Here's What I'm Working on Now

DREAMLANDS MAGIC

Dreamlands critters have a whole soul.

- can't divide soul from body

- can't invest soul into objects

(permanent and temporary)

Those who work magic tend to have a handful of innate abilities that they can always access.

- Improve & expand abilities through meditation and adventure

- Exploration of the quality of their souls and themselves

- Use of these abilities leads to exhaustion rather than insanity

- Restored through rest, meditation

Sometimes special ceremonies?

Ending Another Game

After some thought I've come to the conclusion that the main reason I had as much trouble with the game on Friday as I did was that I didn't really want to be running that campaign in the first place. I was just doing it because I felt like I should. That's a lousy reason to be running a game, and it leads to lousy, short-shrift DMing. So I'm taking another break.

Not 100% sure when that's going to end. Or if it will. The last three games I've run have been frustrating, painful, and ended before they were intended to. I'm pretty happy with the gaming I'm already doing, and as long as that continues, I'm not sure running my own would be worth the potential for more frustration.

Now, that hasn't stopped me from starting to fiddle with a setting for a new campaign -- or rather, another campaign, since the planning for this one significantly predates the game I was running this semester. But I'm not entirely sure that this one will ever get run, and if it does, it will at least be very, very different from the kinds of games I've been trying to run. The "next game," if there is one, will almost certainly be online, via text chat, and it's only slightly less likely to be a solo game. It's probably going to be a system of my own invention, and it won't have many, if any, dungeons in it.

For now, though, I'm content to scribble. I'm also planning on doing more of a number of things that, lately, I've been thinking I'd much rather spend my time on than running the tabletop game. I've got a couple of fantasy novels to read, some drawing to do, and Settlers of Catan and Texas Hold 'Em to play, never mind the "regular" socializing that I'm finally starting to get the hang of. I'm going to do my best not to obsessively analyze and try to figure out "why" the games haven't been working. If an interesting setting comes out of my scribblings, I'll run another game. If not, I'll keep playing in the two games I'm already in, and find some other ways to occupy my time.

Why I'm Not Going to (English) Grad School

I suppose I haven't ruled out law or business school entirely yet (though law school is basically off the table for now), and I might end up getting a Masters or something in another discipline, but I'm absolutely not going further with my major discipline, English. I love English -- as an undergrad. But I don't have any interest in teaching, if I was going to write as a career it'd be speculative/commercial fiction rather than MFA fiction/poetry, and, well...

So I'm reading A Princess of Mars. Haven't gotten very far into it yet, but in the first couple of chapters he deals with some hostile natives of both an earthling and Martian variety. So I'm sitting there pondering the broader cultural narrative that these depictions of native people fit into, what statements the overall work is making as opposed to the specific character, what points of view the work is privileging and what it's trying to shut down, and how complete that process is. I took that class last semester and I've already forgotten the relevant terminology, so that should tell you something.

I do enjoy this kind of thing, and I can have fun talking about it. I'm not one of those people who complains that now I know deconstructionism I "can't turn it off," because I can't "turn off" thinking about stuff no matter what tools I have to do it with. A Princess of Mars isn't actually a very good book to do this with, of course, at least out the bits that I've done so far; with straightforwardly negative depictions of a group like that pretty much all you can do is comment on what it means that Burroughs can grab this group and present them as straight up bad-guys without a whole lot of modification. I'm hopeful that the handling of the natives of Mars will provide some counterpoints to that initial sequence.

But my basic approach to the whole thing is "intellectual toy." I'm at least as interested in the technical aspects of how Burroughs is telling his story as I am in any of the literary criticism buzzwords I can attach to it. I'm more interested in just reading the damn book than I am either of those two things. I can enjoy a good bit of lit crit, but then I get bored and want to go find something else to do.

A lot of people with similar interests and academic proclivities don't feel this way; they take these ideas very seriously, think about them a lot, and feel that they're making an important contribution to the country's political and intellectual discourse by studying them. Which I don't think is untrue, exactly, it's just not my attitude towards those ideas at all. I can't summon the necessary passion, or maintain the long term interest. They're toys. And not even particularly engaging ones at that.

