Old Dice

I'm moving house at the moment, and you know what that means - opening cardboard boxes that have been dragged down from the loft and examining the contents with a mixture of laughter, puzzlement (why did I keep this?) and nostalgia.

One thing that has emerged from this scraping-over and sifting-through of old mathoms is my first set of dice. These things were bought when I was about 13 (before that I borrowed friends' dice as quid pro quo for the fact that I had the AD&D 2nd edition books) and they were carried religiously around the town I grew up to a collection of living rooms, friend's bedrooms, and basements for games of D&D, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun and MERP. Since then they have travelled all around the world, until they wound up almost forgotten at the bottom of a large box which also contained other ancient relics from a bygone age: GURPS 3rd edition and Changeling: The Dreaming.

In Training Day the Denzel Washington character at one stage says to the Ethan Hawke one, "Any good narcotics officer must know and love narcotics." Well, I'm of the opinion that any good role player must know and love dice. Old friends, I salute you.

The appealingly retro sweet tin the dice are housed in, held together with sticky labels because at one stage I had so many dice crammed inside it wouldn't stay shut.

The inside of the tin. I could have sworn I had Warhammer 40,000 scatter dice and autofire dice as well, but they appear to be casualties of the dice tin's odysseys around the world.

The dice themselves. They are cheap and nasty, almost whorish gem dice with suspicious rolling actions and a weightless, soul-less, tacky feel. But time has given them character and significance.

Traditional RPGs are Wood

One of my weekly without-fail podcast listens is BBC Five Live's World Football Phone-In. This week somebody called in and asked Tim Vickery, the "football in South America" correspondent, the simple question: why he loved football. He gave a lot of reasons, but one which struck a chord with me was that he said, in the modern age, there is so much interaction with gizmos and gadgets that sometimes it is nice to just go home after a day's work and touch something that is made out of wood.

To him, football is like wood. It is something from an age before computers, before iPads, before mobile phones, and before the internet. To play or watch football is to connect with the past, but also to the world of physicality and physical objects. It is to feel something natural, tangible, ancient. Something that was around before you were born and will be around long afterwards.

I think role playing games have a similar attraction. There is something about the simplicity of the implements - dice, pencils, paper - that has an actual touchable, holdable charm. They are not the ephemeral, non-corporeal, soul-less products of the computerised age. They are something older and weightier and nicer. There is a trusty, prosaic feel that you get from rolling the dice and scrawling things in pencil that a computer interface can't emulate.

This is why, for me, there is always going to be something unsatisfactory about online gaming, something missing. (Even though it has its obvious advantages.) It's not just the face-to-face interaction: Skype or Google+ hangouts give you that. It's being able to pick up the dice and roll them and let everybody else see the result. It's being able to pick up a piece of scrap paper and pencil out a map. It's being able to decorate your character sheet with doodles of your character. It's being simple in an age of increasingly complex things. I don't know what goes on inside my computer, and I'm fundamentally alienated from it as a result. Dice and pencils are understandable.

Note: Your victory is very improbable.

If you were ever a fan of adventure gamebooks as a kid, I heartily recommend this thread by Melan at therpgsite. It had me laughing so hard I was fighting for breath, partly because his commentary is so funny but partly because the younger him sounds so similar to the younger me; the only difference is that he was slightly more diligent in his efforts to create the ultimate adventure gamebook.

There's something rather life affirming about the fact that adolescent boys, whether in Britain or Hungary, can have exactly the same sort of weird interests. One of those "we are the world" moments.

Amiga Power, Kangaroo Court, and RPGs

I'm not much of a magazine reader - if I'm going to have to leaf through a hundred pages of advertisements to read fifty pages of actual content they can pay me for the privilege, not the other way round - and the quality is generally better on the internet these days anyway. I'll make exceptions for Private Eye, The Economist and New Scientist, but that's about it.

When I was younger the ratio of shite to quality was much lower, and I had quite a few monthly subscriptions. Foremost among this elite group was the Commodore Amiga magazine Amiga Power, which I read religiously between 1991 and 1996 and still think of fondly. Written with a certain wit and intelligence which other games magazines don't have (writers were hired on the basis of writing skill rather than games knowledge, on the basis that it's easier to learn about games than to learn how to write), it's the kind of magazine that you could enjoy even if you didn't have any interest in the subject matter. The kind of games magazine that would write reviews of joysticks in-character as the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse, make up 'Stupendous Tales' features exploring the sinister cult of spectators who can be seen in the background of fighting games like Streetfighter II (known as the "Behind Men"), and publish game write-ups so cuttingly disdainful that game companies would regularly try to sue. (AP's 'unique' sense of humour can be sampled on the myriad tribute pages, written by original mag contributors, here.) Some of this was down to the nature of Amiga owners, who in the early part of the 1990s were already a rather eccentric breed and who by the middle part of the decade could only be described as perverse - what with the SNES, Playstations and PCs readily available. As Cam Wistanley remarks:

"We never had to make up any letters because we could always get enough proper good ones. You never voted with your money by not buying us simply because we talked bollocks, never went on sale on time or produced slightly biffy cover disks. We succeeded because the Amiga owner was from that breed of slightly odd ZX Spectrum owner and therefore appreciated entertainment over information.

PC owners seem to be the other way round, which is why a PC POWER would never have worked - too many people would have written in to say 'Why must you waste space on features about the links between JFK and the Rwandan massacres? Couldn't you devote that space more sensibly to a roundup of modems?'

