He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

-C has been putting up a series of posts deconstructing skills in D&D. The most recent is about knowledge skills, and the problems attending them:

I am confused by the purpose of this skill [he writes]... I just fail to understand how [it] is supposed to be used in play. Here are the situations I can imagine.

There is a piece of information. It is either trivial and of no importance, or it is interesting providing some depth and background to the game and not vital, or it is a crucial piece of information.

In any possible conceivable case is the game improved by withholding any of the above information?

The answer to this question, for me at least, is a qualified "yes". There is one knowledge skill I can think of for which there is a justification, and one area in which it is concievable that the game can be improved by it. That's "Local Knowledge", or similar.

This much we know: there is a dilemma facing all DMs, especially the ones who create their own settings. On the one hand, you think your setting is interesting, and you think the players enjoy finding out about it. You also think it would really enrich the game if the players knew things that were going on, knew where things were, and knew who various NPCs were. But on the other hand, you know that your players' patience for reading or listening to infodumps about the setting are essentially nil.

This is where Knowledge skills come in: they allow you to give information to players, about the setting, that they want, at a time of their choosing. So we might imagine the following scenarios:

Bob has discovered an iron gauntlet of strange design in the dungeon. He doesn't know what it is. He rolls his "Local Knowledge" skill and the DM tells him he knows an armourer in a nearby town who could know more about it. The players go there and find out.

Gwendaline sees a strange monster she's never encountered before. After wisely fleeing, she rolls her "Local Knowledge" skill and the DM tells her of a sage who might know more. The players go to meet the sage and in exchange for performing some non-trivial task, get the information.

The party need to find an alternative route to such-and-such town because the regular road is blocked off by their enemies. Successful local knowledge rolls allow them to determine that there is a hunting trail through the forest. They go that way instead.

Hey presto! Local Knowledge makes the game better. It expands the players' knowledge of the setting in an organic way (because the information they glean is always something they actively want to know), and expands their options.

Now, of course, there's an obvious comeback that goes something like this: implicit in the above argument is the notion that for players to do or know anything, they have to roll to find out. But as -C says, it is hard to imagine how making players roll for this sort of thing really makes the game better. If the players fail their rolls, they don't get the knowledge, and the game suffers as a result, because the setting doesn't get fleshed out and the players' options don't get expanded. So why bother rolling? Why not just tell the players what they know if they ask? Or just have them ask an NPC?

There are a few reasons:

a) Having them just ask NPCs about stuff is time-consuming and quite boring. In the first scenario I included above, for instance, it would involve the players asking other NPCs they know if they know anybody who knows anything about gauntlets. Snore. Easier to roll and just say "yes" or "no", and if "no", then they can do the boring ask-other-people-if-they-know-anybody thing.
b) Having players ask the DM "What do I know about this?" or "Do I know somebody who does [x]?" or whatever puts a lot of narrative control in the DMs hands, and might prove an irresistable temptation to try to guide the "story" unless that DM is a paragon of objectivity. It might lead to scenarios in which the DM thinks to himself, "I'll tell the players this titbit of information/withold it because it'll make the story more interesting." That way madness lies. Having players roll for things like that keeps the DM honest.
c) Sometimes mystery is fun, and can make the game enjoyable in its own right. When you don't know what a monster can do, it makes it scarier. When you are carrying around some weird artefact that you don't know anything about, it makes it intriguing. When you don't know what lives in the hole in the mountain, you scout it out. Not everything ought to be mysterious, but there's nothing wrong with it in small doses.

I expect some people to disagree with this.

Be Prepared

I suppose an explanation is in order for the growing gaps between posts on this blog. I'm afraid it's nothing remotely interesting - just the daily grind of trying to juggle work, shoving together a PhD, social commitments and flat-hunting - but I hope it will serve as an explanation nevertheless. Suffice to say: I am both busy and knackered, all the time, at the moment.

But I am still finding time for actual play, on a bi-weekly/sometimes monthly basis. As coincidence would have it I happen to be planning a campaign due for launch in October, and since the blog carnival this month (which I am amazed is still going) is all about game prep, I think this is a perfect opportunity to both kick Monsters & Manuals into gear and show off my super duper game planning skillz.

The game I am planning is called All Zombies on the Eastern Front (AZotEF!!!! for short) and is a World War II/Zombie Apocalypse game. The core concept of the campaign is, essentially, "You're in the middle of World War II, then something even worse happens" - and in keeping with this spirit I've tried to make it as bad as possible for the players: they begin as Axis POWs in the hands of the Soviets, trapped on a prison train heading into Siberia...an area of the world which happens to be in the first stages of being overtaken by a zombie epidemic. The email blurb I sent out to the players sums things up nicely, I think, and runs as follows:

...All Zombies on the Eastern Front will be about one part Zombieland, one part Twilight 2000-esque “soldiers in a post-apocalyptic Europe”, one part John Carpenter’s The Thing, and one part I Am Legend (the book, not the cruddy Will Smith version). There’s quite a bit of flexibility in that players can be of any rank or branch of the armed services, and can be German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, even foreign volunteers in the Waffen-SS (though I stress the focus of the game is escaping the clutches of zombies, not Nazism), and although I’ll be using the Cyberpunk 2020 rules they’re quite heavily hacked (no classes, very different skill list).

