In the Pipeline...

Some ideas about what's going on at LotFP: RPG as far as original published works...

The Creature Generator has been picked up for re-release, into retail stores, by a larger publisher... no names as of yet as they want to wait until there's a release date before making an announcement.

Deranged and Insane: The Lunatics of the Stone Hold Asylum adventure is currently in production. The artwork has been commissioned (Aino Purhonen again, with maps by Matthew James Stanham), as has the writing for the prop journal. The writing of the Asylum location is mostly done as well, which wasn't difficult since I'd had the entire thing written up for my home campaign in the first place.

Insect Shrine of Goblin Hill. I really need to cut the bullshit and get this done. I mean, really. It's a lot of different things thrown together, it is an ambitious project, but all of the personal grief that's now associated with this needs to be bypassed. I've commissioned 10 pieces of artwork from another local artist, Laura Kristiina Jalo (sample work here), so as that starts coming in, it should re-ignite my passion for getting it done... reading through some of the stuff I have here (I haven't even looked at the actual goblin hill/insect shrine bit in quite awhile) is just NUTS and I really need to let people see it. Some of the material from the inn portion of Insect Shrine has been submitted to Fight On! and hopefully it'll be in the upcoming issue.

And then I have crazy ideas for the next thing. (That's me, looking too far ahead, too soon!)

Buccaneers of the Bahamas!

OK, let me explain. This idea has been batting around my head for quite awhile. It would feature a few things:

• Frequent, if not constant, use of all those naval rules that never seem to get used. And lots of underwater action.
• Random island generation allowing for ongoing "sandbox" play and plenty of weird options - something that can be used for any seagoing adventures in any campaign, not just for use with this adventure (I'm real big on that, adventures that have material useful for more than just that adventure).
• A hands-off moral approach. The setting for the adventure is going to be based on the Carribean, hell it might BE the Carribean to go for a real historical angle, and that means there are slaves all over the place. It will be upfront but the adventure will not pass judgement. It will even force some squickiness: Slaves are possessions which have value. The game gives experience for treasure gained. So some "treasure" will be... slaves. Will the PCs treat the slaves as property and therefore see them as a source of experience or not? An evil little question designed to create a little tension at the game table.

I'm hoping to have the Asylum thing out in the summer with Insect Shrine fast on its heels, and then if the seaborne adventure indeed follows that up (and I won't start work on that until the other two are FINISHED), before the end of the year.

So realistically, maybe before 2010. Dammit.

Stupid Question...

Why are the works that purport to be "publishing enablers" all written, laid out, and presented as if they were games in and of themselves?

If the idea is to present a game, fair enough. If the idea is to allow third party products of a specific flavor, shouldn't they be made up of lists and "how-to" guides?

Branding and Marketing for Future Releases!

... so is this a great idea or a C&D magnet? :P

LotFP: RPG Audio Promo

I Hate Fun

(see also the May 12, 2009 look back: I Hate Fun - One Year Later)

I hate what I like.

I like cookies and McDonald’s and chocolate. I like Godzilla movies and all those fucking direct-to-video horror movies that only an idiot would look at and think, “Gee, let’s rent this!” I like sitting at the computer for hours on end playing Civilization IV.

It’s shit. It’s all shit. It doesn’t enrich my life in any way, but it does turn my brain off, quickly, conveniently, easily, cheaply. No effort. What it all does is separate myself from living life and reduces it to passing time. It distracts me and detaches me from the only thing I have – life - and therefore it is no good. Instead of doing, and being, all too often I am seeking sensory stimulation. Artificial feelings, stimulated most effectively through passively consuming things that other people have done.

The very idea of wanting to be entertained is an exercise in self-nullification.

I want more. I want that doing, I want that being, and I want it in a way that gives my life significance. I want engagement in the things I do, and I want meaning in the things I engage with. I want all the feelings that entertainment artificially instills in me, but I want them to be genuine.

Engagement and meaning is commonly attributed to those terrible things known as other people.

I can’t socialize. I won’t. It’s embarrassing enough to know that I waste substantial periods of my life seeking and accepting entertainment, being mentally comatose instead of being active and involved in my own life. How am I supposed to be exposed to other people behaving this way and have a shred of respect for them? I want to just shake them. “We are real people, we are together! We don’t have to be alone, dead in mind, vacant in spirit! We should do, we should create! Support each other in our times of weakness and make our mark in the world, for we are Human!”

But no. Much of our interactions with others is simply wasting more time, being entertained, sometimes being entertained by discussing entertainment which has been previously experienced. Maybe everybody even gets entertained together, focusing their attention on some thing while under the impression that they’re spending time with someone else. Nobody really discusses anything, nobody explores ideas together, nobody fucking does anything in their spare time with each other. Individual pools of waste are flooded by entertainment to become great lakes of worthlessness.