Frozen

Have you ever just completely frozen as a DM? Sat down to play, with notes that a week ago you were sure would be more than enough to run a session, and just stared at them, thinking, "I have no idea what to do with this. This makes no sense. I can't do this," for a full five minutes, while your players make awkward conversation?

My All-Women Campaign Kicks Off

So! That game. First session went fairly well. One of the players was expectedly late, one was unexpectedly late, and another didn't show up as well, but we still made characters, came up with some starting backstories, and played enough for them to decide on and prepare for their initial expedition into the wild.

Currently the roster consists of:

Helene, Elf 1 -- Exiled from her people for reasons currently unknown.

Sister Amalia, Cleric 1 -- A native of the port city to the north, Kythrea, who left when her researches led her to the cult of the archangel Inara, Lady of Morning, one of the many such cults banned by the city's Sorcerer-Tyrant.

Skeltinath, Fighter 1 -- Another native of Kythrea, who abandoned the city's petty tyranny in favor of freedom! And also treasure.

Sun, Fighter 1 -- A mermaid princess who sold her voice to a sea-witch to become human, so she could avoid the responsibilities of mermaid princess-hood. She's since had a bit of a hard time in human lands, and is prone to starting fights with shady men in bars.

I printed out an extra copy of the character creation info (the first 30-something pages of the PDF) which helped quite a bit. Especially since the Lamentations of the Flame Princess book starts out with a handy, step-by-step explanation of what to do in character creation. I probably should have also printed out a couple extra copies of the equipment list, so that everyone could have had one to peruse. At some point I need to get around to making a list specifically for Stormwatch, or whatever town they spend the most time in, that includes some items from And a 10' Pole. But for now I'm too lazy for that.

They ended up deciding that they hadn't known each other before they arrived in Stormwatch, and all met in a tavern, the Unquiet Cat. I pointed out that, all being women travelling alone and looking for adventure, they actually all had a fairly good reason to seek out each other's company, and they seemed pretty happy with that as an explanation for why they ended up at the table together. I'd handed them each a few clues to some of the adventuring site's I'd outlined in my notes, and they chatted about that and eventually decided to go for the one that Sun had heard contained a huge, possibly cursed, ruby. Then they picked up some extra equipment for the expedition, and we're all set to start the next session off with some dungeon-delving.

They seemed a bit hesitant about how exactly to begin -- only Sun and Helene spontaneously shared the clues they had -- and I probably nudged them a bit too much in response because I wanted to get that section figured out and out of the way before we wrapped up for the night. In the future, I'm going to try to give them more time to work things out on their own, and give them time to dither a bit if that's what they need to do.

Sun also started a fight with a guy in the bar, which gave us the opportunity to demo the combat system. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to orchestrate a slightly more involved combat, with more of the group involved, and to particularly to get to the point of someone being "knocked out" so they could see how easy it is to get to zero hit points. But they'll figure it out fairly quickly once they get into the dungeon, and several of them do have enough old school D&D experience to know at least that combat is pretty deadly.

Next time: the mysterious ruin of Phra Chedi Nam, which may or may not contain a giant cursed ruby!

2010 Gen Con Report Part 2

Here’s the second round of bullet points from Gen Con. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this time.

