Graph Paper and Vinyl, or, "You Old People Just Don't Get It, Do You?"

I am what might be described as a "whippersnapper." Started blogging when I was still in my teens, still much younger than the average RPG blogger out there, and probably younger than the average RPG player, period. I gamed all through my teenage years, and still game with high schoolers occasionally, so I like to think I know a thing or two about "kids these days," at least in the gaming world. And every so often I'll read something somewhere out in blog-land that just utterly clashes with that understanding, to the point where I wonder if I managed to find the only high school, college, and youth group in the country that wasn't each populated by drugged-up cyborg freak-children.

Take this gem I saw over on The Core Mechanic:

It Appeals to the Younger Generation. Grognards need not apply. If the D&D brand is going to survive they need to figure out a way to appeal to the masses of tweeting, texting, facebooking teens who barely have time to sit still to eat breakfast let alone play a 4 hour game of D&D on a regular basis. If WotC fails to do this - the D&D game won't make it in 10 years, or it will be marketed to people at retirement homes (that would be awesome!). The D&D Encounters organized play format has all kinds of features that are aimed at appealing to younger teens and college age "young adults" (read:young whipper snappers!). Tangible trinkets, prizes, and rewards with in-game benefits for playing in D&D Encounters are all signs that WotC is trying to lure new players to the game table. Plus, you have the D&D team pushing D&D WizBook, Facebook connections, and actively Twittering - these just reinforce WotC's connection with a new, gadgeteering younger generation of gamers.

Yikes. Where do I start?

First, I want to make clear that while I'm picking on Jonathan a little bit here, I can understand why he has the view of "them young folks" that he does, and in its broad strokes its even pretty accurate. There's a kind of teenager who will be much more interested in D&D Encounters than a traditional kind of RPG experience, for a lot of the reasons mentioned in the text I've quoted above. And most of what I have to say about "kids these days" is based on my own fairly narrow experience. So take everything I'm about to say with that grain of salt.

(And jazzy title notwithstanding, if you're reading this, you're not "old." And honestly, I think the youth obsession our culture has currently is a big source of what's wrong with it. But it does make for a snappy title.)

Nevertheless, that quote represents a fundamental, and fairly common, misunderstanding of modern teenagers in general, and modern teenage gamers in particular.

Consider, for a moment, the music industry. The last ten years have been all about mp3s, iPods, downloading tracks from the internet. The album is dead. The music industry is flailing around trying to get people to start people to pay for songs without a physical object attach to them. Music has entered the digital age. That's how young people have always known music. And do you know what's gotten popular lately?

Vinyl.

Seriously. Check your local music store. It's not just a baby boomer nostalgia thing, either. Nine Inch Nails put out its latest record on vinyl. It's a huge part of the indie music scene. And while things like Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon top the vinyl charts, that's largely because young people are buying them. They listen to classic music, and some of them want it in the original format. I'm not discussing this in a theoretical way: my boyfriend has a record player hooked up to his media set-up, and the serious music geeks I know love it. They think the sound quality is better. They like the way that vinyl feels.

Most teenagers aren't ever going to pick up a vinyl record. They're going to keep listening to their iTunes library or discovering new music on Pandora. And even the people who love vinyl don't listen to it exclusively. Digital music is too convenient. But there are a number of young people, a significant number of young people, who want to have a place in their lives for an older, slower, more aesthetically focused, aggressively analog kind of music. They like vinyl for the very physical presence that makes it so un-digital.

Young tabletop gamers feel the same way about the games we play. The guys I know who play Magic: the Gathering, Warhammer 40K, and D&D 4e? They like buying miniatures and handling cards and seeing all the stuff of those games laid out on the table. It's a physical, tactile, social experience. They like it for the very things that make it different from the digital graphics, constant stimulation, and online anonymity of the computer gaming that they'd otherwise be spending their free time on, the features that characterize so much of the rest of their lives. It's old school. It's retro.

It's for that reason, as well as my own experiences introducing people my age to Swords & Wizardry and the old school megadungeon crawl, that I suspect, for at least a certain variety of teenager, "old school gaming" actually has a stronger appeal than the slick, glitzy, D&D Digital Initiative direction of gaming that a lot of folks seem to think the hobby is headed in. I know I don't want a tabletop game that requires an iPhone to play. If I want digital, I'll play a video game. I, and a lot of folks like me, play D&D because it's a simpler kind of game.

I've talked about my attempts to get my boyfriend involved with gaming here before; it took a long time to get him to start playing Dungeons & Dragons, and even after he'd tried it, there was a long time when he was willing to play but didn't think it was "his thing." A video game, he said, had better graphics than his imagination. Then he started making his own dungeons, and discovered the joys of drawing little worlds on graph paper. He's working on a scenario now that he's going to run online, through a chat program, but all of his notes are on paper.

Look at the kind of roleplaying that young people (particularly young women, who for various reasons aren't all that interested in the standard "bits of plastic and math" tabletop gaming that currently dominates on the strength of its appeal to those young guys I talked about a moment ago) already do, all the time: online freeform play. Yes, this is an "online," digital thing, but pay close attention to what freeform gaming is not: like a video game in any way. It's text, maybe some illustrations, based on collaboration and social negotiation and writing. Doing it in forums and chat rooms lets it happen at a reasonable speed, but otherwise it's about as analog as you can get these days.

And while I'm getting a little more personal here, maybe excessively so to be useful, I think there's a lot to be said for the appeal to young people of the rules light, exploration-focused, long-running, and sometimes deeply involved gaming that characterizes the neo-classical games I'm in now and that I see happening all over the place in OSR blogging. I know I wouldn't have gotten involved in D&D if all it was to me was an encounter a week at a local gaming shop. What interests me about gaming is the campaign, the world, the characters. Having this thing in my life that I go back to every week, and watching it evolve a little bit at a time. Because so much of my life is brief and fast and digital, there are times when I prize the slow, the involved, the difficult to reduce to a simple, forgettable formula.

But all that proves is that people like me exist. I'm willing to entertain the idea that I'm deeply weird in that preference, even perhaps when included amongst the older generation. Still. I look around at the folks I game with, mostly college-age or a little younger, and I see folks who are entranced by the things that make D&D "D&D" and not Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age. Many of them don't even play video games; these days I'm mostly in that category myself. I have better things to do with my time. Roleplaying is one of them.

Now, not all young people are like that, but D&D is never going to be a mainstream thing. The average kid is going to keep on playing World of Warcraft and Halo, no matter how hard we try to make tabletop games friendly to "the masses of tweeting, texting, facebooking teens who barely have time to sit still to eat breakfast."

But those of us who do continue to embrace roleplaying are doing because of its analog refusal to conform to the digital moment. Those teenagers and college students want something that's different from video gaming and the online, digital world. Just like there still are, and will always be, kids who read novels, play outside, and listen to vinyl, there are still kids who are going to be turned inside out and upside down by dice, graph paper, and good old fashioned D&D.

Failure Rocks!

I don't always agree with Alexis, over at The Tao of D&D. But today, is he ever on to something:

Yes, it is a major bitch that my character's constitution is so low that eight hours of marching leaves him so weak that he can no longer lift his quarterstaff, much less gather together the magical forces necessary to sweep his enemies aside - but I want my weakness, I want to have it to bitch about, to torture the other party members with, to insist again that we have got to stop and rest because my feet hurt! I'm not interested in running a perfect being. Powers are not the whole game - flaws must count at equal value!

Amen to that.

My DMs think I'm weird because I get all excited when terrible things happen to my character. And maybe I am weird. Sure, I like success as the next gal, but you know what? Getting captured or attacked by slaadi or brainwashed or whatever, it's something to play with. It's fun. Even if it's because my character sucks, it means that the game is focused on my character. When my character gets charmed, or ends up stumbling around exhausted because she hasn't slept in over twenty-four hours, it's something to play off of, to respond to, to deal with.

That's really what I care about. Not success or failure, but getting to play.

Neo-Classical Mechanics: Leveling Slower Than A Gelatinous Cube

So in yesterday's post I mostly talked a bit about why I like long term play and the effect that it has on a game, and in the process I mentioned this idea that such play is a cornerstone of old school and neo-classical gaming. I don't mean that it's not possible to have an neo-classical one-shot, but long term play supports a couple of features that make those kinds of play styles really different from more modern styles.

The main thing I want to focus on for now is that it allows the campaign's style to coalesce, in a really natural way, around player interests. You have time to explore things and try out different ideas; the story can develop from random chance, player decisions, and spur-of-the-moment DM inspiration rather than being pre-planned. And, in particular, this style of incremental campaign design allows players to discover what they like as they play. They don't have to understand their own preferences well enough to be able to explain them to the DM as she's planning the campaign.

None of this is unique to neo-classical modes of play, but that kind of organic, improvisational development is a key feature of the kinds of games I'd describe in that way.

