Scenes from a Merseyside Gaming Emporium

I was moseying around Liverpool city centre today on the way to my office, and decided to head into Forbidden Planet - a chain of shops which sells mostly stuff that I don't think self-respecting adults should be interested in (action figures, Dr. Who DVDs, comics), fantasy and SF books, and - increasingly rarely - RPGs.

Before I went to live in Yokohama, way back in 2002ish, I remember Forbidden Planet's RPG section as being pretty extensive. It had, in large quantities, GURPS, old WoD, Call of Cthulu, MERP, D&D, RuneQuest, Shadowrun, Rifts, and so on, as well as more obscure stuff like Continuum. (Some of the books they had may have been out of print by that stage.) The shelf space was probably about 3 yards wide and a yard and a half high with two or three racks.

Now, there is only about a yard of shelf space on one rack. It contains, to my recollection (I may have missed something):

• Pathfinder stuff (Christ, that rulebook is thick: do people actually read that?)
• D&D 4e stuff, including the Red Box rip-off/revamp which I forget the name of
• Mongoose Traveller (one copy of the core rules, nothing else)
• the AD&D 1st edition core rulebook reprints for the Gygax memorial fund
• Mouse Guard 

I find a couple of things quite surprising about this. First - no World of Darkness. I'm surprised that line has tailed off. Since I don't really play those games I can only speculate, but did the new WoD alienate old fans and fail to replace them, a la Dungeons ampersand Dragons?

Second, almost everything is either D&D or a D&D spin-off. The great alternatives of old - Rolemaster, RuneQuest, etc. - might as well not exist, for all you'd guess. This is doubly true of the other heavyweights like Call of Cthulu, GURPS, Shadowrun, and the like. When people say that it wouldn't matter if D&D went away, I have my doubts. Other games may fill the void, but it seems just as likely that the hobby would simply die as a going concern.

Third, Mouse Guard?

And finally: if you assume that shelf space maps perfectly to the number of players (which it probably doesn't) you would have to conclude that the number of RPG players in Merseyside has declined in the last decade or so by what, 90% or something?

You Are The Problem

So somebody called Ryan Dancey, "former VP of RPGs at Wizards and marketing guru at White Wolf/CCP", reckons that

"[T]he tabletop RPG market is enduring a kind of death. I think it is transforming into something that isn't a viable commercial business for more than a handful of people [like model trains]... Kids stopped playing with trains, and the businesses that remained dedicated to hobbyists who got more disposable income as they grew up, until the price of the hobby was out of reach of anyone except those older hobbyists. Eventually, it became a high-end hobby with very expensive products, sold to an ever-decreasing number of hobbyists. As those folks die, the hobby shrinks. That is what is happening to the tabletop RPG business."

Where do they wheel these people out from? And doesn't it sound to you like the last bleatings of the CEO of Netscape, declaring that the web browser is dead, before the men in white coats coax him out to the back alley to put him out of his misery?

I'm sure you can read between the lines, just as I can: the big RPG companies like Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf are dying. They got fat and bloated and have been mostly engaged in the production of horse manure for the past 10 years. QED: tabletop RPGs are dying - the comfortable myth high-ups in those companies can tell themselves rather than face the ugly truth, which is that they're nothing like as innovative or interesting as they should be. Cognitive dissonance is a funny thing.

Tabletop RPGs are in fact in rude health again. They've undergone some lean times, but they've emerged from their long semi-hibernation bleary-eyed and pale but with a feriocious hunger. This is thanks in no small part to the internet and blogosphere. Gamers all over the world can now connect with each other instantly, create endless new material, publish entirely new game lines to sell to each other or even give away for free, innovate and create beyond anything in their wildest dreams 10 years ago, and they're doing it in huge numbers. If you're a "former VP of RPGs at Wizards and marketing guru at White Wolf/CCP" I'm sure you'd also take the view that this represented the death of tabletop RPGs, because none of it results in a single penny being forked over to either Wizards or White Wolf. But you're not. So I think you take the same view as I do - things are looking up.

d100 FTW!