• Talked about the disappointing Wizards booth in the podcast. I'll add that we saw the thing in the dealer hall, decided that couldn't possibly the entire Wizards presence, and went on a quest to find an official location where you could find the books, equivalent to the Paizo display. Nope. If you wanted to browse a 4e D&D book at Gen Con, you had to find one of the game or book store booths that was carrying a few copies.
• I would have strangled the True Dungeon referee if it had been an actual tabletop game (too many "guess what I'm thinking!" puzzles) but the environmental dressing was cool enough that it was worth putting up with a bit of frustration. I was also able to get the two extra tickets I had available on account of scheduling lameness to new players at the last minute, so kudos to the True Dungeon staff for managing the waiting list system well enough to allow that. Coolest touch: the dragon was guarding a huge pile of actual True Dungeon tokens.
• Roger the GS runs a mean game of (mostly) D&D. Another one where I was quieter than I could have been, but still managed to contribute despite that as the party mapper. This one is going to get its own post, since I have a lot of notes to write up from that game.
• I completely forgot about the Dune boardgame. For serious.
• The board game hall is one of the best parts about Gen Con, and another spot I'm going to spend more time in the next time I go. The frantic, grudge-based, not-entirely-serious style of playing Settlers of Catan advocated by the college students in the group (me, my brother, and one of my old players from high school) amused Trollsmyth, who was used to people who are actually focused on, you know, winning.
• "Maraschino cherry, courtesy of Gen Con." I really don't know what the explanation for this was. Some guy came around handing them out. My brother and I both felt strongly that accepting would have broken every rule we've ever learned about food and strangers. Unfortunately, Trollsmyth did not prove our thesis by hallucinating.
• Trollsmyth also got some free stuff that was actually cool. The Men In Black GM’s guide and the Hawkmoon Player’s Guide. I think.
• We played Outdoor Survival! We all died! Seriously, this game is a lot of fun, and fascinatingly close to the Moldvay/Cook rules for wilderness exploration. You move on the hex map at a rate determined by your condition, with more difficult terrain taking more points of movement to enter, you get lost by occasionally having to roll a d6 to determine the direction you move on the hex map, and there’s an optional rule that lets you roll “random encounters” in addition to the basic hazards of starvation and dehydration. The basic version of the game generally ends when you get trapped in an area that costs more than your current move to get out of and then starve to death.
• I didn’t buy much, but I did pick up a couple of pieces of Beth Trott art. Still need to get that framed so I can hang it up on my wall when I get back to school.
• Oh, and Game Science dice. Which are awesome, and awaiting hand-inking.
• I did really enjoy getting the opportunity to flip through some old game stuff from the 80s at some of the used bookstore type booths in the dealer hall. Felt kind of old because the books I started on are now only in the used section, stacked next to the AD&D hardbacks. Trollsmyth laughed at me.
• The 2010 GMs Jam was surprisingly interesting. (If you missed it, RPG Circus has the video posted.) I’m usually not much into the whole “GMing advice” genre -- getting to focused on “advice” contributed to one of the worst games I ever ran back in high school -- but I went anyway so I could meet up with Zachary Houghton and other RPG bloggers, and was quite glad I did. The focus the session had on social issues was both telling and encouraging, since in my experience those tend to be more significant and more intractable than any matters of technique. The opportunity to hear about other people’s games and the kinds of problems they were having was fun, too. The early discussion was dominated by people with too many players, which made a number of the panelists very jealous. Overall the thing drove home just how lucky I am in my current gaming situation, with a DM who fits my own gaming preferences very well, and vice versa, and both of us with enough time to game 3+ times per week.
• I want to go again, but I’m not absolutely, 100% it’ll happen next year. That depends on a number of factors, not least of which is where (and if!) I end up getting a job next year when I finish school. But it’s definitely something I’m going to do again, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

New Campaign!

Starting up a new one tonight. The system is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The players are all women. One is completely new to roleplaying, another has hung out with roleplayers for a while and played a single session of Exalted, two were in my Traveller game but haven't done any roleplaying outside of that, and the last was in my Traveller game and now also plays in Trollsmyth's group game online.

Should be interesting.

2010 Gen Con Report Part 1

Gen Con was the best four days I've had in a long time. Maybe ever. Lots of reasons for that, some more blog-worthy than others. Since I got back I've been sorting through exactly how to handle it on the blog. Should I write a blow-by-blow account of what I did at the con? Write a few separate posts hitting some of the highlights? Attempt to capture the "Gen Con experience" in a narrative essay? Then I decided all of that would be too much dang work, so you get random bullet points. This is just the first batch, and mostly from Wednesday and Thursday.