The problem is made all the more frustrating by the fact that people realize this. They know they are watching crap, but they watch it “because nothing else is on.” They know that eating another bag of potato chips is against their best interest and could even contribute to the ending of their lives, but those things just tastes so good, don’t they?

People settle for garbage because it is convenient to do so and we have all been trained to think that “effort” is “work,” and “work” should be reserved for those times when you’re laboring for the benefit of someone else in order to collect your paycheck. Work and effort outside of employment is a waste of time, so relax, sit back, and passively consume entertainment – you deserve it after all of that hard work you’ve done!

People have convinced themselves that they have no time. Today’s lifestyle is busy, on-the-go, so today’s entertainment had better be as fast-paced and compact as possible to deal with it!

This cycle of disempowerment and uselessness has crept into every facet of society, and it is no good. Change is constant in life, but not all change is progress. For all of the pressure placed on people, the final responsibility for their lives is theirs alone. Being influenced by others is a choice that is made. And rising above all of the negative, defeating influences is a choice to be made as well.

Deny passive entertainment. Demand to be engaged, enriched, and fulfilled by your hobbies and by the people you choose to associate with.

Reject convenience for convenience’s sake. It is all good and well to do things for yourself faster and better. It is no good to hand the doing over to somebody or something else so you are no longer putting in the effort at all. Know the difference and what it means to your life.

***

I wrote that about a year ago for the introduction of the next (and still unreleased… *sigh*) issue of the LotFP metal mag. I went on to describe how this mentality was killing the heavy metal spirit within the heavy metal scene as it once again rose to mainstream prominence. It also expresses a lot of my frustration with life, having all this energy and free time and want to do something but only able to find people who are being passive; the doers seem to have better people to be around already.

Throwing my hat into the “writing about RPGs” ring last month, I had a bit of a revelation… with metal, I was writing about something that I discovered after leaving high school, and had no ability to actually participate in – I was an observer, and a listener, and my writing was a means to be active within the scene. With RPGs, I can perform the core activity I’m writing about, and I’ve been doing so since I was eight years old. A quarter of a century. I’m much more qualified for this (not that I won’t stop writing about that).

And thinking about some blogging subjects, I came back to this old intro. It applies to RPGs just as much, if not more, as it does to music.

People want to be entertained by their role-playing, people want to sit down and get what they want out of it every time, and they want it quickly. They don’t want to work for it, and they don’t want to risk that it won’t happen when they try to play.

This is how I’ve come to interpret people when they use the word “fun” in relation to role-playing games. People wanting quick-fix, feel good entertainment exactly as they like it with as little effort as possible.

And I hate it.

Fun, in the context of RPG discussions, is like some Orwellian inversion of meaning (speaking of which, how big of an example of this is a certain internet forum's use of the word badwrongfun? It shuts down discussion and makes it clear that thinking that anything is important is foolish - no criticism or education allowed!). So much so, that I think that people who talk about "fun" in RPGs are destroying the hobby. Because fun ruins RPGs, much like it ruins everything else that requires time, imagination, and a fair bit of concentration.

Think about how often you see people on internet message boards talking about things which “get in the way of their fun.” What do they mean by that, really? Are they looking for the real satisfaction or the quick fix?

This is a particularly insightful read, talking about the “tyranny of fun” and how it cheapens role-playing games. It’s also why having an attitude of live and let live doesn’t work – those who demand everything easy and quickly will always outnumber those that don’t, and pretty soon a hobby that was custom-made for the studious and imaginative and thorough now belongs to an entirely different caste, while those of us that the hobby was created for are left on the fringes, told that we’re just not compatible with today’s gaming, and sometimes, even today’s life in general.

Fuck that. Fuck that. This hobby is ours. These other types can come and play and we’ll welcome them with open arms and show them the way if they ask, but to dictate fast-food mentality in my imaginative tools… that means war.

“Tyranny of fun” nails it – role-playing companies, in their doomed efforts in ignoring the anomalous nature of role-playing’s mainstream popularity of the 80s, target the type of people that aren’t well-suited for role-playing to buy their products. Because lets face it… it takes a certain something odd to be a real role-player. “Nerd” and “geek” and such are not terms of endearment, they are insults, but they do prove the point that we’re not normal everyday types. Now being different (or even abnormal) isn’t a negative thing – don’t confuse it with the mythical catpissman or lawncrapper – as it doesn’t preclude us from having a job, friends, and girlfriends (before we complain that I’m being sexist by assuming most gamers are male… first, fucking duh, of course we are - look at the source material, and second, what gamer girl ever had a problem finding a social group to fit into?). But pretending we’re normal and just anyone can pick up this hobby and enjoy it, without making wholesale changes to it, is simply nonsense.