Now, part of my reason for saying that is that OD&D and Basic D&D are very clearly built for long-term play. The XP/level system assumes you're going to be playing for at least a half-a-dozen or so levels. It takes a long time to get to those levels. So to a certain degree I'm working backwards here and trying to figure out why those features are in the game in the first place, but I've also seen the effects of assuming long term play for long enough now to know a few reasons why building a system this way would be a good idea.

But those mechanical features are important, and they bring me to the point I'm trying to make in all of this: The ability to support long term play is an important feature of a lot of what I'd call "neo-classical," and it has some pretty serious mechanical underpinnings. The entire XP system of OD&D, the part of the game that makes it tick, is built around this assumption of campaign length. The rate of leveling. The number of levels. The way the power level changes as a character gains XP.

Not all systems support long term, open ended play. If it has a level cap that your players are geared to hit within a year or two, that's not going to work. OD&D does have level caps, true, but at a normal rate of treasure gathering its going to take your characters three, four, or more years to start hitting those levels.

Furthermore, if the power level changes really dramatically over the course of a few months or a year, then the DM either has to accept that the threats she assembles have a strictly limited shelf life, or that she needs to be willing to make things the party doesn't explore immediately level up along with them, which can create more work and damage verisimilitude. There's not quite so much room to wander around and explore different options, because if you don't handle something fairly quickly once you become powerful enough for it, it quickly becomes irrelevant.

And in a really good, long term, neo-classical kind of game, the players are eventually going to find something they like to do better than leveling. A huge part of the kind of campaign I'm describing is that eventually the players are going to find something to do that basically ignores the rules, and at that point, leveling becomes a distraction. Even, perhaps, a nuisance. You can use this to your advantage ("Do you go for the gold and level, or work towards a less-lucrative but more personally fulfilling goal? Dilemma!") but I have a strong suspicion that the reason leveling in OD&D is so hellaciously slow (besides just making it "mean more" when you do finally level, and the general old school philosophy of driving the players crazy) is so you can use it as a motivator in the early stage of the game, and then ignore it most of the time after that.

If that's where the game goes. Which is, when you get down to it, what this kind of play is about.

Doom & Tea Parties: Regular, Long Term Play

So the Doom & Tea Parties solo hit the one year mark this month. Sixty sessions, as of last night. If I'm counting right. Which I'm probably not--I suspect there's a duplicate log or two in there somewhere. But anyhows!

One year. My previous record for campaign length was about six months. Twenty-three sessions. And that was as a DM. (The group game is right around that mark itself now, and shows no signs of slowing down.) I don't have as good records on my time as a player, but I do know that the record there was rather less than that.

Appropriately, I'd been grumbling about this lack of campaign length around the time that Trollsmyth talked me into joining the game in the first place, which he did partly on account of my professed interest in the longer form.

It hasn't disappointed, for reasons that James Maliszewski articulated back when he started his Dwimmermount campaign (right around the same time as the solo game, in fact) and that his own campaign has since confirmed:

One of my growing beliefs is that, for old school gaming to work, you need to play not only consistently but also regularly. I'd venture to guess that one of the big reasons why old school play isn't as popular as it once was is because gamers meet a lot less often than they used to and because they don't stick with a single campaign -- or game! -- long enough to let it find its feet and properly establish itself.

Regular, long term play. I cannot possibly stress how much of a difference this makes to a campaign.

The difference between this game and my previous campaigns isn't simply length. Those other games started out with the understanding that they would be short; either someone else was planning a game that would need a turn within a few months, or the players simply wouldn't be available once summer ended. Doom & Tea Parties, in contrast, is open-ended. It will end, someday. The characters will die, or find another natural conclusion to their stories, and eventually Trollsmyth and I will have other ideas that we want to explore. But when it ends, it will end on its own terms. No external force demands its conclusion.

Again, I can't stress enough the difference this makes: the idea that the campaign can be as long as it needs to be. We've spent the last four months just setting things up, playing through two weeks of my character adjusting to a new environemtn while she anticipates Major Happenings (both social and quest-related) but without any particular pressure to get to those higher tension scenes, because we both know that they would always be there. We can take our time, and linger on the quieter moments that allowed us to lay some serious groundwork that will make those events, when we do finally get to them, really sing.

Furthermore, Trollsmyth and I have both noted that a few months ago the campaign started moving in a slightly peculiar, very social direction. (It's gotten even more peculiar since then. When I got into this hobby I never could have expected that one of my all-time favorite gaming moments would be a ten-minute conversation about what to do with NPC's hair, but there you go.) And I've mentioned that the time we spent in the dungeon was a big part of why that social, soap-opera-y style has worked so well.

But it wasn't just that we were mucking about in a dungeon. It was because we were mucking about in a dungeon and had no particular time limit, other than the amount of time we could devote to the game each week. There wasn't any particular need to clear the place within a given time, no particular pressure to hit any goals or milestones or even to "move the plot along." I had time to explore, wander into brief digressions about elven society, and really enjoy each particular moment of the campaign. As long as I was having fun with each individual session, I could fool around and figure out what I really liked doing. No time limits. No schedule.

And when my characters friends were kidnapped and she and another went to go rescue them, there was absolutely nothing to derail when I decided that, instead of immediately get back to work and move on to the next bit of the "action," what I really wanted to do was play through my character waiting for news. To have, in fact, the kinds of conversations that one has at the beginning of a relationship -- granted, a relationship between "a dwarf who'd been transformed into a nixie and a human cleric," but that's what made it D&D.

Which is the kind of thing that I'd been thinking about doing for at least a few weeks then. I liked several of the various NPCs that populated the game, and knew just enough about them to want to find out more, but I'd never done anything quite in that vein, so it took some time to find the appropriate opportunity to just slow the game down and talk. If I had been paying more attention to those constant distractions of keeping the action moving and gaining XP -- if I hadn't been sure that we'd be able to (or attempt to, anyway) rescue those friends and then move on to explore the results if I took too much time up with other pursuits -- I might never have tried it at all.

Hirelings, the Sandbox, and You

This latest discussion of sandboxes (to which Monsters and Manuals has also chimed in) has gotten me thinking that one really spiffy way to facilitate player choice and player driven adventuring is through choice of henchmen. By which I mean: having hirelings come with plots attached, or with interests and abilities that affect how the party goes about picking and handling problems, are both a lot of fun, and giving players enough information about those plots and abilities when choosing hirelings gives them another way to affect the style of the game -- as well as a way to signal to the DM the kinds of activities that they're interested in.

The "skills and interests" thing is one that's come up a lot in the Doom & Tea Parties solo, partly because most of the adventuring party is NPCs so they get a lot of involvement during the planning stages. Usually my character asking them questions, but still, the interests they have colors their information.

I picked out the party's sorceress specifically because I was interested in at some point going to Fire and she had been to and knows about Fire, so that's an obvious one. More interesting, though, is the effect that having two clerics of Uban in the party has had on the campaign. That had been my initial thought for my PC, before I decided I'd do something I'd never done before and run a dwarf, so that was the first NPC I hired, and then shortly thereafter we rescued another from goblins.

Uban being the god of knowledge, what this basically means is that I had one guy happy to explain elven iconography to me, and another who knew useful things about adventuring, and accordingly made fun of the first. Which for someone whose ideal game is basically a mix of fantasy anthropology, dungeoneering, and social hijinks was pretty much awesome.

That particular configuration mostly fell into place on its own, but party management in general -- both picking who to take with me in-game, and talking with the DM about how I find most interesting out of it -- has been a pretty powerful tool for me to control the game's direction and style. Which is really what a sandbox game is all about: giving the player's control over the game's direction without sitting down and talking with them about what they want. The latter is all well and good, but I'm increasingly of a mind that letting people figure out what they want out of the game as they're playing it has its own perks.

Riffing Off of Rogues, Sandboxes, and Themes

If you aren't reading Playing D&D With Porn Stars then you are missing the heck out. Brilliant stuff about Rogueish Heroes vs. Upright Heroes and their behavior in sandboxes:

In other words, whereas a villain confronted with a sandbox world will immediately start generating ideas, Upright Heroes (typical heroes) need a plot. Without the bank robbery, Superman would just endlessly circle Metropolis, then go to work at the Daily Planet. Without the whole problem with the Ring, Frodo would just sit and hang out in the Shire forever being wholesome and loyal and sipping tea. Without fires, firemen just hang out in their firehouse, Ever Vigilant, playing cards.

I'm sort of a sucker for structural analysis of game behavior like this, but this is something that I've definitely seen in the Doom & Tea Parties game. My character in the solo game is actually pretty stand-up -- she's in the middle of a save-the-world-quest right now, sort of -- but she started out with just "I want gold for personal background reasons, and because dwarf," added "What exactly happened to the elves who used to live here?" and "My friends are in danger!" along the way, and got involved in the world-saving business in the process of following those goals. Because we started out working on other things, the she's now trying to save the world in a way that's very particular to her and interesting to me.