• The whole freaking city was full of gamers. Obvious, out, clearly-there-for-the-con geeks of all stripes noticeably outnumbered normal Indianapolis folk and other travelers until sometime Sunday afternoon. Go to a restaurant? Full of gamers. Walk down the street? Full of gamers. Get into an elevator? Full of gamers. It was very much as if Gen Con was its own small town within the larger city. Or as if my online, roleplaying-focused life had moved offline.
• Being in charge of a trip, on my own, without parents, was wicked cool. This was the first time I've been responsible for anything this big and crazy, and that aspect was one of the best parts of the trip. I didn't always enjoy being the default decision maker, especially towards the end of the afternoon when I'd started to crash a bit, but the other members of my posse were able to mostly pick up the slack when necessary. I did love being able to build a trip around what I wanted to do from start to finish, and even more than that really enjoyed deciding to do something crazy and then making it happen. I'm used to being responsible for myself at college, but a lot of times that descends into the lowest energy state of the daily grind. Planning and executing Gen Con was active, not reactive, and that was very rewarding.
• Hanging out with Trollsmyth was deeply weird, but also a lot of fun. I hadn't met any online friends in person before this, so simultaneously getting "I've known you for over a year" and "total stranger" signals was a new and exciting flavor of cognitive dissonance. Luckily, we had Gen Con, so it didn't take long for my social processing to catch up with -- Oh yeah! Trollsmyth is the guy I geek out about gaming stuff with.
• The dealer hall is like the coolest game store in the world. Seeing a lot of RPG stuff I'd only read about online before was neat, and meeting the people responsible for some of it was extra-neat. There's also a lot of stuff besides RPGs at the dealer hall -- costume pieces, dice, game tables, and other things where the actual physical experience is the whole point of the thing.
• Trollsmyth and I were both more or less mystified by the map/program. It took like an hour to really figure out how all the sub-maps fit together, and even then there was a lot of stuff on there that we simply didn't discover until our second day at the con. We'd be terrible adventurers. But the con is also very big, and very complicated, especially once you start trying to figure out where events are in the connected hotels.
• Seminars are really cool. We ended up only making Girls Just Wanna Get Their Game On and GMs Jam 2010 this year, which were both great. Next year I'd like to do more, and I'll probably spend a little more time finding interesting looking ones before the con; I didn't have that many picked out this year to begin with, and we skipped a couple I had picked on account of hungry, or just other things I wanted to get done.
• The Embassy Suites has its reputation as gamer central for a reason: tons of table space.
• Dogs in the Vineyard is fun. Not going to replace old school D&D as my staple game any time soon, but getting a chance to play with Tim and some of his friends in person was great. Unfortunately Thursday was the day with my highest energy high (boy, was I wired that morning in Panera) and my corresponding lowest low later that evening, which hit right around the middle of that session, and it'd been entirely too long since I'd had a bit of actual table play, so I was much quieter than I could or should have been. Still, a good time.
• Pict-o-phone is also fun. Tim had to take off after the Dogs game, but a couple of his friends stuck around and taught us this excellent thing. Basically it's a cross between the telephone game and Pictionary. Everyone has a stack of cards, writes a sentence on the first one, and hands the stack off to the next person. They have to draw that sentence on the next card, and then hand the stack off again, and the person who gets that stack has to write a new sentence based on the picture, without referencing the original sentence. A couple of rounds of this is a recipe for endless hilarity. Especially when someone thinks it's funny to write things like "For whom the bell tolls" and "A mighty fortress is our God" on his starting cards.

Listen to Trollsmyth and Oddysey Chat About Gen Con

Trollsmyth and I have been talking about fiddling with podcasting for a while now, and at Gen Con had a couple of conversations we thought would make an interesting starting point for such a thing. We ended up being too busy with con things to get all the technical details worked out while we were there, but Skype makes such things fairly easy at long distance. If you want our take on Pathfinder, D&D Essentials, the Paizo and WotC booths, the general con vibe, catgirls, and more, you can download the podcast at Mediafire. It's about half an hour long.