Content-wise, there’ll be plenty of opportunity to mow down hordes of the undead with your stolen PPD-40 and its 71-round drum magazine, but combat is by no means the be all and end all, and there’ll be a lot of NPC interaction and investigative stuff going on too, as well as all the travails that go along with post-apocalyptic gaming (finding food, ammo and shelter; overcoming moral quandaries about protecting innocent fellow survivors; avoiding cannibal bandits, etc.) and quite a bit of wilderness exploration.

You read that right; I'm using a hack of the Cyberpunk 2020 rules. This is mainly because I want to lift the Friday Night Firefight rules wholesale; my philosophy on World War II games is that you want combat to be frightening and deadly, and without armour or cybergear believe me, Cyberpunk 2020's combat rules are very deadly. I'm yet to see how it will work in play (I'm slightly worried there'll be a TPK within an hour), but the first signs are encouraging - the players are making noises along the lines of avoiding combat and playing intelligently, which is always nice to hear.

Logistically my prep is involving lots of maps, random encounter tables, random NPCs, and random name generators - stuff which I generally enjoy - as I envisage a lot of travelling on the part of the PCs, and I'm leaving it open ended, which makes for little in the way of pre-planned encounters/adventures. (Whether the players want to head back to Europe, go East and try to make Japan, hunker down and see if they can survive or investigate the source of the Zombie plague is up to them.) I expect all this stuff to run into the pages and pages, which will be a further drain on my time but one I'll actually enjoy - a rarity at the moment.

The Mandrakes are Back in Town

A certain somebody called Scott, famous for his various setting blogs (Wilderlands of OD&D, World of Thool, and Ordained Dominions of Vologes), has returned to the blogosphere after a prolonged absence. This is big news, because Scott was one of the key early 'thinkers' (if I can use the term) of whatever you want to call this movement of people who like old games and blog about it. His weird and original settings showed the rest of us where a bit of imagination can get you.

Check out his new blog, Mandragora: The Mandrake March. The blurb:

Mandragora is a fairy-tale-influenced setting inspired by public domain sources such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the works of Lord Dunsany, the travelogues of Sir John Mandeville, and especially traditional fairy and folk tales as collected in Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, presented with a healthy dose of 1970s and early 1980s gamer culture. Visually, I'm drawing inspiration from a variety of classic fantasy artists including Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Sidney Sime, John Bauer, and Henry Justice Ford.

Longterm readers of this blog will know that this is right up my alley, so I'll be eagerly reading Scott's new ideas.

Amorality in the Sandbox and GM as Performing Monkey

Excellent stuff from Zak Smith today on the importance of rogueishness in sandbox games.

What I'd add to it is that not only do rogueishness and sandbox play go together like [insert analogy of choice here; I recommend "chips and gravy"]. The also make it a heck of a lot easier to GM.

This may be controversial, but I've always thought that the plotted, story-driven style of play so popular in the Silver Age of roleplaying games (and depressingly still the dominant paradigm today) puts a heck of a lot of pressure on the GM. Not only does he have to structure his campaign and give it a beginning and a middle and an end. He also has to create scenes, build climaxes, lead his players on a consistently entertaining merry dance; he's worse than a puppet master because at least a puppet master is under no pressure to entertain the very puppets whose strings he holds. While admittedly the scope of a plotted campaign cuts down on prep (if you more or less know what's coming, you don't have to worry about unforeseen circumstance), it more than compensates with the workload it generates in just dragging the entire campaign along.

Sandbox gaming spreads out that workload and creates equality. While there's an onus on the GM to do the groundwork with hexmaps, weather tables, random encounter generators, and adventure hooks, it's up to the players to be the engine of the game. They're the ones who make the decisions and drive whatever "plot" arises. And of course rogueishness helps enormously in this; heroes need villains to fight and plots to foil, which again forces the GM to come up with narratives. Rogueishness generates its own stories.

This is one of those areas where the oldest of old school, and the newest of new school, find an overlap. The Kewl Kids over at Story Games spread the workload by giving narrative control to players through explicit mechanics. The fatbeards do it by saying "fuck story, be a rogue". But the end result is more or less the same.

A Milestone of Sorts

Wait! Stop the presses, batten down the hatches, and roll out the barrel! Monsters & Manuals has 100 blogger followers; the d20s are on me!