Yeah, that sounds elitist, and it’s meant to. Elitism is not a bad thing, especially when it comes to something that you can choose to do, or not. Anyone can choose to role-play, but not so many are willing to explore the source material of role-playing and not many are willing to really immerse themselves in the game experience. Their choice, and pretending they’re the same as the people who really get serious about this stuff is just insane. I proclaim role-playing to be something based on its origins, and that no matter how things have changed –

Stop right there! Tangent time!

Never let anyone say that the game has “evolved.” It hasn’t. Ever. Maybe the way you play it has evolved, maybe, but the game itself hasn’t. You could say it evolved if you took the same book from the shelf and suddenly a rule was mysteriously different here and there, more and more, as the years go by. That doesn’t happen. The game is changed, intentionally, for better or worse. Changed, by people doing the changing. It’s not an accident, it’s not an evolution. It didn’t have to happen. It’s willful alteration.

Got that? Don’t let people get away with the “evolved” line. Always confront and correct. Sure, you’ll be seen as an asshole if you do, but it seems to me that it is better to be an asshole for challenging this wording than it is to passively accept being sort of genetic throwback Neanderthal freak since you haven’t kept up with the “evolution.”

Not evolution. “Intelligent” design.

Back to your previously scheduled rant:

– the best role-players are the ones that take it seriously, make it important in their lives, and give it their all. People who do this are the most important part of any hobby. You want to be a casual gamer? Fine. But don’t expect the same level of deference and respect that a lifer is going to get. Those who take their activities seriously are the only ones who matter.

But in reality, people who take things seriously and who actually become knowledgeable and who actually expect newcomers to respect tradition and who expect newcomers to actually learn something and who discourage equal treatment for every dumb shit that falls off the turnip truck… they are insulted by the turnip truckers. Peer pressure is important and there are a whole lot more dumb shit fun-seekers who balk at the idea of “fun” being related to “effort” and “investment of time” than there are people who want to learn and be immersed in their hobby as a whole, not just while they’re goofing off with some pals on a Saturday night. And companies want to be successful. They don’t realize that industries built on hobbies, especially this one, are fucked. It’s not a respect issue. Role-playing is done from the ground up, not from the top down, that’s how it started, and that’s how it exists. You know the argument, “Oh, if only RPGs were respected, then they’d generate a lot of money for the people that make them and all our products would be better!” How do you gain the respect? Marginalize and hide the people that take RPGs seriously. They’ll turn off the “normals” who would spend the serious money.

How do you nudge out the lifers and encourage more casual play? Absolute balance. Be able to participate equally in all ways, right out of the box. By making sure that there are plenty of hard and fast rules to master, instead of dealing with nebulous, ill-defined guidelines that make a human being, the referee, the final arbiter of a game. Rules, people can understand. Like chess! The closer you get to true shared imagined space, the more the man on the street freaks out and rejects, and the more companies see imaginary “what if” dollars going elsewhere. Also, you entice more casual play by having less harsh consequences in a game. You get the elimination of save-or-die, or level drains, or equipment destruction mechanics or creatures, because these could give a “negative experience” to those that believe that you “win” the game by always being successful.

It’s like these people don’t even know that “winning” in role-playing is done simply by enjoying the process of playing the game. Yeah, it’s more gratifying (dare I say “fun”) to succeed, but death and failure are hardcoded into the very essence of the game for a reason. It’s not the amusement park cheap thrill of simulated or illusionary danger… make a bad decision, rely on luck to get you by, and the danger smacks your character down.

But people out there have gotten the idea that if their precious imaginary equipment owned by their precious imaginary man is taken away from them, their fun has been sabotaged! And the game designers are listening.

The clue phone is ringing, and it’s a collect call for these fun-seekers: YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO LIKE IT. Goddamn, risk and challenge and failure are as much part of role-playing as prancing around like Errol Flynn… er, sorry, Legolas (sorry, wouldn’t want to make a reference that the average modern person wouldn’t know off the top of their head) or something. Shit out there is trying to KILL YOU and there are critters out there that will fuck you up but good if you’re unlucky or not careful.