Links to stuff we mentioned:

Zak’s RPG Blog II

Roger’s awesome character sheets at Roles, Rules, and Rolls (Not “Rolls, Rules, and Rulings.” Sorry, Roger.)

The Hook Mountain Massacre by Nicolas Logue

Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set

Dr. Rotwang plays with his daughter

Raggi sells his box at Ropecon

Eric Mona buys Swords & Wizardry

Fear the Boot interviews Ryan Dancey

EDIT: Official Gen Con 2010 attendance numbers.

Unjustified Player Grinching

JB's had an interesting post up recently about how every campaign has a "Robilar." One player who's a lot more into the game, plays more, makes every session, even goes off on solo adventures if the DM is up for it. Apparently this has been a feature of long-running campaigns since the earliest days of gaming, and came up back in his own early gaming as well.

It's certainly been the case in Doom & Tea Parties, though explicitly by design. The game that became the solo game came first, and when we added more players to the campaign we decided to split that off into its own game. The party in the group game picked up a rumor that turned out to be about something that happened in the solo game, but otherwise there hasn't been any contact between them. Which is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned. Does an end run around the messy issues of diva-ism that JB talks about in his post.

Still, the Robilar comparison isn't perfect. One of the things that tends to happen, it seems, in a game that where one character gets a lot more running time than they others, is that character gains a lot more power and wealth just through the extra attention.

But that solo game? The one that's been running for over ninety sessions now? More than twice the number that the group game's had? Guess what level that character is. Just GUESS.

I asked Trollsmyth this question a couple of days ago. He got it wrong!

The Coolest Thing That Happened at GenCon

So it turns out that I'm an idiot. I was completely and utterly wrong about there being no old school vendor presence at GenCon. Over on RPG Blog 2 there are some pictures of Raggi's stuff at the IPR booth, and there was a whole mess of Swords & Wizardry and OSRIC material available at the Expeditious Retreat Press booth. It was awesome.

But being an idiot worked out pretty well for me, because it meant that we dropped by on the last day of the con, once I'd figured out how terribly wrong I was. (Thanks to everyone who commented on that post last week!) We met Jon Hershberger, co-founder of Black Blade Publishing, who was very impressed with how well-worn my copy of Swords & Wizardry was. We were flipping through OSRIC modules and A Magical Society: Silk Road when another gamer showed up and started asking Hershberger about Swords & Wizardry, and what old school modules he'd recommend running with it. A certain, oddly familiar gamer...

I was there when Erik Mona bought a copy of Swords & Wizardry! Which was extra-cool because Trollsmyth and I had spent a lot of our first day in the dealer hall chatting about how neat Paizo's booth was, what makes their business model so interesting, and how awesome it was that they were clearly there to sell product and support people gaming. Not only did their booth contain huge stacks of their rulebooks and an entire wall of adventures, they'd gotten some third party gaming accessories lined up as well. Everything you need to run a kick-ass game of Pathfinder right there.

Gamers gaming, man. Actual people playing the games they want to play. As geek-out worthy as that picture is, that's what's really worth getting exciting about.

Stack Overflow RPG Q&A

I'll have the first bit of my GenCon report up later tonight, once I've gotten a chance to load up and go through my pictures. I have a number of points that I want to hit, so it may take most of the next week or so to get through it all. In the meantime, though, I'd like to point out that Role-playing Games is currently the second-hottest proposal on the StackExchange, an online Q&A system. Jeff Rients, Zach Houghton, Scott, and Rob Conley are all already there, so even if we can't beat out Linux & Unix to make it the hottest topic on the system I figure we can still thorough infest the thing with old schoolers. It won't move into the beta stage until we get enough people to commit to answering ten questions over three months, so if you haven't heard about it already I encourage you to check it out.

No Old School at GenCon?