Thank you everybody for following this ludicrous blog. Long may it continue: ad-free, opinionated, inconsistent and downright silly.

Come not between the dragon and his wrath

I read today something which surprised me from several different directions:

In previous editions, metallic dragons were good aligned, meaning that a DM would have to either create reasons that that the dragons were violently opposed to the PCs, or just ignore the “Always Lawful Good” and similar alignments. As we already knew from Monster Manual 2, this default assumption has changed a bit, tossing many of the metallic dragons squarely into the Unaligned category, giving some wiggle room to those playing it by the book. Draconomicon: Metallic Dragons takes it even further...

Critical hits previewing Draconomicon: Metallic Dragons, how doth thee surprise me, let me count the ways:

1. The trivial one: You're telling me metallic dragons weren't in the first 4e Monster Manual? I suppose that makes sense from a business point of view (don't blow your load of iconics on the first book, because nobody will be interested in the second) but still.
   
2. More serious: It's amazing how combat-oriented this quote reveals 4e to be. The fanboys on rpg.net will say otherwise, but how else are we to interpret this radical rethink of "good" dragons, other than that it is geared to making them a more convenient enemy to fight? I'm particularly interested in this idea that in previous editions, DMs would either have to dream up reasons for metallic dragons being "violently opposed" to the PCs, or else just ignore the default alignment. It seems to imply that the only reason why you would want a monster to appear in a game is to have the PCs fight it. What happened to, you know, PCs just interacting with creatures, as opposed to fighting them?
   
3. The third surprise: Where usually I read stuff about 4e and it makes me want to poke myself in the eye with a fork, I find myself conflicted about whether I think this is a bad development or a good one.

On the one hand, there is something in me that is repelled by the wimpiness of D&D dragons, and especially the good ones. The blame more or less lies with the Dragonlance books, which started off by building up dragons into terrifying demigods but wound up painting them as little more than big and talkative flying pets. Dragons should be in my opinion the most powerful and frightening D&D monsters; from The Bible to the legends of Tiamat to the works of William Blake to The Lord of the Rings, their most compelling portrayals have always been huge and mighty embodiments of malice, antagonism and cruelty. So doing away with good dragons is something I can get behind.

But on the other hand, I do think there is a place in the game for what you might call Old Testament Good - by which I mean the portrayal of God in those volumes as so Good he is to be feared. The stern, just, righteous kind of Good that sees wrongdoers turned into pillars of salt and smites the wicked. Good dragons play into that - as holy guardians and powerful fighters against evil everywhere. A bit like Batman, maybe.

So I view this development with mixed feelings. On the one hand, making Good dragons Neutral so that it's okay to fight them represents a kind of depressing banalism - yet more fodder for the Awesome Things Hitting Each Other routine that the 4e designers seem to want people to play. And yet on the other hand it represents a more-than-welcome step away from the odious Weis-and-Hicksian vision of Dragon-as-My-Little-Pony. A tough call, but I give the move a C+.

She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, she was the best damn woman that I ever seen

Zak Smith, artist, porn star, player of Blixa the thief in my Warhammer FRP game, and general all round renaissance man, has started a new blog. It's called Playing D&D with Porn Stars and it can be found here. It is much recommended - Zak is if nothing else a very inventive guy in-game and is a top commenter on Monsters & Manuals entries. Yes, the premise of the blog sounds too good to be true, but I can personally confirm that Strippers Like Gaming; a stripper ex-girlfriend of mine was among other things a huge D&D fan. (Unfortunately, she only ever used to play 3.5. She was also a lunatic. A tautology perhaps?)

Anyway. Enjoy. I'm back in England for a bit on business and before that was mostly being a newlywed and drinking. Regular posting schedule should start up again tomorrow. For sure this time! Highlights will include:

• Nostaligia for a particular Commodore Amiga related magazine;
• Thoughts on anthropomorphic insectoid Basic D&D;
• A Yoon-Suin map;
• Session playlists for ones iPod; and
  
• Many varieties of magical cigarettes

Wait in bated breath.

Spare me the 'insights'

Sometimes google reader throws up these little blog recommendations. Often they are crushingly dull and of no interest whatsoever to me. ("English skill isn't built in a day", a blog about trying to learn English, for example. Not only do I know how to speak English, I also spent some years of my life despising myself for teaching it, so why on earth I would want to read such a blog is beyond me.) But sometimes you get some vaguely interesting titbits.

It was through such a recommendation that I came across the (now defunct) blog Enter the Octopus, what seems to have been a general grab bag of geek miscellania. This entry caught my interest; in particular this quote, which seems to have been cited with approval:

"Populated with cross-bred elves and dwarves, fantasy realms make people feel not quite so freakish, releasing them from their cages of identity. Playing half- or non-human characters can be an exploration of their freak side, a new door into themselves..."

pp. 56-57, Chapter Four, "Into the Dungeon Again"

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, by Ethan Gilsdorf.