What part of, “The giant spider bites you… oh, you blew your save… roll up a new character!” is supposed to be fun or heroic? Obviously the game was built on a different type of satisfaction. But these people don’t want to spend their time figuring out challenges (that’s part of that large percentage of “not-fun” time that’s being had in the average session of old-fogey D&D, right?), they want to charge right in. They must, if they’re always getting their shit rusted, or their levels drained, or poisoned, or what have you. If they’re not getting nicked by these things, they wouldn’t complain, right?

The point isn’t to make role-playing some sort of masochistic experience where it’s all suffering and death and pain and failure. The point is, if all these things are real and present dangers, then success means more. And I think it’s telling that so many people reject this idea. Assigning value to in-game success seems to be something embarrassing to a lot of people, like a RPG is just supposed to be some interchangeable entertainment option to play with friends alongside a console system or Scrabble or watching a movie, with no worth or value in and of itself. I’ve already given my thoughts on this. Nothing beyond the barest essentials of life (food and water) has inherent meaning. Meaning is given to things and experiences by people. And assigning meaning to role-playing is not something to be ashamed of! It is a social game that strengthens social bonds, it exercises the imagination and encourages reading and knowledge and it is not a passive experience and nothing in the experience is just handed to you.

Take the introduction to Mentzer’s Basic Set. It is the finest introduction for D&D that was ever penned, explaining the basics of everything from classes and their abilities to combat in just seven pages – of storyform prose, not rules blather. And the first-time D&D player has an 80% chance to fail that saving throw against Bargle’s spell. An 80% chance of losing. Aleena dies. You can’t save her. You must run from the ghouls or you die. Some would say that traditional Dungeons and Dragons was poorly designed because first level characters were weak and that there was an uneven playing experience. It never seems to occur to these people that traditional Dungeons and Dragons was designed perfectly and that play experience was intentional. Mentzer’s introduction shows what Dungeons and Dragons is all about, and it’s not flashy heroism. It was never about that until Gygax was removed.

You’re not playing a game pretending to navigate your playing piece (called “a character”) through some story where you get to be the hero! You are using the rules to pretend to be someone and experience and react as that person would through a dangerous world. Nothing more, and nothing less. If you want to be the hero… then you get to try. To guarantee success is to defeat the entire purpose of role-playing.

Some will try to say that “Each edition of D&D is based on the common fantasy tropes of the time it was released.” That’s just ignorant bullshit. Dungeons and Dragons was built on classic archetypes (with some game elements added on) and literature that was decades, in some cases almost a century, old by the time Dungeons and Dragons came around. It was built to be timeless, not timely. And some of the more important influences, say Leiber and Lovecraft, certainly didn’t feature success as a common theme. And it certainly wasn’t all honor and glory, what with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Conan and Cugel being thieves (and worse as far as Conan is concerned). Yet the focus wasn’t limited – there was still the influence of Tolkien and Poul Anderson and Lord Dunsany for the more positive, and even dreamier sides of fantasy. You could do it all with Dungeons and Dragons, back in the day. Nothing was excluded. And this is what Dungeons and Dragons was, focused through rules that sprung out of the wargaming culture.

As the game was altered through the years, this was lost. I don’t know why it was decided that games sold in the form of number-filled books with fancy vocabulary would appeal more to people that didn’t care to actually read literature, but that’s what happened. Real choice in the manner of game play was lost, or at least obscured and made more difficult to achieve, all the while increasing the options for individual characters… That was a great trick, giving players the illusion of more choice and increasing the detail and complexity of the rules while slapping the handcuffs on the game itself. Brilliant. Fuckers.

But while Gygaxian D&D was forged from classic stories, with the perfect capacity to deal with the current fads (and that’s where Tolkien comes into D&D, as a secondary “hip” source to lure the kiddies in, not as a core component), the next generation of clueless imbeciles decided to tell us what D&D was all about. It inevitably led, as did most fantasy fiction, to using Tolkien as the core. Grand quests. Heroics. And then it fed on itself. D&D became “literature,” which then influenced the game. D&D basically created most of the video game and personal computing industries (you think people at home were upgrading their computers to play the neat new version of Space Invaders, or were they wanting the sweet, sweet graphics from a particular version of Bard’s Tale?), which was easier to pick up and play with no investment of time or knowledge… and so then D&D took from that as well. If it was done to add to the current influences, maybe, maybe, it would have worked. But the new influences replaced the influences that created D&D, and what’s more the modern influences are seen as competition, so aren’t even explicitly mentioned. So D&D becomes more and more an ungrounded “adventure” game designed to be mindless entertainment, to only be taken seriously by the “professionals” who will lay out a specific path to “fun.”