I'll have a longer report (complete with rants!) when I get back, but one point so far at GenCon stands out enough that it's worth taking a break from pestering Trollsmyth to mention it -- there is a serious lack of old school presence at GenCon. As far as I can tell the only publisher connected with the retro-clone scene here is Troll Lord Games, though Rogue Games also has James Maliszewski's The Cursed Chateau. And it seems that the only old school or quasi old school bloggers here are Zack Houghton, me, Roger GS, and Trollsmyth. (Please let me know if I'm wrong. And e-mail me so we can hook up!)

Mostly it's an object lesson in just how "niche of a niche" we really are. And I know there are AD&D games running so there obviously are old school people here who aren't associated with the online scene. Still -- can't help feeling that there ought to be a bit more of a concerted presence next year.

GenCon 2010 Side Quests

Wednesday night will find me in Indianapolis for the four days during which it is the greatest city in the world -- or so I am told, since this'll be my first ever GenCon. And in fact my first gaming con, ever. I've been thinking about doing "the GenCon thing" for a couple of years now, but this time I'm finally making it happen. I suspect I'm going to spend most of my time wandering around and hanging out, but as befits any good campaign, I have acquired a number of side quests.

Buy a set of GameScience dice.

It's been a while since I picked up a new set of dice, and I still don't have a set to go with Doom & Tea Parties (not surprising, since we don't use dice in that game, but still). GameScience seems the obvious choice, being the premier dice of the old school. Unfortunately, word on the street says I'm not going to get an opportunity to witness the famed Lou Zocchi pitch.

Attend some seminars.

Right now I'm signed up for "Girls Just Wanna Get Their Game On!" on Thursday at noon, "Game Design: Seven Steps to Writing Great Rules" on Thursday at one, and "Game Magic: Why It's Not" on Saturday at noon, but I'm sure I'll wander into some others as well. I'm deeply annoyed that I'll be missing the TARGA seminar -- a game of the Dune boardgame was running at the same time, and, well, Dune.

Poison Meet Trollsmyth

Why would I ever want to harm my beloved Dungeon Master?

Meet other blog folks.

Readers of this blog as well as writers of others. I'll have chocolate chip bacon cookies. Though maybe only on the first day of the con. (Don't worry. I'll tell you which ones not to eat.) I'm bringing my Swords & Wizardry book as a sort of "con yearbook" for people to sign, too.

Get Monte Cook to sign my 3e Dungeon Master's Guide.

I may have sworn the system itself off, but I'm still very fond of the book that taught spazzy thirteen-year-old Oddysey how to DM. And didn't do too bad a job of it, if I may say so.

Try a new game or two.

Perhaps weirdly, this isn't my absolute top priority, but Tim Jensen has been talking about running some dirty hippy indie games and that sounds like a fun time, given his games' historically high incidence of magic giraffes. I'm also assuming I'm going to end up in at least a couple unplanned games or demos or somesuch.

Pick up some art.

I've been informed that I need to actually decorate my room at college this year. The inexplicable diagram that somehow compares teaching styles to the "land of ogres" and the "land of elves" is no longer cutting it, it seems. Enter: fantasy art.

Some Stuff You Should Know About

Good stuff happening on the blog-o-sphere lately. But you knew that.

• If I was willing to deal with fiddly, 3.5-style character abilities again, I'd probably follow Zak S's lead and tie them to specific areas of the campaign world. Cool of an idea as it is, I can't see myself doing that any time soon. Though I do I know I've enjoyed the handful of odd powers that my nixie has, so maybe.
• JB's got some really interesting observations on poison in Moldvay/Cook. I've got only this to say: Poison should be guaranteed, will-definitely-kill-you death, and shouldn't do it immediately. Got a great moment in the solo game out of something like that.
• Alexis's ideas on running the "end game" are basically how I'd always assumed that something like that would go down. Or how I hope my DM will run things if I ever get to that point with a campaign. But I'm all about the politics, backstabbing, and deal-making.
• So it turns out I'm not actually the only old-school-ish college-age gamer blogging right now. Ian of Swashbuckler's Hideout got into roleplaying with AD&D, and Nick Crayon of Lawful Indifferent started out with BECMI, got into 3e for a while, and these days is all about Labyrinth Lord.
• Roger the GS is working on a color system for D&D magic. It's nifty.
• Jacquaying the dungeon
• Help out James Raggi's long-suffering wife! Get a LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Box Set out of his living room!