The thing that makes this work really well with Trollsmyth's game is that nothing in the setting lines up into Good Guys vs. Bad Guys. On a large scale, there's "the folks who want to make the world a better place but maybe have their own motives for doing so" vs. "the folks who think that 'making the world a better place' is crazy and dangerous but maybe have their own motives for working against it," and on a small scale there's a bunch of folks with their own particular things that they want out of the situations they're in. Some goblins you meet while they're torturing people for fun, and some goblins you meet while they're hunting spiders.

Which means that even if I'm going to play a fairly stand-up character (And I'm evil enough in real life that I usually end up doing that, just for a change of pace.) there's still a lot of decisions to be made and flexibility to be had in figuring out exactly what "stand up" means. Do I hire on with the priests to wipe out the murderous, troublesome pirates and make the seas safe for honest folk? Or do I go warn the pirates about the obnoxious, slave-taking priests?

This does mean that I spend more time than I would in a lot of games thinking about things like "what's the right thing to do?" and "how should society be organized?" (Though the latter is because I'm weird, not just because of how Trollsmyth runs things.) Which is all kinds of fun for me, but isn't what everyone wants out of game, and isn't even what I want out of every game--sometimes a girl just wants to goof off and steal things. But it does make for a pretty powerful, involving, and player-driven game.

Old School: The Feeling is Fear!

Toth of the Emergence Campaign Weblog posted a really interesting analysis of combat in RPGs, with an eye towards addressing the question of how complicated your combat system needs to be. The quote that caught my eye:

The most boring fights are the ones where you know the outcome already, or where you’re almost sure to win – but you have to grind through it anyway. For them, you want a quick-and-simple combat system. The truly satisfying part of fights like this lies in the characters having worked hard to find a way to turn a potentially-deadly fight into a near-certain victory. Doing it for them – the “Balanced Encounter” philosophy – will quickly get boring. Phony risks are only exciting for so long.

Obviously this ignores the fact that, for some people, the simple acts of optimizing a character and making decisions in a tactical, rules-bounded environment are fun, much like spending a couple hours chatting with a cleric and a rakshasa about boys is fun for me. But I think it's an interesting point that a game that does have a big focus on both tactical combat and character continuity is going to have to deal with the fact that at least some of the game's danger is artificial danger. More importantly, he lays out a pretty thorough case for a combat system that does get the heck out of the way, for those of us who either aren't interested in tactical experiences or get them from other kinds of games.

And Zachary the First had some over-lapping thoughts yesterday, on The Lost Art of Running Away. He covers a lot of ground in a short post, pointing out that part of the reason running away is "lost" is that a game with too much running will get really obnoxious in short order, and that for a certain kind of game running away defeats the point, but I have to agree when he writes:

But if you’re playing in a sandbox/exploration/dungeon crawl, the goal isn’t to bravely die on the 4th level of a dungeon fighting bugbears who will eat your corpse as soon as you drop. It’s to survive, become more powerful, and get out with what loot you can while avoiding any more potentially lethal situations than are strictly necessary.

After all, I've said similar things myself, in talking about why the sense that death is always just around the corner can make a game awesome.

What this all sets me to thinking is that focusing on the outcomes of fights rather than the experience of playing through them and being afraid enough of those outcomes to occasionally run away are largely a result of the way a rule-set handles combat. Make combat into a big fun deal and the players won't run away from fights, because fights are what they're there for. And running away -- making the decision that a particular foe is too tough for you to handle right now, and backing off to prepare, bring allies, or find another way to your goal -- is fundamental to any game that I'd call "old school" or "neo-classical." That label isn't entirely a mechanical one, but it has some pretty significant mechanical requirements.

7th Sea: New Campaign, New Character

At this point the Erin's 7th Sea Wave game has been running for about a week now on Wave. Trollsmyth and made characters who had met up before the game got started proper so we'd been playing a bit before Christmas, testing the waters, but the game didn't really get started until December 30th.

Things have been, well, rough. Fun, yes, but there's been a bit of friction. That's normal for a new campaign, particularly for one where the players don't all know each other and haven't all played with the GM before, but the period of adjustment can still be awkward, even if you're expecting it.

A lot of it, honestly, is a side-effect of Doom & Tea Parties. That game going for a year now means Trollsmyth's been my DM for more games than probably all the other DMs I've played with combined. (I game a lot, but the campaigns I've run tend to be short and the campaigns I've played in tend to be shorter. I've had probably eight DMs in nine years of gaming, and run a lot more than I've played.) Which means that I have a lot of habits and expectations and things based on the particular style of that campaign. And Doom & Tea Parties is weird. I love that game, but the ideas it's given me about how I should handle in-game situations, and what the results of various actions will be, don't translate to every game, and it's caused a couple spit-takes on my part when Erin has done something that reminds me, oh yeah, new GM. Not to mention that Labyrinth Lord is not exactly the same rodeo as the drama dice slinging 7th Sea. So that's an on-going adjustment.

But that's part of why I signed up for the game in the first place, so I'm not complaining. As you may have noticed, one of the things I like to do is try new kinds of games and new styles of gaming, so I'm looking forward out of getting shaken out of my rut a little bit. It's a fun rut, and I'm not planning to abandon it permanently, but I could use a little vacation now and then.

It also doesn't hurt that my character, Alasdair the Highland Marches (read "fantasy Scottish") Pirate, rocks, and I'm having all kinds of fun playing him. I put a somewhat ridiculous amount of work into developing him pre-game (1000 words of character background and another 400 of physical description, way more than I would have even considered writing a year ago) and so far it seems to have paid off, giving me a lot of things to riff off of and interesting reactions for him to have. I'm particularly happy with the relationship Trollsmyth and I sketched out and are playing with between our characters -- recently re-united half-siblings, which has produced quite a bit of banter and continues to keep me amused.

He's the first male character I've ever run, which is an interesting challenge that I'm not sure I'm quite meeting yet, and something that I have wanted to do for ages but never did -- first because we had a rule against cross-gender play for a long time in my high school group, and later because I'd seen some cross-gender play at the table and decided it was too confusing to be worth it. In text, though, it works.

So that's where that is. Early in the going of it, but promising.

2010 New Year's Resolutions

There's not as many this year as last, but honestly, I'm trying to be a little less hyper and spastic than I was when I made that last batch. I got a lot of things done this past year, including a lot of gaming, but much of that gaming turned out to be different lessons in what I don't like. Which is good, and I gave a lot more thought to my play style and what exactly I like about and in gaming this year than I have in years past, but in 2010 I want to narrow down a little bit and really get involved with those things I've identified now as Stuff I Like.

Go to GenCon
This one should be pretty simple, but it's something I've been meaning to do for the past two years now without ever quite putting in the effort to make it happen. I've already got two members of my road trip posse confirmed, money tucked away, and arrangements made to borrow a car, so that's in progress. I also have a couple extra goals for once I'm actually at GenCon; while the list will no doubt grow over the next seven months, it currently includes bringing a revamped megadungeon binder ready for play, and in no way mentions getting revenge for all the horrible things Trollsmyth has done to my character.

Read 15 Fantasy Novels
Another easy one. I got a few read over last summer (the first two Pern trilogies, to be precise) but if I can get started before August then I should have no problem beating that number. At the moment I've got my eye on the Kushiel series, and the rest of the list is mostly romantic fantasy, since I missed that all during my teenage years, but I'm also going to see about getting a little pulp fantasy and sword and sorcery in there. (And to that end, a book of short stories officially counts as a novel.)

This is really two resolutions in one. First, I just want to read more, period. But I also spent pretty much all of high school reading science fiction -- and mostly Golden Age and hard SF at that. It's time to move on.

Blog About Every Game I'm In
This year I'm going to make a point of writing about the games I'm running, playing in, and planning. I do a fair amount of that on the blog already, but this year I'm want to do it more consistently and organize it better. The other day I was going through the archives and thought to myself that it would be cool to have a better record of the gaming that I'd done last year, so that's what I'm going to do for this year.

I won't be doing a write up of every session that I play, if only because there's no way I'm going to start doing that for the solo game, and Erin's 7th Sea game doesn't have sessions per se, being play by post. But at least a monthly check-in should be reasonable for all the games I'm in right now, just to talk about what we're doing, why it's cool, what it's got me thinking about, and what's working or not working.

Let Someone Else Run This Year's Summer Game
This one may be tough, because I'm a compulsive planner of campaigns and I've got at least three ideas right now that part of me is dying to work up and run this summer. That's when the high school crowd gets back together for our annual three or four month mini-campaign, and I've run both of the ones we've had so far. This year, I'm going to leave the field open for someone else. I haven't ruled out encouraging someone to run something, but I'm not going to do it myself.

I've got a couple of reasons for this. The big one is just that I've got a longer-term online game in the works and I don't want to take my eye off of that. It's also been a while since I played regularly at the table, and partly I just want to give someone else a turn. I'm a little worried that if I don't run something, no one will, since as I mentioned I'm the compulsive game-planner in the group, but even if that's how things work out I've still got Doom & Tea Parties and the brand-new 7th Sea Wave game to fall back on.