It’s already been discussed to death how D&D has been retroactively described by its detractors as a hack and slash game, and how that description is dead wrong, as played by the people that created the damn game. We’ve seen how D&D increasingly makes the criticism come alive, making D&D more about encounters and carefully balanced tactical encounters than anything else, and we see that the same people who decried D&D as a hackfest now embrace it for being specifically built as a hackfest.

It is rather unfortunate that Dungeons and Dragons had the subtitle “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” It’s a historical problem that the term “role-playing game” (or any other suitable term to differentiate it from the wargaming hobby that was still in full swing) wasn’t used, as role-playing wasn’t its own genre at the time. It certainly wasn’t a wargame in any real sense, and Gygax (at least – I don’t know about Arneson), co-creator and writer of the actual text, didn’t even use miniatures! But this is another example of the instant-gratification crowd these days. The problem isn’t that they don’t know, I have no problem with people who are simply new, the problem is the people who don’t care to know and become insulted when informed that their assumptions are dead fucking wrong. But it would be inconvenient to research all this shit, and why bother when possessing this knowledge will make you some sort of weirdo and doesn't support what you've already made up your mind to do?

It's a pain in the ass to deal with people who have a "been there, done that, and found it immature" attitude when they don't even know where there is or what that even entails. Fucking hell, it's like someone not wanting to visit China for the Olympics for fear of the fallout from the two atomic bombs that got dropped there during World War II.

It’s time to stand up, and it’s time to make some noise. It’s time to stand up and stop letting the lies about the origins of our game, which are the origins of the entire hobby, spread. It’s time to stop letting the people who have no intention of taking all of this seriously dictate terms and create the labels. I’m tired of it.

“Old D&D is for old people.” I’m 33 and I’m not even as old as Arneson or Gygax were when Dungeons and Dragons was originally released… and their target audience was people like them. But, lest you say “people in their thirties are old,” remember that Gygax ran the game, in its original, pre-published form, for his kids. Original D&D, while it encouraged (and almost demanded) source material reading, was itself not very much reading compared to what came after.

Kill the misconceptions and the falsehoods. Stop taking the abuse caused by the assumption that “current” D&D is the “real” D&D and that everything that came before is some sort of 8-track equivalent relic. Hasbro may have a legal claim to the “Dungeons and Dragons” name, but they certainly have no moral claim to it. A multinational corporation (who aren’t interested in the “game” as much as the “intellectual property” it affords) bought a smaller game company, none of whose founders are still with the company, who bought another game company, none of whose founders were still with the company, and in fact the creators of the game in question that started this chain were forced from that company at different points. Stop acting like we’re guests in their house when it’s the exact opposite. Stand up, and when people complain that we seem to not recognize their “alternate playstyle,” (especially when they sure as hell aren't recognizing our playstyles, and "you play your way and we'll play our way" is dismissal, not recognition) tell them they better learn what the fuck they’re talking about before they get to say anything.

And this isn't directed at the stupid or the willfully ignorant. It's not even directed at those that know what they are talking about, know their history, explored their options, and decided the new stuff is better for them. No. Their minds are made up. The purpose of standing up and making noise is for the silent crowd that watches from the sidelines. We need to make sure our game isn't defined by people who don't like it, we have to be visible and make noise so these people see the earlier versions of the game are being played and are perfectly viable options for them. We have to make sure they know there is a history and a legacy and a depth to this hobby which can be explored. That there is life in this hobby beyond the shiny new release, which is to be given up once the trademark overlords decide it has outlived its usefulness and decides to create an even shinier, newer release. The silent crowd should always be reminded that the "industry" can never dictate the possibilities at their game table. If we manage to enlighten those actively dancing in the shadows, then yay, but that's not really the point.

So go home, casual players, and take your “fun” with you. For those of you who gain enjoyment from a more involved experience, or at least the attempt at such… welcome. There is much to gain, from everything you ever do on this planet, by digging deeper, discovering traditions, and realizing there is a way that things can, and perhaps even should, be done that often do not coincide with the ways that give the easiest and quickest pleasure.

Oh what are you gonna do
When there's a part of you
That needs to run with the wind

And the fire of burning yesterdays
Can only light the way
To lead you from
The garden of the dark
Stay out of shadows

Now look like the change is on
Tomorrow's never gone
Today just never comes

Go on and jump, yeah
Into the hurricane
You will forget the pain
It's only there
To exorcise your mind

Looking at the world
When you've opened up your eyes
You've got to see the promises they've made
They're bloody lies and broken dreams
Your silence screams

You're living in a time machine
And you can choose just who you are
Someone that you've never seen
Somewhere you've never been
You're living in a time machine

Oh what are you gonna do
When every part of you
Just needs to catch the wind

And the fire of burning yesterdays
Can only light the way
To lead you from
The garden of the dark

Looking for the world
When you've opened up your eyes
You'll see you've got invisible chains
They're only lies
Not what it seems
I hear your silent screams

You're living in a time machine
Nobody cares just where you go
Taken where you've never been
Somewhere you don't know

You're living in a time machine
Why do you stay who you are
Be what you've never been
Someone you've never seen
You're living in a time machine
Yeah

“Time Machine” from Black Sabbath’s Dehumanizer

"4E is like hair metal! It's a gateway for some people to something of value." - Matt Johnsen

First Level Appropriate Challenges

So the other thing that I'm not sure what to do about in my upcoming campaign...