What's Up With That Wedding Anyhow?

For those times when you go "You *finally* arrive in Small Town #3. After a bit of asking around, you find out that there's a sale on cheese, the sewers are infested with giant hungry weasels, and the locals are planning a wedding" and the players go "Sweet! We crash it!"

1. An important alliance between two nobles.

2. A secret marriage between two nobles, who's parents will be some degree of unhappy when they find out.

3. A secret marriage between a noble and a commoner. The noble's parents will be extremely displeased when they find out; the noble was supposed to marry someone important to end some war or another.

4. The bride is a werewolf!

5. The groom is a vampire!

6. Part of an important rite for a weird local fertility cult. The human sacrifice is purely metaphorical.

7. Part of an important rite for a weird local fertility cult. The human sacrifice is very much not metaphorical, and the bride and/or groom is it.

8. Part of an important rite for a weird local fertility cult. They still need a human sacrifice -- preferably one from outside the community.

9. The bride and/or groom is under the effect of a charm effect. It will wear off at the worst possible moment.

10. The bridge/groom has been, or is about to be, kidnapped by nixies/satyrs.

11. The bride/groom gets cold feet.

12. The bride/groom gets cold feet. S/he makes it look like s/he's been kidnapped by nixies/satyrs.

13. The bride/groom gets cold feet. S/he gets the other one kidnapped by nixies/satyrs.

14. The couple is already bickering constantly. It's starting to get on everyone's nerves.

15. The couple is madly in love, utterly normal, and deeply obnoxious.

16. The bride/groom is a doppelganger.

17. The bride *and* the groom are doppelgangers. Neither is aware that the other one is one.

18. The bridge/groom is a secretly a hideous monster! The wedding is all just a convenient pretext to get a large number of people in one room for convenient mid-rampage snacking.

19. The bride/groom is not whom s/he appears to be. S/he's actually an obsessive stalker, and has kidnapped the real bride/groom to take his/her place for the ceremony.

20. The couple has made a poor choice of flower arranger. Odds are good that the ceremony is attacked by angry sentient plants.

Quoted for Truth

Role-playing is a social hobby, and a being able to be identified as a growing thing is the best way to get more people playing. Absolutely nothing gets people willing to try to play games more than the belief that it will be easy to find people to play with.

That sense of mass and momentum is the greatest tool we have to get more people.

If we disconnect, if everyone takes down their blogrolls, stops talking about each other's work, stops caring about the world beyond their table and just plays the game and says fuck everything else, then this doesn't grow, and it dies with us.

I've been on about this long before I had any sort of financial stake in it, and there's a hell of a lot more people than me that benefits from this. Not just publishers, either. Every single person who thinks they'd like to play but suffers from the old gamer curse, "can't find a group" benefits.

-- James Edward Raggi IV

I owe the OSR my current game group. Technically speaking, I owe it to some combination of Jeff Rients (who linked me to Trollsmyth's blog, and piqued my interest in this old school thing originally), James Maliszewski (who got me really interested in old school mechanics and the principles behind sandbox play and dungeon delving, and convinced Trollsmyth that maybe demi-human level limits weren't such a horrible thing after all), Melan (again, the idea that there really was something to dungeons), Daniel Proctor, for publishing Labyrinth Lord, the Knights & Knaves Alehouse and Dragonsfoot (for kicking off the retro-clones with OSRIC) whoever it was who linked Trollsmyth to me, and, frankly, pretty much anyone who wrote something interesting about old school roleplaying between, oh, the summer of 2007 and the winter of 2009. You guys just made this dungeon and Red Box stuff just sound so dang fun.