Finish, Run, and Publish my Social RPG
I haven't written about this much yet becaue I'm superstitious that if I write about it too much before it gets done, it won't. Essentially, I'm solving the problem of what system to use for my next campaign by building a neo-classical RPG about social interactions. The "publish" part may be a bit of a stretch, but as far as I know there's nothing out there quite like what I'm working on, and it's not a bad spot to shoot for even if I'm not quite sure I'll make it.

There's a reason our game is set in an original wacky fantasy land, and not in any attempt to recreate an actual historical era.

Members of the public who find themselves curious about those chat games I'm always rambling on about shall note that Trollsmyth has written up a second State of the Campaign covering both in honor of the end of the year.

The public shall further note that Grognardia has just published a missive that can only be described as a vile and untrustworthy slander on the style of play that Trollsmyth and I and the other good folk of the Doom & Tea Parties game have heretofore enjoyed. What other motive than base treachery could he have for the following?

Granted, this isn't a fault with Oriental Adventures itself, but it's very much a product of a gaming culture that conflated immersion with roleplaying and thus promoted the accumulation of reams of social and cultural details as necessities for "properly" roleplaying. It's not an approach I've favored in some time and I don't miss it at all.

It's almost as if he means to imply that there's something wrong with spending several hours discussing, in character, the courtship rituals of the various creatures and cultures that populate the milieu.

In all seriousness--it's good to be reminded, every so often, of the weaknesses of one's chosen style of play, and the ways it can go wrong if handled poorly. Just as, say, more pure dungeoneering is often slandered as inevitably devolving into nonsensical powergaming, the kind of game that I currently find so engrossing can easily take a turn towards navel-gazing alpha-nerd one-up-manship. (Though apparently I have not escaped an infestation of en dashes. Curses and lamentations!) Perhaps more importantly, someone who likes a more freewheeling, whimsical style of play would get just as bored with Doom & Tea Parties as I would with a game where the main difference between various gods was the name I wrote on my character sheet and the particular peculiarities I imparted upon my cleric.

But mostly what I worry about is the alpha-nerd thing. Thus the quote from Trollsmyth: "There's a reason our game is set in an original wacky fantasy land, and not in any attempt to recreate an actual historical era."

Someone, Somewhere, Has Already Done This, and For That I Salute Them

So what with Wave being the hot new thing, and smart phones being the other hot new thing, the thought occurs to me. With a game of D&D or what have you run on Wave (or, honestly, any PBP platform, but I'm currently enamored with Wave as a PBP platform for reasons of ease of set-up, interface, and flexibility; we'll see what I think once the 7th Sea game is in full swing but early tests look good) and a mobile device with internet access, one could conceivably play anywhere, all the time.

Screw animated miniatures and digital dice rollers. That's the technological revolution I want a piece of. No matter how bad of an idea it will inevitably turn out to be.

2009 New Year's Resolutions in Review

I posted my original list of New Year's gaming resolutions towards the end of last year. Now, we get to see how I did, both for my own edification and as a part of this month's RPG Blog Carnival.

8. Pick up a copy (or two) of Fight On!
Success! I've got 1-4 now, in fact. I don't have plans to pick up the rest that are out yet, but that's mainly because I don't have any old school D&D campaigns currently in the works. Next time I run a dungeon or similar, I'll see about picking up the next batch.

7. Post a little more regularly
Failure! No matter how you measure it, I posted less this year than I did last year. Which, honestly, I'm fine with. The blog does what I want it to.

6. Train a new GM
Success! At least by the specific wording of the original resolution: I got boytoy to run a couple sessions of Swords & Wizardry. He hasn't run much since the bat incident, but we keep talking about trying Mutant Future sometime.

5. Read a few Conan stories
Failure! In the specific wording of the resolution, anyhow. I read no Conan stories this year. I did, however, read a bunch of Solomon Kane stories, and the first two original Pern series. Which is really what I wanted, just to read some more fantasy.

4. Write up a megadungeon through 3 levels
Failure! But, again, only by the specific wording. See, what happened was, I filled out level one and got a start on the maps for level two and I said to myself, I said, "Gee, I bet I could run this thing now for the gang." Which I did, with excellent success: a few solo sessions for the boyfriend, another for part of the Traveller group, and then again a couple times over the summer. I never did get around to finishing up all three levels, but I accomplished the spirit of what I set out to do.

3. Finish my Traveller Subsector
Failure! Unless by "finish my Traveller Subsector" you mean "run a Traveller campaign," in which case, again, my performance was perfectly adequate. The dang thing still isn't finished, per se, and probably won't ever be. But I scratched the Traveller itch.

2. Play in a campaign
Success! In a way I absolutely could not have imagined back when I wrote these down. Less than a week after the original post went up, Trollsmyth started recruiting for his Labyrinth Lord game, talked me into playing in it, and, well, now I play in two pretty fantastic weekly games of Labyrinth Lord, and I've just finished a character for a soon-to-start game of 7th Sea on Wave. It's awesome.

1. Run a campaign
Success! I knocked this one out with two campaigns and a couple extra one-shot sessions here and there. I ended up being less than pleased with the results of those campaigns, but I learned a fair amount, and I've got a much better idea now of what kinds of games I want to run and how to run them well.

All in all, not a bad year. Four definite successes and another three satisfactory failures sounds pretty good, from where I'm standing. Enough so, in fact, that I've been putting some thought to what I'd write on a list for this year. Stay tuned.

Experience Systems: The Foundation of the Game

The issue of experience, and reward systems in general, has been rattling around in my head for a while now. So I figure I should strike while it's the hot new thing, what with Jeff Rients XP-for-Exploration idea making the rounds, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess having sounded off about it (declaring that XP-for-gold is the only true way, naturally), so you know it's a big deal.

My basic opinion is, "whatever works for your game." XP-for-gold is what I use in my games, for most of the reasons that Raggi has already enumerated. I'm more open to the XP-for-Exploration idea than he claims to be, but I agree with his opinions on pretty much all the other systems he discusses, and I actually think he's missed a point against XP-for-roleplaying, in that it can create messes, socially, for me as the DM to be grading my players like that. (Or I should say, has created messes, socially, for me.) All the systems he's discussed, and really all XP systems, are to some degree arbitrary; at the very least, the DM creates the environment that the experience is being awarded in. But I like having the illusion of impartiality, and having something other than "Well . . . because I said so," when I get asked why Player X got more experience than Player Y.

Anyway. The thing about XP-for-gold is that it tends to break down if the players decide they want to ditch the dungeon for a soap opera, or otherwise find a way to take the game in a new direction. And while I'm moving into hypotheticals here, based on my experience, observation, and general sense of how the game ought to be run, in a long-running old school kind of game, the players are going to eventually figure out a way to take the game in some kind of new direction, away from "pure" dungeon-crawling. They're going to find something that they like better than gathering treasure. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, this is going to be something that's still largely compatible with XP-for-gold. Sometimes, though, it won't be. (Of course, as Raggi points out, this can be a great thing; having the players choose between level advancement and some other goals can be interesting, at least on an occasional basis.)

If you won't to know what to do at that point, talk to Trollsmyth. I still don't think he's told me yet what he's doing with the XP in our now heavily soap-opera-ified solo game. My character hasn't gotten any treasure in about twenty sessions. She doesn't care, and neither do I, but not every player is as nonchalant as I am about leveling, even if they are having crazy amounts of fun gossiping about boys with rakshasa and clerics or what have you.

I can, however, comment that the process itself is a very excellent thing to happen in a campaign, even if it does cause a few problems if things go too far afield: the campaign becomes uniquely yours. This is certainly achievable by talking things out with your players ahead of time and designing such a personalized campaign from the get-go, but that requires that you and your players both know what you want before the campaign starts. The beauty of a letting a game evolve like this is that you don't have to know. You just have to be paying attention.

If you've been following Grognardia's Dwimmermount posts you'll have an excellent idea of what I'm talking about--and at least an inkling of what all this has to do with XP-for-gold. His campaign hasn't suffered as extreme a drift as the Labyrinth Lord solo, which makes it a better example; I suspect its evolution is more typical for such games. But the basic pattern remains the same: it started out as a a game exclusively about Dwimmermount, guided by the rhythms of dungeon exploration. In the past few months, the characters have started to deal with potentially treacherous NPCs, uncover the schemes of ancient cults, lead their cities in response to undead hordes, and even delve a bit into some fantasy theology. It's still largely compatible with the dungeon delve, and by extension, XP-for-gold, but it's become a distinctly different game from the one the one Maliszewski started about a year ago.

And XP-for-gold was one reason why it, along with the solo game, was able to shift in such a way. XP-for-gold supports a player-driven game. It's not the only system to do so, and it's not required to run a player-driven game, but it does help: it helps the players answer that eternal question, "What do you do?" This is especially true early in the game before they've figured out their characters, established their own motives, and gotten involved in the larger schemes of the milieu. It's provides a way to run a foundation for a player-driven game before the players, and the DM, know what really interests them.