What do the PCs do at first level?

First level characters are not weak. When you compare them to a party of regular men-at-arms, it's pretty obvious that a first level party has it all over a regular bunch of mercenaries.

But first level characters aren't very well suited for extended adventuring. A single blow from a normal melee weapon can potentially take the toughest PC out of the fight when they're first level. The difference between a one sided fight (in the PCs' favor) and a massacre (in the monsters' favor) can come down to initiative. You just can't risk violence and expect to come out of an adventure alive.

Which is as it should be. A brand new first level party is not a group of heroes-in-training. They're a bunch of talented yobbos who are about to hit that crossroads: Wealth and power, or death. And nobody knows which it'll be. PC death when everyone is first level should be a constant concern and a probability more than a possibility. Handing anything to the players cheapens advancement and levels, and I like the idea of a group of 4th or 5th level characters knowing that the wasted meat of dozens of would-be adventurers prove the point of how dangerous this life is.

But first level really does encourage the 15 minute adventuring day. In one encounter, the magic-user is pretty much guaranteed to use his one spell, and if anyone takes any hit for more than 1 or 2 hit points' damage, then the cleric is going to use his one spell (which is almost always cure light wounds, right?)... if the cleric gets that first level spell at all. If more than one person is hurt, the party has to pull back.

So what's the answer? More NPC interactions to decrease the physical danger? Yeah, they'll be at first level forever for all the XP that way of playing provides - and I go for the Monsters + Treasure method of granting experience... no "story awards" because I shouldn't be encouraging them to move along any particular storyline.

Then there's the Puzzle Dungeon. Give them puzzles and tricks and traps that may be avoided. There is always danger but it's danger in avoidable form. This can keep things interesting but giving so much treasure away in places like this to allow everyone to level up just seems like handwaving first level.

How do the original modules do it? They create grinders. Fresh-off-the-turnip-truck first levelers are going to get squashed walking into the moathouse near Homlett, or marching straight into an orc cave in the Caves of Chaos... not to mention the impossibility of the Horror on the Hill, the large enemy encounter groups in Palace of the Silver Princess and more.

Remember the opening starter bit in Mentzer's Basic set: Character death. Remember the example of play in the 1E DMG: Character death.

The poor bastards were never supposed to face "first level challenges" in a way that they really have a chance to survive as a group with no casualties!

... and here I was considering a "pest control" adventure with a bunch of giant rats and giant centipedes for the "first level" appropriate challenge.

Nah.

So then... what?

The Definitive Explanation of Alignments - Almost... Plus: About Blogs!

Advanced Gaming and Theory's June 9 post is all about alignments. It's always grated on me that people seem to think alignment is... well... I don't know. Every version of D&D treats alignment differently for some dang reason.

(And wouldn't you know it... I left a note about my criticism on the blog, and the criticism was listened to and the blog was changed for the better! Egads! Egads! I'm not used to people actually listening to me! But the actual article was merely a springboard for many of my points, so... go read the article, it's really good, and also note the points I make below, they're really good too, but realize they remark on content that has been since changed...)

AG&T's post starts off strong and reading through the description of the Law vs Chaos axis, I get the feeling that we finally have gotten something definitive on alignment that's both usable and makes perfect sense.

Then the fact that this is for AD&D 2E gets in the way. AG&T is a 2E resource blog, meaning it's for 1E but with the evocative parts sanded off for general consumption. I originally meant for that to be a joke, but take a look at what happens when the article shifts to the Good vs Evil axis... it falls apart and ceases to be description or analysis. It says that evil will always lose, it turns into a "soapbox" (AG&T's words) about how Evil is just not good (so to speak) to play, and the article really just derails and ceases to be a useful discussion of alignment at that point. But because the article is about the nine-point alignment system, it's impossible to use the Law/Chaos portion for the games that use just that axis for alignment purposes.

I call for Mr. Ripper X (dude, it's really awful to write such in-depth, and usually well thought-out articles on a regular basis and have the byline be some ridiculous pseudonym... sign your damn work) to re-think and revise, because he's onto something here and there will be value in doing this right.