Mainly because it seems like cod arm-chair psychology of the most banal kind. (You'll notice it's also self-contradictory - either fantasy realms make people feel less freakish or they help people explore their freakish side; which is it?)

I never think of fantasy gaming in that vein, and know very few people who do. Gaming is fun for a lot of reasons, but for me it has never ever been about making me feel "not so freakish", releasing me from my "cage of identity" or allowing me to explore my "freak side". I can do all that with beer. Maybe absinthe if I really want to explore my freak side.

Gaming for me is about two things: playing a game, socialising and stretching your imagination. All fun and worthy endeavours, especially when mixed. And there's nothing much more complicated to it than that.

Some designers get it, some don't. And bears shit in the woods, too.

Some interesting stuff floating around the blogosphere. Kevin Siembieda, I would submit, gets it:

Everyone is NOT created equal. These attempts at ‘game balance’ with characters that are all pretty equal may sound correct, but all they do is create an illusion of balance and fairness that ultimately creates (in my opinion) dull, boring, “cookie cutter” characters that lack personality and excitement, especially in a “storytelling game.” And role-playing games are all about storytelling and characters. Character who must think and be clever, cunning, make bold and daring moves, take chances, face impossible odds sometimes, and pray for a touch of luck via the roll of the dice.

J. Tweet, I would submit, doesn't:

[Swords & Wizardry has] too much arithmetic (5% XP bonus, copper pieces, etc.), wonky XP progression per class, too-random character creation, and poor class balance. It also has the problem that didn't get fixed until 4e: all spells are daily, which makes spellcasters play too differently from the fighters.

Big news: Some game designers talk sense, some don't. In my next post I will exclusively reveal that the Pope is not a Dutchman.

Upkeep Stuff

I have now entered the 21st Century and joined this twitter thing everybody is talking about. I won't talk about RPGs much but you're welcome to follow my ramblings about law, academia, booze and girls there if you like; this is the place.

Also, I feel like I should update on Yoon-suin, in case anybody is still interested. Work continues apace (i.e. aslowpace, aha ha ha). I've been methodically jotting down ideas as they come to me and writing up some travelogues that I'll put up on the blog at some point. I'm not sure whether to "do a Scott" and just create a wiki, or compile a pdf and release that.

Finally, I notice that the inestimable taichara has decided to put some entries together into a document for release, for which she [I'm pretty sure she's a she; correct me if I'm wrong] should be applauded to the heavens.

The Winter of Our Discontent; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Shibboleths

An interesting coincidence (or something more sinister...?) sees a mild flamewar erupt on the rpg site about growing discontent with D&D 4e, while at the same time wailing and gnashing of teeth comes over the 'old-school' blogosphere about the revival/renaissance or whatever you call it and the retro-clones it has spawned. The moral of the story? People like complaining. And I am no exception.

Here's my own stance on the retro-clones. As I've said a few times in this blog, all they really boil down to is glorified shibboleths. I don't believe that they provide a solution to an otherwise insurmountable legal problem with publishing 'unlicensed game supplements'; that problem almost certainly doesn't exist. Nor do I believe they are necessary to preserve the older versions of D&D - all of which are available to buy as pdfs.

What they are useful for is as a means for like-minded people to easily identify one another. "D&D" will generally always mean the current or latest edition of the game to most roleplayers. At the moment, it's synonymous with "4th edition D&D". Fine, no problem, that's the way the world works, whatever ones personal likes and dislikes might be. But it does mean that saying "I like D&D" is problematic for someone who likes older editions. Other people might get the wrong idea and assume you play a game involving 'controllers', 'daily powers' and half-orcs with origins that absolutely do not involve anything bad.

However, say the magic words: "Swords & Wizardry", "OSRIC", "Labyrinth Lord", and if anybody within earshot is 'in the know' - Bingo! - they'll identify you as somebody who probably shares a similar gaming style. And vice-versa. Love, or at least mutual satisfaction, (ahem) will blossom. What's more, saying "Swords & Wizardry" has a kind of cache that saying "I like AD&D" or "I like B/X D&D" doesn't. It immediately lets the right kind of person know that you are in the club. Probably you read all the blogs and forums that the cool people read, have the right playstyle (sandbox, megadungeon, 'rulings not rules'), and possess a healthy disregard for Wizards of the Coast. You are one of the special ones, and all the other special ones will identify you as one of their own. This is a nice feeling to have. Belonging. And a hint of superiority over 'ordinary gamers'.