Allowing the players to drive at least the direction of the action is crucial to this kind of evolution, particularly if you want to start out simple and get more sophisticated like this. The players need to have the freedom to say, "Ooh, that looks fun, let's go do more of that." But giving players freedom can be a great way to get some very confused players, so sometimes, just to help them get their feet on the ground, you want a big blinking neon sign that says "Adventure Here!" XP-for-gold puts that neon sign right on top of any place that has a little treasure in it.

I keep using XP-for-gold as my example here, but it's not the only system that provides that effect. Pretty anything that makes it obvious to the players what they need to do in-game to get that XP will do--which means that XP-for-roleplaying and XP-for-quests won't. Whatever their other charms, such systems either don't significantly guide in-game decisions (which in other contexts may in fact be one of the main advantages for XP-for-roleplaying and similar systems, but here it defeats the entire point), or they make it very difficult to define the rewards involved ahead of time without pre-framing the decisions the players can make. Sure, a good XP-for-quest-type system will allow the player to negotiate with the DM to define what they want the quests to be, but that doesn't give them much help in answering that question. Which is great once the campaign has gotten up and running and they have some ideas already, but it doesn't do a great job as a neon sign for the early game.

There are, however, other systems that do have the right set of features, XP-for-monsters and XP-for-exploration being the most well-known at the moment. They're not quite as flexible as XP-for-gold, suggesting a more specific range of activities, so they tend to be supplemental rather than comprehensive systems, but that's perfectly fine. In fact, I consider the D&D XP system's ability to accommodate expansions of various kinds one of its strengths.

(As an aside--while I tend to agree with Raggi that monsters really ought to be obstacles to XP-collection rather than an avenue for it, in a world where most monsters are unique (or if you could only get XP for a kind of monster the first time you killed it) XP-for-monsters could form the foundation of a really interesting game that revolved around researching, tracking down, and defeating various beasts.)

Eventually, killing those monsters or exploring those locations will lead to the PCs stumbling across some larger mystery, or they'll cross paths with the wrong people during their pursuit of gold, or they'll just run into some other activity that catches their interest. And that's all to the good, because the point of this kind of experience system isn't to define the game but to provide a foundation for it. It gives the PCs something to do and a reason to get involved in the world while you're figuring out what you want to do with a campaign.

Better Character Backgrounds

Yikes. The posting's been light lately, I know, but that's mainly because I've been busy -- and busy gaming. Two nights a week of Labyrinth Lord plus a new 7th Sea game just starting up has made this a very good semester.

I think I'm getting better at building characters and writing backstories, too. Time was, I'd just have my character's whole family killed off by some mysterious, unnamed menace and call it "giving her motivation." I resisted that temptation for my first character for Trollsmyth and have so far been very happy with the results; her brother has popped up in game directly (working, quite naturally, for a group that is not as bad as some of the other "bad guys" in the campaign, but still pretty bad on their own) and, more importantly, her relationship with her family has shaped the way she's reacted to most of the various exciting disasters that have befallen the party.

So in making the two characters I've built since then, I put a fair amount of thought into their families, and their relationship with their families. If nothing else, it gives me a reliable foundation for figuring out what makes that character tick. "Family" hasn't been as big of a deal for the cleric I made for the second Labyrinth Lord game, but it promises to be a major part of the 7th Sea game, seeing as how Trollsmyth is playing my character's half-sister.

But my old style of building characters did have one thing going for it--uninteresting as they were in themselves, those backgrounds did make it fairly easy for the GM to tie my character into their own schemes. In actual practice, what tends to happen with a really wide-open background like that is that it gets ignored in favor of the characters with a few interesting details filled in. You know, the ones that give the GM less work to do.

Taken to less extremes, however, throwing a few mysterious open-spaces into my backgrounds has turned out to be a handy technique. That brother I mentioned, I'd originally described as having disappeared a few years back, my cleric has a few mysterious NPCs of mysterious motive in her past, and my pirate has what I think is my best twist on this idea so far: a fight that he apparently started, but doesn't have any memory of, that went on to get him into a lot of trouble and eventually was what got him involved in the starting events the campaign. There's a couple people who he thinks might have been responsible for said trouble, including the guy who he got into the fight with (who now has an important family MacGuffin, so my character is going to go after him either way), but he's really not sure what happened.

This may or may not turn out to be a big deal in-game; likewise, the cleric's background hasn't come up yet in a significant way, but that's okay. There's already more than enough excitement going on in the game the cleric is in, and the point isn't so much to get the game to revolve around my character as to give the GM a few more options and ideas. Although it's certainly nice when a background does get used in a major way, it's not essential.

While it's too early to tell exactly how well this latest character will function in-game, he's the main reason I say I'm "getting better" at this character building business: I had more fun making this character than any I've made before, and put a lot more detail into it. Partly this is because I interlocked his background with Trollsmyth's character, and Trollsmyth writes ridiculously detailed character backgrounds, but mostly, I'm just getting better at the whole business of coming up with and picking out appropriate details, and, I think, connecting "things that have happened to my character" with "how my character acts," without tying myself down to boring or obnoxious behavior. Like most else in the hobby, it's a skill, and one I'm glad to finally be getting so much practice at.

On Systems and Skills

So lately I've been jotting down notes for a new setting and discussing dice rollers for a Wave game with potential players and generally doing the things one does when one has a mind to run a game. I won't be able to really get it rolling for a few weeks at least -- no time until after finals -- but I've been thinking about it regularly and it's starting to sound like a viable idea.

The thing that I'm currently hung up on, besides matters of time, is system. I did something unusual, for me, and started sketching out a setting system-less, (Took a page out of Trollmyth's notes and started with themes, in fact.) and while I'm pleased with the results so far it means I still need to figure out the mechanical side.

While I haven't gotten quite down to the level of what the player characters look like and do, I know I'm going to need at least some kind of jedi-knight analogue, a mutation system, and some way to handle magical tattoos. I'm also considering a cyberpunk-ish or otherwise somewhat post-modern tech level. So Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord, which otherwise are my go-to systems right now, aren't a completely natural fit. I can crib Mutant Future's mutation system, but I'd also kind of like something that's more forgiving of acquiring them in play, in addition to your existing class/race. And I might be able to make clerics work as the jedi-guys, but depending on where I go with those I might need to make a full new class (which is something I've wanted to do for a while, so that wouldn't be too bad) and then I'd need to figure out what else to do with clerics, and healing in general.

But LL and S&W are my go-to systems for a reason. Right now, they do everything I want out of a system and nothing I don't: fast, deadly combat, magic with for interpretation and additions, a save system, and a couple of other odds and ends. None of the other systems I've used before or have the books for quite fit that bill; I was considering new World of Darkness for a while, but discarded it before I really got serious about the setting. I don't have any use for most of its skill system as implemented (in particular the social stuff; while I can understand the arguments for mechanical supports for certain kinds of characters, with the way I've been playing lately those skills would just get in the way) and I'm similarly suspicious about how the morality system would interface with the kinds of gaming I've recently gotten used to. While I still want to try Vampire, Mage, and all their ilk at some point, that game will have to wait.

One system that has caught my eye, however, has been BRP. I've been looking for an excuse to pick up that book and take it for a spin ever since sirlarkins started posting about BRP, and it has a reputed flexibility that appeals to me: I suspect it would be fairly easy to tweak its character power subsystems to support the character types I have in mind. It does have a lot of dependence on skills, but I'd feel more comfortable ignoring or downplaying certain parts of that system if it didn't mean tampering with some platonic grid of ability scores, and it might do me some good to have a skill system to mess with again. I've gotten perhaps too suspicious of them lately.

Early Thoughts on Wave and Gaming

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, so predictably, I've been thinking a lot about gaming lately. If all goes well, things are going to continue to be quiet around here through the end of the month. Last year I quit NaNo early, partly because I got massively distracted by a sandbox I was working on, but mostly because the novel was terrible. So I'm hoping that doesn't happen this year.

Anyhow. The main thing that's had my attention lately, gaming and otherwise, has been Wave. Trollsmyth and I have been using it to chat about gaming and setting stuff, and it's been great for that. It's a more convenient format to re-read than e-mail, there's a lot of tools for organizing conversations, and most importantly, conversations have a lot more structure to them. Everyone talks about the real-time, simultaneous editing, and it does conversations run a lot faster, but being able to break a conversation into multiple streams, or head off in another direction if I think of another question a few days later, is the main advantage Wave has over my other forms of communication.

The improvement in my between-session activities is good enough to make it a permanent tool in my gaming arsenal, but naturally I've also been pondering the use of Wave as a gaming platform directly. There's a different ways here to adjust (and perhaps improve) traditional play-by-post gaming; in particular, Wave's editability suggests a lot of possibilities, and the ability to easily manage a number of Waves with different combinations of participants should come in handy as well.