This does remind me about one of the reasons why I hate blogs in general, and why my daily reading of about a dozen blogs now is frequently nothing more than an exercise in frustration. Blogs aren't written rigorously (and make no mistake, my blog is no better than the rest and worse than some in this regard). Sometimes they are useful or profound, but the format doesn't promote such a thing. They are flashes of thought, thrown out there for discussion. That's not a bad thing by any means, but it seems that yesterday's blog is yesterday's news, never to be revisited and never to be developed further. I think that's why I like Grognardia so much. It was the blog that showed me that blogs weren't just flighty piles of mental flatulence (and made me think that perhaps I could have a blog myself that wasn't a worthless pile of poo - although that's for you, the dear sweet reader, to decide). And Maliszewski's ideas build. I really think (hope) he's building to something real (as in, beyond the scope of having a blog) with everything he's talking about, something that will reflect the discovery and pontification he indulges in within his blog.

But I think a lot of us out here in blogland should recognize what we're doing. There are a lot of good raw ideas out there... but there is no reason they should be left as raw ideas. Taking our blogs as statements of intent, we should be writing actual articles on these subjects, and then finding a forum (no, not a web forum!) to properly publish them.

I find it rather insulting to the concept of "publishing" that these blog posts are considered "publishing" by blogspot (or blogger or what the hell ever the name of this site is)... this button down here that says "Publish Post"... who the hell are we kidding? Let's face it, blogging encourages laziness. How many blog posts do we see in our little "old-school" sphere that consist of nothing more than linking to someone else's blog when we find a particular entry interesting? If you're already linking to a blog, your recommendation that readers of your blog read their blog is implicit, and it's just taking up space and acting "current" (I didn't do a blog today, oh noes, I'm going to lose readers/I'll look like I've got the lazies/My relevance is going down the intertubes!!!!!) to then point out a particular post on an already-linked blog... unless you have further commentary on the matter. Turning someone else's thoughts into a starting point and springboard for your own thoughts, well, that's "the blogosphere" (stupid, stupid, stupid word) working as it should. But it only works if it is just a starting point and a springboard.

So if everything works as it should, you've either got a a solid, worked and re-worked essay that you've done yourself, or you've got an article that's been made by several people who have all gone in different directions andexpanded upon the potential of the original idea. What now?

Publish. For real. Fight On! takes open submissions. So does Dragonsfoot's Footprints. Note that both of those are D&D-oriented without using any license. Matthew Finch wants to get an OGL counterpart to Fight On! off the ground. Those non-paying "for the cause" efforts for traditional games might make it easier to publish collaborative efforts without worrying about rights issues. There are the usual avenues for those who want to move into "more serious" or even "for profit" offers. Anything, anything, to make things carry more weight than the numerous thoughtless, or thoughtful yet underdeveloped, written work found on livejournal, blogspot, and whatever the hell else is out there.

Because the internet isn't real, and the stuff found solely on the internet isn't real stuff. I don't believe in virtual reality. Nothing that goes away without electricty is real. It's just stuff with the potential to be real, it's a tool to help unreal things become real. And few things are as tragic as unfulfilled potential.

Mike Mornard Takes Your Questions!

Mike Mornard, the (only?) guy who played D&D under Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and Phil Barker, is taking general questions concerning the early days of the game. He started playing with these guys before the game was ever published, so he might know a thing or two...

Other notables to have Q&As going online are Dave Arneson, Rob Kuntz, David Cook, Tracy Hickman, Steve Marsh, Tim Kask, James Ward, and Frank Mentzer.

Gygax himself used to have such threads on Dragonsfoot (check out the archive here), Enworld, and the Trolllord boards. And it's a shame that he's no longer here to answer questions.

These other guys are still here. If you've got a question, ask.

Tools of the Trade

My campaign tools!

First up is the rulebook. I'm using the Basic Fantasy RPG, but I prefer digest (or its European cousin, the A5) sized books for ease of handling and transportation, and coil binding for stays-open-on-the-table use. Now, BFRPG makes this easy: It is downloadable as an Open Office document as well as a pdf, so grabbing the text in order to do a new layout is convenient and easy. The booklet shown here was done using the version 64 rules, and I'll be doing up a few of the latest version (65 is out, 66, or BFRPG Second Edition, is out soon) when the game starts.

Next up is basic supplies. Pictured is a pad of graph paper (fun fact: graph paper, not lined paper, is standard in notebooks here in Finland so I didn't need to lug my graph paper all the way from the States), a regular notebook (again smaller sized), and a mechanical pencil. I normally don't use mechanical pencils, but finding an electric pencil sharpener in Finland seems to be harder than finding a virgin in a whorehouse...