Nothing wrong with this of course - it's natural human behaviour that we all exhibit, no matter what hobby we have. In my circle of friends in school, saying that your favourite Smashing Pumpkins album was Pisces Iscariot had much the same function - it meant you were in the know, and to be trusted as somebody with impeccable taste. More usefully, the Flemish used to get people to pronounce the words 'schild en vriend' as a means of rooting out French speakers, who would pronounce them 'skild en frend'. And be killed.

Also, I should point out that I like Swords & Wizardry a lot as a cleaned-up version of OD&D, so no complaints about it on that score. But let's stop pretending that it's all just a way of getting around a legal problem now, shall we?

EDIT: Somebody in the comments to the post at LotFP makes the excellent point that the retro clones are free. Also, they are presented better than the older editions. These two factors make them excellent tools for spreading the word. But hey, I have broken ribs and have been writing bullshit insightful stuff about international law all day, so I can be forgiven for the extemporaneous nature of this post.

Would You Like To Be Interviewed?

Stephen Fry once remarked that a newspaper columnist should be allowed, just once in his career, to write a column about not having anything to write a column about. In similar vein, this is the only time I'm going to write an entry in this blog about writing other blog entries.

That is, I'm thinking about doing some interviews in the spirit of (read: shameless rip-off of) Norman Geras' famous Friday morning normblog profiles - short profiles of other bloggers and regular commenters, though naturally to do with role playing games. Much more in-depth, inspiring and interesting than "What games do you like?" and "Do you like being a GM or a player?"

I have two corollary questions:

1 - As a reader, would this be something you'd like to see once a week or so (maybe every Friday or something), or would you rather just have the usual patented Daily Esoteric Nonsense Tangentially Related to Role Playing Games from the mind of yours truly?

2 - Would you like to be interviewed? I'm not interested in doing this with just the 'famous' bloggers; so long as you feel that you are interesting and have interesting things to say about games, and that other people might want to hear those things, please drop me a line. The address is jean.delumeau AT gmail DOT com.

Addendum: this does not mean that I'm running out of things to say and in need of filler, so never fear. As I'm sure you are aware by now, I can write reams of this tripe indefinitely.

Monsters & Manuals Gets Its First Award!

Matt, also known as arcona (of The Dwarf and Basilisk fame), has very kindly given my blog a Superior Scribbler Award. Matt must have been at the absinthe again, because he had this to say about my unhinged ramblings:

I’m gonna call it right now. With all apologies to James at the infinitely readable Grognardia, THIS is the best RPG blog on the net (plus Brian already gave Grognardia a SS Award). Well written and straight from the heart, M&M has a good mix of games outside of D&D being discussed, in addition to a number of downright barmy ideas/monsters/scenarios/etc that one can’t help but admire. Perhaps the only blogger I’ve ever seen that actually posts thoughtful photo dumps too (with more apologies to all the guys who post babes in chainmail bikinis every other day).

Should we be worried about the man's mental health or what? In seriousness though, Matt was very kind to say such things. Cheers.

Anyway, according to the rules I now have to nominate five other blogs. This is a difficult task, as I have 69 RSS subscriptions in my Google Reader tray. Many of those relate to cricket, however, which I'm sure has limited appeal to my mostly American readership, so I suppose I'll at least be able to narrow it down to the 30 or so RPG related blogs that I regularly dip into. (I should say first of all that I would ideally nominate every blog I read for an award; that's why I read them, as opposed to the horrendous shite that gets purveyed around much of the blogosphere. Also, I've deliberately chosen blogs that haven't already been nominated, which rules out the excellent Grognardia, Sham's Grog and Blog, and of course The Dwarf and the Basilisk.) Well, here goes:

My Superior Scribbler Awards

Exchange of Realities, which dubs itself "an attempt to bring the worlds of table-top roleplaying and writing closer together by illustrating techniques usable in both formats." Always interesting and readable, it's given me lots of inspiration and ideas about putting a new spin on gaming. The author, Ravyn, is also I think one of the most skilled and intelligent bloggers in terms of writing ability, and her stuff is worth reading for that reason alone.

Worlds in a Handful of Dice is the work of Jukka Särkijärvi, a Finn with a better command of the English language than 90% of its native speakers. He's a writer of excellent rants, thoughtful commentary, and industry insights that are always compulsively readable. The only criticism it's possible to make is that he doesn't update regularly enough!

World of Thool, which is just the kind of blogging I like to read - an ongoing account of the creation of a campaign setting, from the ground up. What helps is that Scott, the author (well known from his now apparently defunct Wilderlands of OD&D) is clearly slightly bonkers - in the best possible sense of the word - and his eponymous setting has the sort of hallucinatory genius which that kind of madness brings.

Another excellent but too damn infrequently updated (post more, Max, damn your hide) blog is Malevolent and Benign, which more than makes up for this one shortcoming with always funny and interesting posts. Max is one of the few bloggers beside myself and Jeff Rients who seems to ever mention Risus, which is in and of itself important, but besides that his work covers everything from Encounter Critical to Mutant Future to spooky Doo-wop music, and much more besides.