And it is. And I could not have gotten to it on my own. Without the OSR? Without old school bloggers and linking to each other and the retro-clones? I might be running Pathfinder, giving a curious glance at OD&D every now-and-again but convinced that it was too arcane, too inaccessible, fundamentally in some way not for college punks with more enthusiasm than sense. Or who knows? I might have picked up a copy of Moldvay/Cook in a used bookstore and figured it out on my own. Maybe. But the OSR sure got me here a lot faster.

Take that for what you will.

And here's your Obligatory Argument Content:

Antoine's Ring of Lizard Power
This white jade ring is etched with crude scribbles that, based on appearance alone, might be large lizards or small dinosaurs. Or birds. Can't rule out birds. Anyone who puts the ring will eventually discern that they were probably intended to be lizards: the wearer gains the ability to understand the speech of lizards, but birds remain unintelligible. Furthermore, there is a 50% chance to understand the speech of any given snake or turtle, a 25% chance to understand any given amphibian, and a 25% chance to understand any given dinosaur.

Once per day, the wearer can cast charm monster on any creature whom the ring allows him to communicate with.

The wearer also experiences one of the following effects while wearing the ring. The effect should be chosen at random, but an individual will always experience the same effect when wearing the ring. If the wearer removes the ring, the effect lasts for another 24 hours.

1. Ectothermic -- irresistibly drawn to sunlight and sources of warmth. Becomes lethargic in surroundings significantly cooler than comfortable room temperature.
2. Forked tongue
3. Yellow, slitted eyes
4. A patch of scales on the back of each hand
5. Clawed toes
6. Nothing visible

Why Don't More Girls Play D&D?

Zak S asks why none of the guest stars on I Hit It With My Axe could get any boys to let them play when they were teenagers. (NSFW)

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the answer's in the gap between:

"When I was a teenager, I knew guys who were playing and I always wanted to try it, but they wouldn't let me play."

and

"Heh, that never happened with us. Sure, we were nerds but we weren't stupid...and we had hormones just like anyone else. If a young woman would have asked to play D&D or whatever we were playing we would have each been falling over one another to day "yes". We were not at all shy, and every one knew that we played...but no girls asked." (Mr. R, from the comments on that post)

One of my major social functions is to make it okay for the women around me I hang out with to be geeky, because there's always at least decent odds I'm the geekiest one in the room, male or female. Comic books, video games, and, yes, D&D, are all often seen as "boys stuff." Women are often interested, but aren't sure how to directly ask. And male nerds tend to be even more clueless than guys in general.

2010 ENnies

I just wanted to take a moment to echo LotFP and RPG Blog II in encouraging everyone to vote in the ENnies, especially since a number of old school outfits are up for Best Publisher. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is my top choice there, for the inside look we've been getting on the creation his amazing boxed set, but Goblinoid Games, Mythmere Games, Bat in the Attic Games, and Pied Piper Publishing all absolutely deserve a shout-out.

And LotFP's The Grinding Gear is up against Paizo, Fantasy Flight, Green Ronin and Pelgrane Press in the Best Adventure Category. Worth a shot, though, eh?

Player/GM collaboration?

How much do you talk with the GM about the kind of game you want? Or to your players about the kind of game they want you to run? Do you prefer a "this is my game, take it or leave" approach from the GM, or do you build the whole premise collaboratively from the ground up? Or somewhere in between?

Does the way you handle this issue vary depending on whether you're playing or game-mastering? That is to say, do you prefer a collaborative approach when you're a player even if you're pretty much "take it or leave it" when you GM yourself? Or do you encourage player participation in the premise when you GM, even if you're happy to leave that work to your GM when you play?

Does it matter if you're putting together a brand new group or running for a group you've had for ages? When you're starting a new group, do you decide on the premise and then recruit players for that, or recruit players and then work on a premise together? When you're coming up with a new game for an old group, is it usually built on conversations you've with them over the course of the last game, or are you more likely to pitch them an idea of your own more-or-less cold?