Next up is dice. After moving to Helsinki, I bought a new set of dice (from Fantasiapelit, a most excellent game store), which is the white set (my "paladin set") pictured. But whenever I travel to a new town and visit a game store there, I must buy a set of dice. I'm in Lappeenranta this week (yes, I bring my basic gaming supplies with me when I travel... what?), and I visited the Fantasiapelit here (not nearly as impressive as the one in Helsinki, but the town is 1/20th the size) intending to buy a set of metal dice. They just have a great *clunk* factor hitting the table. But I wanted the silver ones, not the copper or the gold. They only had the copper and the gold! So what to buy? When I was in Lappeenranta in January, I had bought a pricey set of "rune" dice, that were embellished with all sorts of cool looking nonsense. But they weren't all that easy to read at the table! And I didn't want just another normal set of dice... so when I saw the really big set of dice (those blue ones in the picture), I had to have them! I chose blue because I don't have a set of blue dice and never have... And these rather large dice are for more than novelty value. I make most rolls in plain sight, but when using normal-sized dice, only the people sitting right next to me can see the rolls... maybe if I use the bigger dice, more people at the table will be able to see it, which really makes rolling out in the open more effective.

The referee screen is in the back of the shot. This screen is actually an AD&D 1e screen (with the 1983 DMG cover as an illustration, not the older one with the really cool wraparound painting) with a pasted-on sheet with all the Unearthed Arcana Weapon vs AC Type tables on there. I won't actually use the screen for rules or charts since I'm using a bit of a different system, but having a proper screen is still cool anyway.

The 1E DMG is absolutely indispensible for any D&D referee! The amount of pure inspiration and arcane lore, even if you're not using the rules, is simply awesome. Extensions of some of this stuff, such as Troll Lord's Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds series (which I don't cart around the country when I travel), are also most helpful.

The Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Role-Playing Games and Their Modern Simulacra. Really, if I wasn't going to use it in my game, I'd have no right trying to sell it to you to use in yours.

... plus my brain, but, well... you wouldn't want to see a picture of that.

Character Death

hmmm.

So the campaign is going to begin soon, probably in the next couple weeks. I've got everything figured out except for two things...

One of the things I haven't figured out is how to handle character death. Early edition D&D is deadly, and the Basic systems deadliest. When any successful weapon strike could potentially kill any first level character, there will be character deaths. Or maybe continuously if they don't learn that "CHARGE!" isn't often going to be the smart thing to do. ;) I figure I'm going to tell the group to not even put their characters on a proper character sheet until they hit second level - when the characters level up, the players will feel a sense of accomplishment.

When a character dies... what to do?

Obviously the player rolls up a new character and re-enters play immediately. But... what's the death penalty?

In my AD&D campaign, the new character was to be one level less than the dead character, with the minimum experience for that level. In my last BFRPG campaign, PCs got to keep the last level they gained, and the new character, of whatever class, begins again with the minimum XP for that level.

I'm torn. I believe there should be a penalty for character death. Not that it matters much if you lose a first level character (and a healthy boatload of early PC deaths does demonstrate how powerful - or heroic - a higher level character really is, instead of just making it a background assumption like games where PCs have "plot protection"), but what to do about higher level PCs that bite the big one?

Raise Dead/Resurrection is going to be very rare or non-existent in my campaign. Dead is dead.

If the penalty is too steep (everyone automatically starts as a 1st level character, from scratch), then it's going to be more of a pain in the ass for all the PCs to adventure together. If the penalty is too slight, then perhaps the players won't take too good care of their characters...

So where's the balance?

One idea is that the PC would take control of one of their retainers/henchmen... which would encourage players to take them on in the first place, and they'd perhaps be a bit more enthusiastic about the same soaking up experience and treasure... and take good care of them.

Any other ideas out there?

Old School

Found an interesting movie at the rental place today... Hatchet... listen to this tagline...

"It's not a remake. It's not a sequel. And it's not based on a Japanese one! Old School American Horror"

Interesting that everything I'm interested in has a tendency to re-invent itself so much that there is true value in shrugging off everything modern about it and embracing what came before with open arms... and it's interesting that doing so can be a marketing decision, even if the "old school" values advertised are complete bullshit.

I liked Hatchet, by the way. It's a true gross-out, and even though it has a lot of humor, it's all situational and not at all wink-wink hipster irony.

(oh, and that Night of the Living Dead anniversary edition from the 90s with the newly-shot footage? Total shit. Fuckin hell.)