Advanced Gaming and Theory, which I never seem to comment on but always keep up to date with. The blog is a witches' brew of gamesmastering tips, actual play reports, new ideas, and the occasional rant, all of it good - although in keeping with most of my other selections, it needs updating more often!

I'll now set about informing the blog writers and putting up this nice little picture in my sidebar.


EDIT: Like a chump, I forgot to add the rules for my awardees. Here they are:

• Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.
• Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.
• Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to this post, which explains The Award.
• Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List (scroll down). That way, we’ll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor!
• Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

Just Because

Author blogs are usually pretty awful affairs - rarely updated, and when they are, you get about a line. I've just discovered M. John Harrison's, and it seems at least slightly more interesting than most. This entry made me laugh:

Earlier this year C, who is 100% a literalist subeditor, managed to get through several HPL stories, including “The Haunter of the Dark” & “The Colour Out of Space”, as bedtime reading, without having a moment’s insomnia or a single nightmare.

“So, this ‘Goat with a Thousand Young’ business,” she says: “What’s scary about that ?”

I try to explain that it can’t really be a goat. It’s an attempt to describe something by one of its qualities, or–worse–to encode some quality it possesses which can’t be described any other way.

She says: “Bollocks. Goats can’t have a Thousand Young. & anyway, why’s that frightening ?” She’s Lovecraft-proof.

At 17, I couldn’t have the books in the house. If I owned them I’d read them. If I read them, I wouldn’t sleep for days. When did they stop doing that to me ?

Irrational Hatred and Edition Wars

Due to another of Zach's recent entries, I came across this old rpgsite thread, which was the result of a Best/Worst RPG ever survey carried out on those forums. There are various ranking permutations worked out in the first post, but the most persuasive interpretation of the votes (number of 'best' votes - number of 'worst' votes) resulted in the following "bottom ten" table, number 1 being the worst game of all time:

1. AD&D 2e
2. Star Wars d20
3. Rifts (Palladium)
4. FATAL/Powers and Perils
6. Aftermath
7. Immortal: The Invisible War
8. AD&D 2e Player's Option/Living Steel
10. Fuzion

Do you notice anything odd about that? I do. Namely, AD&D 2e patently isn't the worst RPG ever. It really isn't. You might not agree that it is the best (and although it is my favourite, even I don't think of it as the best), or even that it is very good, but come on... the worst? How do we account for this abnormality?

Mostly, it is to do with the fact that 2e was the most played version of the game, and it thus draws the most ire from the people who dislike D&D generally; it is likely to be the version they are most familiar with. That's unfair, but understandable. However, some of the negativity must also be put it down to the the tendency among a sizeable portion of old schoolers, bemoaned in a recent thread at dragonsfoot, to what essentially boils down to Intellectual Perversity (as opposed to the sexual kind). That is, irrational hatred on the part of 1e AD&D fans for a game which is 99% similar to their favourite. Intellectual Perversity of grognards, how do I love thee, let me count the ways:

1. 2e AD&D went hand in hand with ill treatment of Gary Gygax, therefore it is bad. Intellectually perverse because it isn't the set of rules' fault, nor Zeb Cook's, that Gary Gygax was forced out of TSR, and lingering distaste over that episode is no rational reason for disliking the game.
2. 2e AD&D threw out some treasured eccentricities of 1e, therefore it is bad. Intellectually perverse because those treasured eccentricities added nothing to the game. Disorganised and incoherent rules are not a good thing. The assassin class never made any sense.
3. 2e AD&D is written in a simplistic style of English which anybody can understand, therefore it is condescending and infantile. Intellectually perverse because game rules are instructions and instructions should always be clear.
4. 2e AD&D got rid of the words 'devil' and 'demon' and replaced them with 'baatezu' and 'tanar'ri', therefore it was cowtowing to the moral majority and demonstrating cowardice. Intellectually perverse because it's a purely cosmetic change.
5. 2e AD&D was moralistic and high-handed, which is never good. Intellectually perverse because nothing within the ruleset prevents graverobbing, murder, genocide, or playing a chaotic evil character as the player desires.

These in and of themselves are perfectly acceptable reasons (however irrational) for disliking 2e or preferring 1e. But they hardly qualify as reasons to believe it the worst game ever, given that the two editions are so similar.

The root cause of this grognard hatred is, I believe, snootiness. 1e came first, and moreover was written more or less for adults. 2e was a jonny-come-lately with aspirations to appeal equally to both adults and older children. That sort of thing bothers people of a certain disposition, who fancy themselves mature and intelligent and above childish pursuits, and thus the edition war was born. Personally I prefer certain aspects of 2e to 1e, but I like the older edition and would never vote it the worst rpg ever, or even call it a bad one.