Trouble is, one of the main things I like about the online chat gaming I've been digging so hard lately is the ease of immersion. The 15-minutes-a-day format of PbP doesn't really encourage that. It's got other advantages -- and I don't really have another spot for a 4-hour block of gaming in my life right now -- but that's still a serious drawback. So I'm starting to think about what would take the best advantage of the PbP format, if I was to run a game like that. There's no point running a game that I'd be happier with if it was in chat. If I'm going to use the medium, I want to do something with it that only it does well.

Unfortunately, right now when I ask my brain that question ("What would PbP do well?") it keeps spitting back "Vampires!" So I think I'm going to give it a few more weeks.

Gaming Stories

There are a handful of stories that all gamers have, and that we pass around, ritually, when meeting each other or inducting new gamers into the tribe. Dice superstitions, "how roleplaying changed my life," and "the worst game master/player ever" are all well known anywhere gamers are, and we all have our collections of memorable anecdotes and thrilling incidents, either from our own experience or borrowed from the collective pool.

This is so much true that I tend to think of these topics as clichés. Sure, I can write about how writing helped me get through high school and made me a better person, or the bizarre behavior of some Dungeon Master, or the funny things I do with my dice when I'm bored, but why? It's good to revisit those topics every so often, trade the details of each particular incident back and forth, but there's little of real consequence to be said on the subject.

So what's really interesting to me is how fascinating these stories can be to non-gamers. Every so often I'll go back to gaming when I'm writing something for a fiction or a non-fiction or a poetry class, since I have to generate a fair amount of material for those classes and gaming is a reliable subject for me, since I'm interested in it. Then we'll workshop the essay or the poem or whatever it is, and a bunch of non-gamers, people who have barely heard of D&D, will read it, and while not all of them care, there are always a few who are fascinated. They want to know more. Even if it's something simple; that old reliable story of the guys who "train" their dice, say. It's a window into the customs of our peculiar tribe.

Which, I suppose, explains why those stories keep getting passed around. Even though we've all heard them, or stories like them, a thousand times, it's a way to reaffirm our membership in that peculiar tribe. (And to reassure ourselves that, while we spend our Saturdays pretending to be elves, we're nowhere near as crazy as "that guy.") They're tokens of our various customs: why we game, the trials we've all survived in common, our shared talismans and paraphernalia.

My Biggest Game Master Mistake

It's kind of ironic, for me, that Johnn Four picked Game Master Mistakes as the topic of this month's RPG Blog Carnival. Roleplaying Tips and Campaign Mastery are both great resources, and his GMing advice is, in general, solid. But Roleplaying Tips was also a major part of my most important game mastering mistake.

See, I've got this perfectionist streak. It's under control now, but it used to be a pretty vicious one. There was a period in high school when I would fail entire classes from simply not doing the work, and while that can't all be laid on that tendency, a big part of it was just that my idea of what would be "good enough" was so overwhelming that I didn't want to start at all. Naturally, that was about the same time I started game mastering.

So I went through this stage where I was obsessed with game mastering advice. I pored over the 3e DMG, read the "running the game" section in every roleplaying book I could get my hands on, and combed the net for articles on technique and style. That's where Roleplaying Tips comes in: at the time, it was the major source of game mastering advice on the web, at least that I could find.

And despite all that, the games I ran were terrible. The advice had nothing to do with it; though the quality varied depending on the source, on the whole it was fairly good. But I put more effort into "doing it right" than into just running a fun game. It took me a long time to figure out that it didn't matter how nicely my notes were organized if there was nothing for the players to do.

My Next Campaign Is A Long Way Off

I've been thinking a little more lately about running a game again. I don't have time right now (and that's not entirely bad, because the main reason I don't is the amount of gaming I'm already doing) but I've started thinking about it regularly again, sketching out ideas here and there, and figuring out when I might next have the opportunity. I'm determined to get back into it slowly: it'll be next semester at the earliest, and I very well might put it off until next summer or even later. But I'm considering it.

Part of the reason I'm taking it slow, beyond just the time constraints, is that I'm still not sure why the last few games I've run didn't work. I had fun, and the players had fun, but neither the Traveller game nor Is This Foul? ever clicked for me. They were both chores to prep for, and I didn't always look forward to game night. I'm starting to get a better idea about why that was, but I don't want to put the effort into running a regular game again until I've got, at the least, a new tack to take.

I'm also thinking I might actually prep for the game a bit before start up this time around. Normally, there's a pretty short time between idea and execution when it comes to my campaigns; it's normal for me to run a game within just a week or two of coming up with the concept. The trick there is that the two times that technique's been really successful, I was running a pre-existing world; in one case a published campaign setting (in this case, the Diamond Throne), in the other, the setting from a (terrible) novel I'd written several years prior. I'm thinking about giving that world-building thing a try again, so that suggests spending a bit more time on the game than usual.

I'm hesitant to make any dramatic statements about what exactly I'm going to run, because it's so far off that I'm almost guaranteed to change my mind twelve times before it hits the table. But at least for now, I'm thinking it's going to be a fantasy, location-based, sandbox-y thing, because I've been wanting to run something like that since I came to college and it keeps getting pushed back in favor of other ideas. That, in turn, means I want to use either Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord, with plenty of house rules and bits and pieces from other things.

I'd also like it to be a chat game. I've been having a lot of fun playing in the two Trollsmyth's got going right now, and I want to try my hand at setting one up myself. I also like the idea of pulling in players from my entire player base, which is currently pretty scattered geographically. It'd be fun to play some new combinations of people off each other, and starting with a larger pool gives me a better shot at getting a group all willing to put up with romantic shenanigans.

So that's where I'm at as far as running a continuing campaign goes. I might run some one-shots before I get that started (Vampire, Mage, and Promethean will probably get that treatment, since I can't see running a full campaign for any of them soon, but the reason I got them in the first place was to use them) but for now, it's going to be planning, and playing.

Dungeon Soap Operas are the Best Kind of Soap Operas

It's been three sessions since I rolled any dice in the solo game, and before that it'd been at least five or six sessions since they came up at all. (At least on my side of the screen.) It's not quite free form -- a few spells have been cast, and ability scores referenced -- but, as Trollsmyth mentioned about the time that the new style started, it's definitely shifted more towards relationships and social maneuvering, with the occasional desperate rescue attempt thrown in for good measure.

That's the key word, though: "shifted." The game started out solidly D&D. Lots of mucking about in dungeons, figuring out traps, and getting chased around by spiders. A lot of times my character ended up talking to the various dungeon residents rather than fighting them, and there was a brief detour to the plane of Fairey, but it was still mostly a game about treasure, the nasty things between me and the treasure, and the odd world-threatening artifact. A good game, but nothing too unusual.

Now, yes, it's very different. It's mostly talking, often about other people, and reacting to all the weird social situations my character's gotten herself into. Treasure's no longer an issue, and even saving the world has receded in importance. Now, I spend more time thinking about relationships, between my character and various NPCs, and between those NPCs themselves. An unusual amount of time, for me; while friendship, romance, loyalty, enmity, and other such bonds have always played a part in my games, we've been spending much more time than I'm used to dealing with them, sometimes to the point of simply playing them out. While I liked the game before, I'm greatly enjoying the change.

But it all grew out of that dungeoneering. Mucking about in dungeons gave my character something to do that didn't require complex relationships with several NPCs, or fifty e-mail's worth of setting knowledge. It was fun to do on it's own (particularly the kind of dungeons Trollsmyth runs, where you learn all kinds of things about elven history when you're not busy running for your life), but it also lent itself to developing the kinds of relationships that now support the game. The dungeon, after all, is how my character met those people in the first place, and the danger was part of why she started to care so much. It provided a backdrop, and a backbone, for the development of the friendships we're now exploring.

To take the most obvious example: The big turning point in the campaign, the moment when it became clear even to me that something different was going on, was when my character and one of the clerics she'd hired back at the beginning of the game got themselves involved in an awkward budding romance, and we spent most of several sessions just playing it out. But things had been developing in that direction for a while, all in the context of their adventures. He delayed an expedition half a day looking for her when she disappeared into Fairey; she opened the potentially deadly door into the Tower of the Stars partly so he wouldn't. When they finally acknowledged, and acted on, those feelings, it was with that history. Dungeoneering created situations where those moments could happen.

Magic Item: Wayedge

Taichara and Trollsmyth have both posted versions of a magic item called "Wayedge." I don't think I've ever posted a magic item to this blog, but I thought now would be a good time to start. (Dave, at the Tower of the Archmage, was similarly inspired.) Without further introduction:

This slightly curved, elegant steel blade is called Wayedge. Its grip is a striking black, and feels almost like wet, polished stone to the touch. Those who have heard of it claim that it is never found, only won: though the details of the stories vary from teller to teller, and none seem to agree on just who the past weilders of the blade have been, all who speak of Wayedge claim that it always comes as a reward for a test of wisdom. Sometimes, this is an obvious thing—perhaps unravelling a puzzle presented by the sword's current possessor. (In the stories, those who own the blade are often curiously ready to give it away, despite its reputation as an object that makes all tasks easier and all places closer.) Other times, the test is more subtle—it might simply be that the blade is secreted in a place quite difficult to reach, and thus requies some cleverness to gain.