And then we'd have had to kill them."

One of AP's best features was Kangaroo Court, a monthly column in which game design "crimes" were detailed, a case for the prosecution made in a witty and entertaining manner, and a sentence (e.g. "execution by underwater spear-gun firing squad") prescribed. It only ran for 10 issues; the list of "crimes" covered will be well familiar to anybody who used to play computer games in the 1990s, and included:

• "Loading...please wait" messages;
• The Invisible Killer ("Having areas in your game where the player is killed without warning by something they couldn't see before it hit them, and then are expected to complete the game by finding all these areas (by dying, obviously) and then remembering where they are.");
• Slip Slidin' Away ("Including in your game a so-called 'slippy-slidey ice world,' where normal inertia is greatly exaggerated to provide a more 'realistic' simulation of a character walking on an icy or snow-covered surface."); and
  
• The Cheese Plant, then, maybe? ("Attempting to improve a game's presentation by replacing its menu screens with confusing, badly-drawn illustrations, areas of which you must click on to activate the various options.")

Which is of course a concept that can be applied to many different hobbies, including, for example, role playing games.

What would be Kangaroo Court candidates for me? I can think of a few:

• It is an orc, but it is not an orc: Creatures in fantasy games that are to all intents and purposes orcs (or goblins, or elves, or dragons) except with another name, as if that's enough to make them original. Example: Eladrin in D&D 4e, who let's face it, are just elves, but not elves.
• This is kewl and awesome: When it's obvious that the game designers are practically orgasming in their pants over the sheer brilliance of their own creation. Example: almost anything ever written about the drow.
• If only real life could be like this: Wankfest utopian fantasy settings which are essentially thinly veiled political whinges. Example: Blue Rose.
• This is what real imagination looks like: Excessive weirdness for the sheer sake of appearing creative. Examples: the setting for Reign; the Duck people from Glorantha.
• This is an indie game, so it uses dice pools: Self explanatory, really.

There would have to be suitable sentences meted out by the RPG Kangaroo Court, of course. Underwater spear gun execution for the more minor offences.

Nostalgia

I have quite a lot of gaming material sitting in a box in my dad's loft. (Whenever I visit I usually spend an afternoon finagling this box out from underneath all the accumulated crap, just so I can leaf through the goodness it contains. Every year it seems the pages of the various volumes grow a little more faded; occasionally one of the items will have mysteriously disappeared, never to be recovered. My rpgs are a dying breed.) Some people - cold hearted, unsentimental types, no doubt - would probably put them up for auction on eBay. Not me. I'm hoarding them (by proxy, seeing as they aren't at my house) on the off chance that I might one day get the chance to use them again, and also because I just can't bear to give them up. Too many happy memories.

The box contains, at last count:

AD&D 2nd edition Dungeon Master's Guide, first printing. Acquired at a shop in Tel Aviv around, I think, the spring of 1993. Still with the original Hebrew stickers, though the contents are English. For a long time this was the only AD&D book my friends and I had; we used the Red Box Basic rules and our own imagination for character gen and monsters.

Blacksand and Allansia, the two latter volumes in the three part Advanced Fighting Fantasy series. I used to have the first volume too, but it seems to have gone away to the great DM's screen in the sky. Of great sentimental value because I can still remember borrowing them from the local library time after time before I eventually managed to save the money to buy them for real; is there any feeling sweeter than being 12 years old and finally getting to buy something you've been wanting for ages? They still seem to me to be the ultimate in ergonomics when it comes to role playing game rulebooks - they're paperback and ever so slightly larger than an ordinary novel: just the right size to hold and flick through.

The Amber Diceless Role Playing Game, which in my memory my sister's friend's older brother gave me (along with a huge box full of Star Wars figures) when I was about 7. This memory can't be true, however, because Amber wasn't published until 1991, when I was 10, and by that time I think I was probably too old for Star Wars figures. Strange. Anyway, it's in the box. I've never played it and for a long time wasn't aware I had it, but one day I swear I will use it.




A whole host of very old Epic 2nd edition rules stuff for Warhammer 40,000.

My large collection of Planescape material, which I thankfully also have on .pdf on my computer these days. I would go so far as to say that even if you hate role playing games you can appreciate the sheer beauty of that line and the care and creativity that went into its design. It's worth keeping for that reason alone.

Changeling: The Dreaming and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. I went through a World of Darkness phase, like I suppose most gamers of my generation did, but nowadays look on that stuff chiefly as juvenelia. Changeling is the one that has best stood the test of time, I think. It's beautifully written and has a great atmosphere about it. Too bad that what was most important - how you play the damned thing - was so difficult to get to grips with.

Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, and MERP, all of which threatened to displace D&D as my 'favourite game' at one stage or another. All told I wouldn't be surprised to learn that my Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun rulebooks have seen more actual game-time than my D&D books have; between the ages of 14 and 17 I honestly don't think I did much else with my free time than play those games (and Warhammer, and, okay, cricket and football) with my group of fellow social outcasts. Nowadays Shadowrun in particular makes me want to cringe - it's such a ridiculous game, really - but I would never let want to let those crumbling rulebooks go. The character sheets for two of my friend's favourite ever characters - Yosemite Sam the dwarf street samurai, and his troll sidekick Bizkit - are still folded inside the cover.

What gaming materials from your youth do you still cling onto?