RPG Bloggers: Unite

I won't be posting much this week, as I'm leaving to start my new international jet-setter lifestyle tomorrow. But it's really about time I gave a big plug to Jonathan at The Core Mechanic, who for some time now has been singing from the rooftops about his 'Best of 2008' RPG Blog Anthology. I think it's a great idea, which might go some way to spreading the word to the RPG community at large, and ideally haul in lots more readers for everybody. (God knows why anybody would want to read the dreadful tripe I write, but hey, apparently some do.)

So go ye forth and nominate your favourite entries from other people's blogs. I haven't made one yet because I'm still trying to decide - and I don't want to spam-bomb the entire process with about 50 nominations. The deadline is December the 1st, though, so you still have time.

Not D&D

James Maliszewski and Brian Murphy have been posting lists of "RPGs other than D&D" which they like. Here are mine:

• Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP). This is a gritty, low-magic, gloriously detailed game, with brutally violent combat and a meticulously realised world. Some people say that it doesn't 'feel' like a Middle Earth game should, but I've never understood that. The atmosphere of the thing, from the art to the text to the mechanics, seems saturated with Tolkien. I love the fact that everything is open to you, too: the idea that you can be a Haradrim, an Uruk-hai, or an Easterling was like a breath of fresh air to me after all the finger-wagging and moralising of 2nd edition AD&D.
• Cyberpunk 2020. The game I've probably played most after D&D; I spent a ridiculous amount of my teenage years on this thing. It's grotesquely, awfully, irredeemably broken, from the core mechanic to the equipment to the roles, but oddly enough my friends and I never seemed to care. Hunting cyberpsychos with railguns was just althogether too much fun.
• Shadowrun. I spent a ridiculous amount of my teenage years on this, too, and for a long time it vied with Cyberpunk 2020 for the mantle of my favourite game. But I hear that in recent years the game has rather lost its way a little. That's a pity, but I suppose deep down I always looked on Shadowrun as something of a guilty pleasure. At 14 or 15 I wasn't at all keen on genre-bending, or at least thought that I oughtn't to have been (I was much too serious for that, dontcha know), so the fun I had with Shadowrun was always tempered by a healthy dose of shame. Looking back now that attitude was utterly absurd, but I still have to cringe a little at the thought of fat geeky guys with beards pretending to be elves in a William Gibson novel. That last bit seems like just a step too far.
• Changeling: The Dreaming. I don't like White Wolf games, as a general rule, and especially don't like the World of Darkness ones. It's all too emo, and too politically just so. But I do like Changeling: The Dreaming, which was by far the most original setting of the bunch and full to bursting with great ideas. It was done with impeccable taste, too: the production, art, writing and tone were absolutely perfect for what the designers were trying to achieve. My only real criticism was that the thing was easier and more interesting to read that it was to play - as with a lot of White Wolf games, there were never enough (for me) examples of what a Changeling game was actually supposed to be like.
  
• The Burning Wheel. This just does what it says on the tin, for me: it's a rules-heavy, setting-lite, gritty fantasy game, and it works. You have to invest rather more effort into it than I'm used to, but with a good group all that energy pays off.
  
• Risus. I love Risus. In fact I would go so far as to call it my favourite game, if only I had more opportunities to play it. It's always billed as a 'comedy game', and though it works for that, I've never been happy with people limiting it to just a 'beer and popcorn' deal. With the right group of players the game can do absolutely any sort of genre or tone, and a damn sight better than a lot of other rulesets out there; I'm forever scheming of ways to use it to run Arthurian fantasy, ancient Mesopotamian mythology, Pacific exploration games...you name it.

Tell me yours!

On Humanoids

Jim has once again put up a thoughtful post, this time about the moral ins-and-outs of the slaughter of humanoid creatures in D&D. He says:

Don't shy away from [the questionable morality of killing kobolds], but don't water down the issue by just making the humanoids simply "misunderstood," either. Milk it for all the drama that it's worth.

He then goes on to recommend a number of different ways of messing with players' moral compasses for the sake of drama, including orc-meat, orc-children, and bounties on humanoid scalps.

This hits a chord with me. I've always believed that there should be more to a game than just the unthinking murder of 'evil stuff'. But at the same time (as I think Jim is alluding to) I believe that it is important that good and evil should exist as objective things in the fantasy genre: Even if you tweak the tropes, there should always be an awareness that irredeemable evil can and does lurk somewhere. Now, it might be the case that you want to have an evil dwarven emperor, morally ambiguous elves, and neutral/isolationist orcs in your setting. That's fine; to be encouraged, even. Likewise, it's important that not every 'evil' creature should be utterly steeped in sin, and that not every 'good' one should be a paragon of virtue. If you want a friendly goblin guide for your players during their journey through the mountains, all to the good. But objective evil does exist, and is a force in the world that sometimes has to be fought.