Wayedge is a sword +1 that grants it's weilder a +1 bonus to all saves, and can undo any knot without harming the rope or fiber that forms it. The blade also eases any journey its possessor undertakes in a number of mundane ways: weather turns fairer, most met on the road are friendlier, and often the weilder picks up an uncanny knack for shortcuts. However, whether because of the history of the blade, or on account of some peculiar power, at some point on most longer journeys (and many shorter ones), its weilder will be greeted by someone who seems to recognize the blade but offers only mysterious riddles for conversation. Sometimes this is simply a fellow traveller, who may perhaps offer advice or warning once his riddles have been answered, but more often than most who possess the blade would like these riddles are posed by someone who could present a significant obstacle to the journey.

Fantastic Characters vs. Common Characters

Robertson Games recently posted an interesting contribution to the on-going discussion of how to define "old school," Differences & Directions in Dungeons & Dragons, which lists a bunch of differences he sees between Basic D&D and the latest edition. It hits most of the major features that I think of as differentiating the styles behind the two games, and both makes it clear that neither style is inherently superior to the other and demonstrates why different people might naturally prefer one style to the other.

In fact, it creates a pretty thorough checklist of things that I think are awesome in the Labyrinth Lord game. But not a completely thorough one, and that's another advantage of the list. It presents old school as a handful of features that, while they work well together, can also be taken and considered individually or in groups.

In my case, besides some quibbles about the power level part of the list (I love having just one spell slot to wrangle at first level, but I can't legitimately describe a game where a gang of 1st and 2nd level characters end up on the plane of Fire, however badly they do there, as "low power.") the main area where I don't clearly lean towards the Basic side is in the "Fantastic Characters vs. Common Characters" category. I really can't be -- I'm having too much fun playing a nixie, which isn't as far out there as you can be in terms of monsters with weird powers, but it's still a lot more exotic than the standard options.

But I'm not completely in the 4e camp, either. The character who's now a nixie started out as a dwarf, and a fairly non-descript one at that. No unusual powers, fairly standard backstory. Likewise, I tried to make my cleric a reasonably typical human with a reasonably typical backstory. I've been having all kinds of fun with her, because "reasonably typical" means she's actually fairly odd in some respects, by my standards -- she's argued with the party half-ogre in favor of slavery, and her religious ideas are, obviously, pretty far out from my own.

For the most part, I like making characters who are fairly normal, particularly when the setting itself is interesting. It's easier to explore a distinct milieu when my character's not an odd-ball herself. But I don't mind at all when a character doesn't stay normal. I'm much happier with my dwarf-turned-nixie than I would have been if she'd stayed a dwarf; though then again, that's partly because of all the interesting social issues it brings up for her and the rest of the group. And those wouldn't have been as interesting if I hadn't already been playing a relatively normal dwarf to begin with.

(Not entirely normal, mind. One of the things that made her being a nixie interesting to begin with was that there were a number of features of dwarven society that she really wasn't too thrilled with, but I didn't make her knowing that, and she only really found that out herself after hanging out with humans for a while.)

Writing as a Player

So. Posting. It's been light lately. Trollsmyth's already covered a big part of why pretty well, pointing out that the solo game we're doing has recently veered into social, setting-heavy territory that makes it even more difficult to discuss intelligently than most campaigns. I've also just moved back to college, and I'm still adjusting to the changes in my schedule and social life associated with that. But I'm also still figuring out how to write about being a player, and how to think about it in a way that I can write about.

It's pretty easy for me to write about DMing, because when I DM, I'm thinking a lot about what I'm doing and the technique I'm using and so on. I'm naturally in an analytical mode, because I want to improve what I'm doing. As a player, I'm mostly thinking about what my character's doing and how she's going to react. It's much less about technique and much more about the game itself, which runs me right into the problem that Trollsmyth discussed.

When I do think about technique during a game that I'm playing in, it's usually in reference to something that the DM seems to be doing. Lately, for instance, I've been thinking a lot about player failure, since my character in the solo game has been doing a lot of pretty serious failing, and I've been having all kinds of fun doing it. Part of the reason for that is that even when things go spectacularly wrong in the game, they often end up working out in her favor in some way. Things don't always work out exactly well, and there's usually some fairly significant fallout along the way, but she's also gotten a number of rewards -- and a few allies -- by taking advantage of the consequences of failed die rolls.

The trouble with writing about that from a technique standpoint is that I don't really know what the DM is doing, since I'm not the one doing it. It's even possible that this pattern I've noticed is completely unintentional. I've gotten some ideas from it for how I'm going to run things in the future, but that doesn't help much because to focus strictly on what I "would" do makes the discussion a little too hypothetical to be of much interest to me.

On the other hand, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of looking at my reaction as a player to various DMing techniques, so despite the problems with that format it can be worthwhile. But I haven't been playing exclusively all that long, so I'm still figuring it out.

I Didn't Think I Hated People Quite That Much

Your BrainHex Class is Seeker.

Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Seeker-Mastermind.

You like finding strange and wonderful things or finding familiar things as well as solving puzzles and devising strategies.

Each BrainHex Class also has an Exception, which describes what you dislike about playing games. Your Exceptions are:

» No Mercy: You rarely if ever care about hurting other players' feelings - mercy is for the weak!
Learn more about your classes and exceptions at BrainHex.com.

Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:

Seeker: 20
Mastermind: 16
Survivor: 14
Daredevil: 7
Achiever: 5
Conqueror: 2
Socialiser: 0

Go to BrainHex.com to learn more about this player model, and the neurobiological research behind it.

(Via Jeff's Gameblog.)

An Unusual Situation

Last week I played a little 4e for the first time. I've DM'd it before, but never sat down and ran my own character. It was pretty fun, especially considering that it was Maggie's first shot behind the table for us. So the pacing was a little rough, and we didn't have time get to the "real" part of the adventure, but what we did do was fun; I was particularly impressed by her combat descriptions, and renewed my resolve to work on my own skills in that area.

As I was getting ready for the game (using the Character Builder to make a half-elf bard, "Fiona Trollkin," and a longtooth shifter warden as a back-up in case we needed a defender) I thought to myself, as I often do in such situations, "Man, it'll be nice to get a chance to finally play." It took me a moment to realize that no, wait, I play all the time now. This summer there've been a couple times where I played four sessions in a single week. Sessions that often last up to eight hours. I'm not even running a game of my own right now. It's all play.

What's really weird is that I don't even have much desire to start running a game again. I'm pretty happy just playing. That's never happened to me before, and I don't know how long it'll last, but for now I'm enjoying it. Being able to game, and be really happy with the game, without the work? It's nice. (Not that I'm not doing a bit ofwork for the game, but not nearly as much as I would be were I DM. My main contribution is thinking up setting questions that Trollsmyth then answers.) Partly this is because the games I'm in right now are really good, and fit me in a way most of the games I've played in before didn't quite. But I suspect it's also partly because I've gotten really frustrated, in various ways, with most of the game mastering I've done in the past year or two. Not really sure why that is yet, but luckily I don't have a huge need to figure it out immediately. I've got time to let the answer come to me, and in the mean time, I can play.

And while I'm on the subject -- not running a game of my own is part of why the blog's been so quiet lately. I've been thinking about game stuff a lot, but mainly stuff that has no business being on the blog, or that Trollsmyth's already covered. I've also been trying to take care of my hands, since they've been acting up a little and there's other stuff I need to do on the computer that's more important, but the main of it is that I haven't had a whole lot I wanted to write about. I'm still keeping up with the blogosphere, but things may continue to be quiet around here for the time being, particularly since I'm going back to school soon.

And the Movie Was Pretty Good Otherwise

So there's a bit in Funny People that got my attention. One of the subplots is a pretty standard loser-comedy romance: Boy meets girl, boy turns out to be way too shy and awkward to actually interact with girl, roommate sleeps with girl. Pretty standard stuff. All you need is a discussion on how girls only sleep with jerks and shun guys who actually care about them, and you're set. And Funny People does hang around in that territory for a while.

But then . . . the guy in question realizes that he's done something weird by getting mad at this girl he hardly knows for sleeping with his roommate, apologizes, and then ends up going on a date with her, wherein making out and perhaps other things happen. The moral of the story is: "Of course women won't sleep with you if you never ask. Having actual conversations with them helps, too."

It was very weird. Not only did the movie demonstrate why the Nice Guy routine doesn't work, it did so in-character and made something of a big deal out of it. Which I wasn't expecting. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn't that. Really quite refreshing.

Kung Fu Cowboys . . . with Lasers

I am seriously tempted to make this the basis for my next campaign.

What's Old School Good For?

