, or complaining that I wouldn't let them play a half-illithid whatever, anyway. But it had a different sort of style to it. We played at lunch, and it was mostly guys who liked building characters, killing things, and taking their stuff, in roughly that order. I flailed around a bit at the beginning, but once I figured out that what they reall wanted was to kick in the door and have a fight every day, things started to go pretty smoothly.

I was a lot less focused on story -- that is, what had happened before in the campaign, and what was going on outside the characters, and what might happen next if they didn't get involved -- and a lot more focused on what was going on in the fight of the day, and prepping the dungeon so I'd be ready for the next day.

Because I didn't particularly care about what the characters had done, or were going to do--they were interesting enough, on an individual level, but the the guy the player came up with next would be, too--I was a lot more comfortable really dropping the hammer on them. I even used a death ray on one of them.

It was fun. The players liked the fights, and the occasionally liked rolling up new characters, and not taking things too seriously. I had one guy who liked arguing, another who liked making just-barely-almost-broken characters, and another who liked playing the weirdest things he could find, but I handled it.

I liked the change of pace from my usual games, and actually getting to use the random monster and treasure tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide, for once. And I liked building the dungeon. The dungeon--which was, in the game, a tower, but in practice it was a dungeon--wasn't particularly good. It wasn't much more than a bunch of rooms filled with monsters and treasure. Very little in the way of traps, description, puzzles, or interaction amongst its inhabitants.

It did have a couple of virtues. It was extremely non-linear. Any place you could get to, you could get to in a couple of different ways. Which was good, because the players could still get to the stairs after they decided that the black dragon, and later the basilisk, just weren't worth messing with.

I think, if I'd continued to run that dungeon, or something like it, that I might have eventually worked out the finer points of dungeon design. But they finished it, killed the sorcerer at the top of the tower, and a short time later the campaign went on permanent hiatus, in favor of a campaign by the guy who liked to argue that ended pretty quickly, too.

It was fun while it lasted. I some important things from that game, even if, at the time, it was a source of serious frustration for me, and it didn't end quite how I would have liked.

I'm thinking about running my summer campaign along similar lines. Improve my dungeon design, because I know a lot more theory than I did then, that I'd like to put into practice. And maybe get more comfortable with PC death, so I don't back down from it as much even in games where specific characters are more important to the players, and to me. I'll have a good mix of players for that style, and it'd be good to test how well 4e can handle it.