The key, I believe, is in making evil believable. I won't have any truck with what I read recently on a Story Games thread, in which it was advocated that:

The usual 'enemy races' are actually materialized negative energy from purification rituals- goblins are evil thoughts, orcs are evil deeds, hobgoblins - evil laws, and kobolds? Good deeds undone.

I don't necessarily think that is a bad idea (it's actually quite a good one for a certain kind of game) but it really isn't my scene. I don't want my orcs [or whatever the 'evil' races are in the campaign world] to be 'materialized negative energy' or personifications of 'bad deeds'. I want them to behave in 'evil' ways because it makes sense to them to do things that way. Why do orcs want to eat human babies? Because they're hungry, and they don't see human life as remotely precious. Why do they torture? Because they think it's fun, and it has religious significance. Why do they make war? To gain more resources for themselves.

This has the added advantage of allowing players and humanoid opponents to interact in more sensible ways. The party comes across a bunch of hobgoblins laying waste to a village; of course, they step in and try to stop them. But on another day they come around a bend in the road in the middle of the wilderness and are confronted by a different group of hobgoblins who are just out hunting. Because both the players and the monsters are rational, it's perfectly possible for both sides to negotiate without resorting to senseless killing. And the game world seems richer and better as a result.

I think this is what troubles me most about the 'minion' rules in 4e. (I keep breaking that promise I made to myself not to talk about the new edition. Dammit.) Minions are there to be killed. That is the meaning of their existence - to die and make the players look good by doing so. I know that this is deliberate and the designers have made it explicit that all notion of an independent reality outside of the players has been thrown out of the window. And if that's what you want from a game, more power to you. But the very idea of 'minions' is anathema to the type of thing I'm interested in. Monsters aren't just there to kill and die. They're there to be interacted with in my games. That implies a whole world going on outside of the player characters, which just doesn't chime with the idea of minions.

My Map: Let Me Show You It

James at Grognardia posted an endearing map which his 14-year-old self drew for a D&D campaign. I love maps; I love looking at them, drawing them and thinking about them - which I'm sure is a trait I share with 95% of the role playing fraternity - and James' has made me think about sharing one of my own.

Unfortunately, I have none which my 14 year old self drew here with me in Japan. I wish I did. They would be mighty embarrassing to look over now, of course; when I was 13 or 14 I was still very much of the Forest of Death/Mountains of Doom/Desert of Destruction Fighting Fantasy school of place-naming. Nevertheless, it would have been fun to look at a few of the old campaign settings. (There must be a hundred or more in my parents' loft.)

So in lieu of one of my older efforts, here's a very recent one, from a play-by-post game I'm still running. It's a map of Moluche, the seven hobgoblin Kritocracies by the sea, and their surroundings:


This is done with my current favourite method of map creation: taking snapshots from Google Earth and rotating, chopping and variously mutilating them into something workable. The seven Kritocracies are Mapuche, Nguluche, Koniyiin, Koninguun, Pefimi, Peynguun and Peymuun. To the south is a wilderness area dominated by primitive Lizardfolk tribes, and to the South-East the lands of the Duergar. Moluche has been devastated by centuries of internecine strife between the Kritocracies. Much of it is now a desolate wasteland, strewn with the detritus of war - abandoned fortifications and trenches, mass graveyards, and exhausted mines. Only Peymuun, the richest and most powerful, retains its forest cover to any extent.

I wish I could remember where I took the snapshot from. I believe it is somewhere in the Arabian peninsula, rotated at an angle, although I could be wrong.

Caterpillar List

You know how you sometimes have a few caterpillars of ideas crawling around the empty space inside your head, but none of them has yet matured into the butterfly of a proper blog entry? Today is one of those days. So, I bring you, A Short List of Things That Have Caught My Attention:

• Max has picked up his own idea and run much further with it than I did when I ripped him off a few entries ago. Borges and D&D are clearly more a match made in heaven than anybody has previously realised.
• There is a new blog out there called The RPG Corner, which judging by its first few entries is going to be good reading. The blogger is tentatively working his way through the 4e books from the perspective of, I think it's fair to say, a relative skeptic.
  
• Tony DiTerlizzi, who together with John Howe and Donato Giancola is top of the list for me when it comes to fantasy art, is running a Planescape retrospective at his blog. Planescape is my favourite setting ever, so I'm paging through the one or two Planescape books I have here with me in Japan and getting all bleary-eyed and nostalgic about it.
  
• I'm going to see if I can get a group together to run real-life, tabletop Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Risus, and/or the Burning Wheel. And 2nd edition AD&D Planescape!
  

A proper entry tomorrow, perhaps.