I went to see China Mieville do a reading from his new book, Embassytown, along with a Q&A session, at a local bookshop on Friday evening. And a nice and interesting guy he was too. I was particularly impressed that he openly and merrily sang the praises of roleplaying games; even though I should have been expecting this, as it is something he is wont to do, it bears repeating just how rare and precious a thing this is: a respected writer on his way to becoming a giant in the field, and a genuine crossover success, who has absolutely no shame saying he likes D&D and RuneQuest.

Anyway, I duly queued up with the herd (which also included local fantasy/horror luminary Ramsay Campbell) and got my copy of Embassytown signed. I think this just about says it all:

What do you do for money, honey?

One of my favourite quotes is by Richard Condon, and it goes something like this: It's no use kidding ourselves that [politicians] are ordinary people just like us, because they're not. For all the similarities, they might as well be from another planet. Probably are.

I'd like to replace the word "politicians" in the above quote with the word "game designers". Specifically, Wizards of the Coast game designers. I mean, what other conclusion are we to draw from this?

You may think me a little harsh. I suppose at first glace it might seem I am being a trifle melodramatic. Let me elaborate. What Condon was getting at was this: ordinary people by definition do not want to become politicians - because as an ordinary person why in hell would you be so lustful for power? I mean, who reading this blog would be so utterly crazy as to want the responsibility of being the leader of your country, of taking it to war or keeping it out of one, of managing its budget, of steering its policy, and who would want the sleepless nights that go with that? You would have to be mentally ill, or a sociopath, to begin with. Or so strongly motivated by a given topic that it drove you to mental illness, perhaps. (And the original motivation could be perfectly valid, of course.)

Similarly, ordinary gamers by definition do not want to become game designers, because they're having fun playing the games they're playing. It takes a special kind of person to want to become a designer, and that is somebody who is, crucially, so unsatisfied with the games that they are playing that they not only want to change them, but to change them as their calling in life.

This can be an unmitigated good impulse, a fair one, or a bad one:

The Unmitigated Good: A given person might be so unsatisfied that there is no game about managing casinos in Macao that he goes ahead and makes one. Brilliant - now there's a cool new game about managing casinos in Macao.

The Fair: A given person might be so unsatisfied with an existing game that he decides it needs changing, and strives to make those changes. This sometimes makes for a better game and sometimes doesn't. It might result in HARP, but it also might result in the third iteration of Cyberpunk.

The Bad: A given person is unsatisfied with a game for reasons that have nothing to do with anything intrinsic to that game, but rather having something to do with external factors mostly to do with Gaming with Dickheads. He then makes changes to that perfectly fine game in order to solve a problem that really doesn't exist, with lamentable results.

It seems the latter has occurred with the designers of D&D 4e and game balance, which is their overriding obsession.

See, the thing is, if you obey my cardinal rule of Not Gaming with Dickheads, you don't need such a thing as game balance. Reasonable, friendly, sociable people have fun with each other, support or take the piss out of each other depending on context, don't hog limelight, don't try to compete with one another if in the noncompetitive context of a roleplaying game, and generally contribute towards an atmosphere in which everybody enjoys themselves, gets drunk, eats lots of unhealthy food, and stays up late. Who cares if one character class happens to be a bit objectively "better" than another in that context?

The only time when balance becomes an issue in an RPG is when people start breaking social contracts and being dickheads. Viz:

"Mages can do anything any other class can do by using magic, after about 9th level, and it's just so unfair!" (Not an issue if the guy playing the mage doesn't use his magic to do everything every other class can do, in a spirit of not being a dickhead.)

"Everybody should have an equal amount of time in combat!" (Not an issue if everybody behaves like a sensible adult and doesn't hog the limelight, in a spirit of not being a dickhead.)

