Retreat Forward

I’ve come to believe that a roleplaying game that codifies too many of its rules actually limits the creativity of players and GMs. I’m not commenting on the idea of complicated vs simple rules. 3E or Pathfinder aren’t necessarily any simpler than AD&D, which is full of elaborate and sometimes clunky rules systems. What I’m talking about here is the deliberate codifying of game design and character design into the rules in a way that’s meant to reward so-called hardcore players. In 3E, this kind of rule takes place mostly off-stage (i.e. outside of the actual play experience). You don’t select feats during game play, you take them between sessions. Once the game begins you’re stuck with what you’ve got. It’s during your down time that you plan out your character’s next level, decide the best multiclassing route, figure out how to gain the most synergy bonuses to your skills, etc. The GM, on the other hand, has ready-made rules to help guide his creative process. An experien...

I must admit that when I first started looking at the rules for older versions of D&D, I found the idea of race as class strange and laughable. I get this same reaction from a lot of gamers when I broach the subject. One of my friends here gets a bemused look on his face whenever he mentions “that version of D&D where Elf is a class.” Look, I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid on any one version of D&D being “superior.” One is certainly free to prefer whichever version of D&D one likes best, for whatever reason. Please don't pretend that the things you like about your favorite flavor of the game makes it objectively better than other versions. That's a tired, tired philosophy and I have no interest in discussing it. Your opinion is perfectly valid, but that doesn't mean you should dismiss a game mechanic out of hand. Speaking of opinions, here's why I've come around to liking race-as-class in D&D. Since the first edition of AD&D and ...

I really have no excuse. I've been busy, sure, sometimes working 12 or 13 hour days. You know what, though? I'm supposed to be retreating forward here. Not standing still. I've got a posting philosophy change and a bit of a schedule that I think will keep me honest. More posts to follow, hopefully tomorrow, definitely by the weekend.

The following is a short bit of flavor that may (or may not) explain how magic works in my home-brew fantasy world of Terren. It's based on stuff I wrote here. The Elements The material world is comprised of five elements. The first four, called the corporeal or lower elements, are earth, air, fire, and water. These elements, combined in various pairings and ratios, are the building blocks that make up everything in the physical world. The fifth element, called aether, is sometimes known as the celestial or higher element. Aether, like air, is invisible and largely intangible. It does not exist on its own, but instead can be found within other things. A man's body is made of flesh (earth), blood (air), bile (fire), and phlegm (water); his soul is made of aether. Without the soul, the body is just an empty husk. Therefore, aether is the spark of life. Tied closely with the concept of aether is an invisible energy scholars call mana. In simplest terms, mana is a kin...

I have a long-running joke with a friend of mine. It basically boils down to mocking the way one creates characters in the Marvel Super Hero RPG . The version that I owned really pressured players to assume the role of the established heroes of the Marvel comic books (at least, it seemed to 12 year old me that it did). The trouble is, no one I know wants to do that in a super hero game. They want to make their own guys. It's more than half the fun. Don't get me wrong. It's neat to bump into established supers from time to time. While powerful NPCs are vexing in D&D, in a comic book game it's a treat to battle Doc Ock or meet the Human Torch at Applebee's. As far as running those characters, though? Heck no! I want to make my own. In Marvel Supers , at least the version that I owned, character creation was relegated to a back section. It was written as if the authors never expected you to actually use it. It was also completely random. Everything fr...

As I posted a while ago, I ran into a group of guys playing the old TSR Marvel Super Heroes game down at the food court. They invited me to play, but work commitments kept me from accepting their offer until today. Let me preface by saying that I had fun. The GM did a great job of making me feel like I was playing in a living, breathing comic book world that was unfolding all around my character. There was a lot of sandbox gaming going on, with a whole bunch of leads popping up all around us. We could have gone and investigated any of them and I'm sure they all would have turned up a bunch of adventures. I say that because I don't want it to seem like I didn't enjoy gaming with this friendly group of guys. I really did. However, I'm not sure that Marvel Supers is my favorite game. This is likely to be a longer post than it needs to be. I'll try to keep it to two parts. I used to own the Marvel Super Heroes Basic Boxed set. Man, did I save up and w...

One of the things I've always tried to do is take a look at the way D&D rules work and tried to adapt my world to fit those assumptions. That doesn't mean that I won't alter or houserule something that doesn't jibe with some setting detail that I'm particularly attached to, but I'm not interested in changing 30 plus years of D&D tropes unless I have a darn good reason. Better to flex my world to fit the rules. Cleric magic has always struck me as a good example of this kind of strangeness. With a few exemptions, clerics and magic-users (wizards, mages, whatever you want to call them) cast spells pretty much the exact same way. I think we can all agree that the D&D cleric is primarily based on the idea of a medieval Christian crusader, perhaps with some extra powers (i.e. spells) tacked on from various mythological and literary sources. Nowhere that I've read, however, do miracles work like D&D magic. So how do they work, why, and what do...