I had a point that I'm not sure I communicated very well in yesterday's post, partly because, when I wrote it, I was still figuring out exactly what that was myself. Reduced to it's essence, the point is this:

The OSR is getting new people into the hobby. It's positioned very well to continue doing it, and expand those efforts, because many of its major participants are focused on figuring out why the games work the way they do, and sharing their love of those games with anyone who will listen. The games themselves are simple, fun, and appeal to a lot of people who have experience with newer games but don't find they quite fit.

"Old school," obviously, is about the past. But it's just as much about the future. Introducing new people to the old ways, and going new places you can't go with more mainstream games. That's what it's about for me, and I don't think I'm alone.

Old School is New to Me

Here's a secret:

About four, maybe five years ago, one of my friends showed up to our Friday night session with a big stack of rule books and a bunch of boxes full of miniatures. His neighbor had given him a couple boxes full of old 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D gear, and he was talking about starting up a game with some guys he knew from school. (We were engaged in another campaign at the time.)

I flipped through the books and started making fun of them. Class-as-race? Ridiculous. Individual XP charts for each class? Laughable. That weird system of saves? Archaic. The organization was impenetrable, the prose awful, the art hideous-to-non-existent. 3e, I knew from reading forums on the internet, was a great improvement.

That was back when I didn't know any better. Heck, even my friend didn't know any better. Based on, if I remember correctly, some vague knowledge of the Outdoor Survival Map, he explained to us how OD&D had been "a board game," where you moved your pieces around on hexes. What we didn't know about the games we filled in with crazy rumors and misinformation from other new-edition-playing twerps like us.

Then I started getting into RPG blogging. I started reading Jeff's Gameblog, and from there found Trollsmyth, Grognardia, and a bunch of other guys who knew what the heck they were talking about when it came to the older stuff. Not that any of them were, or are, gurus, but they knew that the older editions were fun, that 3e wasn't intrisincally superior to any of them, and they were interested in figuring out exactly what it was that made those old games tick. Luckily, that mix of enthusiasm and curiosity was enough to get through my idiot ideas on the subject, and I ended up coming along for the ride.

Now, I collect those old hardbacks, play in two Labyrinth Lord games, built my own Swords & Wizardry megadungeon, and have pretty much sworn off running 3e, at least for the next few years. I've taught people to play Swords & Wizardry who have never played an edition of D&D before in their lives. It's some of the best gaming I've done in my life.

A few final words, from Trent Foster:

Yeah, there are some "old guys" in our midst who actually were around back in 197x playing D&D in this style, watched the game/hobby move away from them, and are refreshed to see a new crowd pick up on what they liked about the game in the first place. But more of us are people who started playing the game later, after this style of play was already in decline, or had even disappeared altogether from the mainstream/commercial rpg scene, and are so interested in this style and approach to play now in large part because we didn't get to experience it then.

My Absolute Favorite Thing

There's a point in a campaign when things have been running pretty smoothly for a while, and I've been spinning out a situation long enough for things to really start getting interesting. The players have a few things in the game that they care about, and are going after their own goals. They've started to pick up non-mechanical resources. There's a fun intra-party dynamic going on. I've got a few folks I've established as nasty-scary-bad, and if things are really going well they've got a serious hate-on for a villain or two.

And usually, at this point in a campaign, one day I sit down to prep for a session and I find an opportunity: a few dominoes that have all been set up already, or a set that just need a few adjustments to really go somewhere fun. I think to myself, "If I move this thing over here, and this NPC does that, the players will totally flip out." So I polish it up, come up with a plan, and get ready.

Then, if I pull it off right, if most of my assumptions about the players and the characters turn out to be true, the ones that don't turn out in my favor anyway, and all the timing works out, there's a moment. The players realize just what it is that's happened, and they're all looking at me, and they can't decide if it's insanely evil or the most awesome thing they've ever heard of. The characters at this point are usually pissed off, often terrified, and always ready to go pound someone into the dirt. But the players are having a blast. Because when it works out just right, I've given them a goal that they could never have come up with on their own, but is still utterly perfect for their characters.

And then I've got 'em. A villain who they'll follow to the ends of the earth. A problem they'll argue about amongst each other and come up with all kinds of schemes to solve. A brilliant set-up for, at the very least, a few weeks of high-stakes, high-intensity gaming, and sometimes something that will come to define the entire campaign. When everything works out right, it's about as close to perfect as gaming gets.

Lessons from a Campaign Ended

I ended Is This Foul? on Friday. The gang still got together and hung out, we just played Apples to Apples and 1000 Blank White Cards instead. (Note to those interested: Captain Kirk makes any 1000 Blank White Cards game 243% more awesome. Especially when people start thinking up cool ways to steal him.) We've got plans to get together next week, and I'll probably run a little megadungeon. But that campaign wasn't working.

The exact reasons behind that are probably beyond my powers of analysis. Mostly, it just never quite clicked. But I learned a couple things from it that I'm pretty sure will improve my chances with future campaigns. At the very least, it can't hurt.

Don't overload a short campaign. In a game with an indefinite time-span, sure, I can throw in as many plot threads as I want. The players will pick up on some, ignore others, and invent their own. They've got time. But in a game like this, with a definite end-date? My attempts at giving the players "choice" just ended up bogging them down with option-overload. They had too much stuff to get done, and too many looming loose ends. A short game doesn't need a whole lot of choice, because it's short. There's not as much chance of people getting bored, and they can get their self-determination kicks from figuring out how to handled whatever handful of problems I do present to them.

Don't mix old characters with new. This is an issue that's pretty specific to sequel games, and maybe even specific to the structure of this game in general. (More on that in a minute.) In hindsight, I should have had them all make new characters, and kept the old guard around as helpful-but-distant NPCs. Instead, I was running a party that included three well-connected, politically powerful masters-of-the-city with a lot of shared history, and a couple of people who had just kind of shown up. The latter two had their own reasons for being in the game, and interesting stuff to do on their own, but they didn't have a whole lot of reason to hang around or help out the first three. That caused a few problems.

Don't run two vastly different but interconnected parties. The idea of having one group of high-level city leaders and ambassadors, and another of their mid-level children and minions, sounded cool on paper. In practice, it created situations where one character would suddenly stop talking because his player's other, much more important character had just entered the room, and generally caused a lot of "who's talking now?" type confusion. Add to that the massive player/character knowledge problems that started when people's characters started to align themselves on opposite political sides (Which, I'll add, my players handled masterfully, but it's still something that's better to avoid when you can.) and this idea was just a whole lot more trouble than it's worth.

Don't run a game that I'm not completely sure I want to run. I'd mentioned the idea, and thought it sounded kind of cool. My players loved the last campaign, and were way excited about the idea of another like it, which is always awesome. I knew there were some neat political shenanigans I could try, and it'd be an opportunity to play around with some ideas I hadn't used before. But I wasn't sure I could handle the system. I worried that it wouldn't measure up to the last campaign. And I didn't know if this was really the game that I wanted to run. DMing is hard enough even when it's a game that I am consistently, 100% committed to. This campaign couldn't quite make that standard.

Edited the last paragraph for clarity.

Get Out of Jail Free Cards

One of the things I like about Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord game is that it feels very deadly. That threat of death has a number of benefits to the game, not least that it keeps me focused and involved with the game.

But in objective terms, it's not deadly at all. We've been playing for half a year now, and no one's died. Honestly, it wouldn't be all that much fun if it death were a regular thing; beyond the usual fuss of coming up with a new character and re-integrating her into the ongoing campaign, one of the things I enjoy most about the game is learning about and interacting with the NPCs, and there wouldn't be much point to that if they were getting eaten or poisoned or whatever all the time.

Still, even despite that, the game feels ridiculously dangerous. Partly, this is just me as a player: I worry about stuff, even if it's not that huge of a risk. But more important is the fact that the main reason no one's died yet is what Trollsmyth calls "get of jail free" cards.

We've got a number of them in this game. Shields Shall Be Splintered is one; if I'm remembering correctly, the party's lost two shields so far, both times to nasty, horrible critters that probably would have killed us otherwise. The Table of Death and Dismemberment is another, and it's simultaneously comforting (having rolled on the table a few times myself, I know the odds of insta-death are actually pretty low) and terrifying (since Labyrinth Lord would otherwise be a dismemberment-free ruleset.) And, of course, there's more specific (and weirder) ones, like the potion that restores all hit points, neutralizes most poisons, cures most diseases. Then it changes your sex.

What all of these have in common is that they say, "next time you won't be so lucky." You won't have that shield, or that potion, or you won't roll as well on the table. The table in particular creates a moment of tension, as I wait for the DM to roll his dice -- and then another, one one of my allies hits the floor and I don't know yet whether he's just unconscious or completely dead.

And then, there's the fact that both the shield and the potion create decisions, which are to my mind the lifeblood of a good game. In the one case, deciding what weapon to wield gets a lot more interesting. In the other . . . as I discovered when it got used on Sunday, as if "death or sex change?" wasn't decision enough, since there is only the one, is "the first person to nearly die" really the criteria we should use to decide who gets it? Talk about roleplaying. I'm still kinda buzzed from that session.