In conversation with another gamer that I chanced upon here in South Korea, he mentioned that he's not really a D&D fan. Instead, he seems to prefer games with a more storytelling, less random aspect to them. While not exactly my cup of tea, I don't believe in the One True Way or the dreaded Wrongbadfun. Thus, I was interested to hear a bit about his games of choice. He mentioned that, while he likes certain games, he prefers to run a system of his own invention. This got me thinking about our own tolerance for house rules and experimentation in RPGs run by other people. While I'm as obsessive a tinkerer as they come, I have always found it important to try to adhere to the core of the rules as written for whatever game I'm GMing at the time. When I add houserules (and I do), I try to keep them in the spirit of the original system and only add them for good reasons. This idea also applies to setting/genre tropes that may or may not be part of the rules. If...

Some time ago, the One Page Dungeon was the rage amongst all the OSR bloggers. I must admit that I find the concept intriguing. As fun as flavor text can be to read in an RPG book, I don’t think that “read aloud” sections of adventures actually work in gaming sessions. If I have to read anything more than a few sentences or a short paragraph to my players, I notice their eyes glass over. Worse still, they often miss key information, simply because reading verbose prose aloud is not a very good way to rely fine detail. Emotion, maybe, but fine detail? No. What I like about the One Page Dungeon more than the template itself is the idea behind it. Namely, anything you have to use as a referee of a roleplaying game should be presented as clearly, concisely, and quickly as possible. That’s why monsters in older D&D are easier to use than 3.5. No matter how well designed the statblock, it still takes a certain amount of brainpower to parse all those ability scores, a...

There is a really cool scene in the Fellowship of the Ring in which the heroes, floating down the river Anduin into Gondor, pass two giant marble statues. These are the Argonath, a pair of statues carved in the likeness of Isildur and Anarion. The statues mark the northern border of ancient Gondor and serve as a visual warning to her enemies as well as a reminder of Gondor's might. The Argonath aren't essential to the plot; they're little more than scenery, but the statues serve another purpose. Their presence reminds the viewer (or reader) that Middle Earth is an old world with thousands of years of history. The Argonath show us that Gondor was once a much larger and more powerful nation. They also tell a little something about Gondor's culture. A GM would do well to include such man-made wonders in his campaign, for many of the same reasons that Tolkein included the Argonath in his book. They make the world feel more alive; they're interesting to vi...

I'm running solo playtests of the upcoming DCC RPG on weekends here on post. Since I don't have a gaming group to speak of, I run everything myself; the player characters and the monsters. Last time I ran things in the comfort of the post library. For a change of scene, I decided to play in the food court today. As I was sitting there, rolling Game Science dice and scribbling notes on a piece of loose leaf paper, I looked at the table across from mine and noticed a bunch of percentile dice surrounding this: “Are you guys playing the Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game?” I asked. They were. Not only did I chance encounter a trio of gamers, but they were playing the last game I expected to see anyone playing over here. I've been searching for a month for people playing the most likely games: Pathfinder, 4E, even Warhammer 40K. But Marvel Supers? From 1985? That's unexpected. It turns out, one of the three players (one was even a GIRL!) does run Pathfinder. Em...

I've gotten off the d20 band wagon. It's kind of sad, in a way. As silly as this sounds, I think I was literally one of the earliest adopters of D&D Third Edition. Way back in 2000, I was an active reader on Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D Third Edition News. I can still remember the excitement of those times. If I think hard enough, I'm mentally transported back to the radio station where I worked as an overnight DJ. During down time, I'd surf onto Eric's site and read snippets of the upcoming 3E. I remember how new and different it all felt. Reflex saves, Base Attack Bonuses, Feats...all that stuff that is part of the gaming lexicon now was exotic and new. It was a new age in gaming, one that we'd never seen before. The grognards will tell you that the golden age of D&D was the late 1970s, and they're right. The early 2000s, though, was the age where the gap between the game designers and the players all but vanished. The internet was sti...

I watched the movie Super 8 last night. I enjoyed it, although I thought that it had the makings within it of a much better movie. Super 8 felt like the Goonies mixed with a modern, slightly scarier, ET. I don't want to give the wrong impression; the plots weren't the same, just the feelings. A group of ragtag kids run around in an adult world while scary government agents do X-Files stuff in a small town. Super 8 is trying to be more realistic than the movies that inspired it, the movies that producer Steven Spielberg made back in the 1980s. The result is more realistic but less memorable characters. The Goonies were almost archetypes. They even had evocative nicknames that reminded the viewer of their personalities: Chunk, Mouth, Data, even Sloth. The characters of Super 8 have normal names. They seem (with the exception of the improbably brave and clever protagonist) like kids you might know. More real? Yes, but less memorable. At the same time, the fantastic element...

Now that I have the characters , it's time to put them through my pseudo-adventure. As I said before, I'm playing the part of all of these characters. This isn't a real adventure, but a series of planned encounters meant to simulate the sort of things one faces in a real D&D session. We begin with the PCs just outside the entrance to the Barbarian King's tomb. Dusk is falling, and they know that there are goblins inside. Their plan is to creep into the tomb quietly, hoping to get a jump on the goblins and defeat them as quickly as possible. Before they begin, Dog lights a bit of tinder and gets ready to put flame to his flask of lamp oil. The PCs then creep along the outside wall of the cave before bursting in. I have the party roll an Agility check, based on the PC with the worst modifier (+0). The result is an 8. The goblins, who are just inside the tomb's entrance, roll an opposed Intelligence check to see if they notice the PCs. I figure goblins ...