"If a game isn't balanced it leaves everything up to GM whim, and that means the most popular players get all the decisions in their favour!" (Not an issue if the GM... well, you get the picture.)

So I think we can only draw two conclusions from the prevalence of the cult of Game Balance at WotC. Either:

1. The designers were traumatised by gaming with dickheads in their formative years, and it motivated them to try to Change the World of D&D in a bad way;

or

2. Gamers who were traumatised by gaming with dickheads in their formative years became such a vocal and whiny minority that the designers had no choice but to try to pander to them.

Now, please understand me: I'm not saying 4e isn't a fun game, equally as valid as any other RPG, blah blah blah. And it doesn't impact in any way on how I interface with the hobby at large; to all intents and purposes D&D ended at 2nd edition as far as I'm concerned. But I find it, frankly, melancholic, sad, perhaps even tragic that so much effort has gone into such a Quixotic goal as "Balancing the Game" when all that really needed to be done was to slap a sticker on every 2nd edition AD&D rulebook sold saying: "Remember, kids, Don't Game with Dickheads, and Don't Be Dickheads Yourselves."

Why RPGs?

Inspired by comments here, I've been thinking about what got me into rpgs:

• Escapism. The town I grew up in is a nice place, but boring. Liverpool is a big, exciting city and is just over the river, but that's far enough away to be too expensive for a kid to go to on public transport on more than a weekly basis. I played a lot of football and cricket as a youngster, but that doesn't provide the same escape.
  
• Derring-do and adventure. Boys like those things, bears shit in the woods, etc.
• Violence. Boys also like this. An important part of rpgs for my friends and I when we were 12-16 was the combat. No, not an important thing, the most important thing.
• Disapproving parents. I sometimes read stories about people playing D&D with their sons and daughters, which is so completely alien to my experience I just can't envisage it. Moreover, I think the fact that my and my friends' parents would look at the covers of my AD&D rulebooks with raised eyebrows and looks of vague concern was all part of the fun.
• By the same token, older friends. When I was 11 or 12 we gamed with my best friend's older brother (who was probably 14 at the time). It seemed like a hobby for more mature people, which was a good thing.
• Pictures of hot women in the near-altogether. (In the absolute altogether was of course too much to hope for.) Larry Elmore has a lot to answer for.
• The fact that there were a lot of pseudo-rpgs or lite-rpgs or whatever you want to call them around. For example, the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf adventure game books. They had massive market penetration 15-20 years ago. Not any more, that I can tell.
  

So what we need is to play up all those elements and the hobby will be booming, no?

The Children are our Future!

Trollsmyth, writing on Mishlergate and the fate of the rpg industry generally, makes some excellent points. Notably about the lack of youngsters in the hobby and an obvious reason why:

Since 2000, the "gateway" product has consisted of three 200+ page books costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 bucks. Even that might have been reasonable if the kids had been shown what benefits they would have received for their time and treasure. Was there even an attempt to overcome the fact that D&D was the game Dad played when he was in junior high? I never saw it. I never saw any outreach to these kids, any attempts to study their interests, or any attempts to adjust the game in ways that would appeal to them...

On the one hand I think the $60 thing is somewhat of a red herring. In the current currency market $60 is about 40 quid, and 40 quid is peanuts to my spoiled adolescent cousins. It's what they spend on games for their Wii every weekend. I think sometimes us adults forget how much life has changed for children in Britain or the US since we were young - I saved for literally months to afford the AD&D 2e DMG when I was 12, but kids these days (kids these days!) just don't seem to have that experience. To a point, money isn't an object.

Where Trollsmyth is bang on the money is outreach. What are the most popular fantasy fiction series for children around today? Harry Potter by a country mile, followed by probably those awful Twilight books, and I suppose you could throw in the Chronicles of Narnia too, thanks to the films. But where are the rpgs based on these franchises? I know that J. K. Rowling is touchy about fan fiction and fan produced products, but there is a metric shit ton of merchandising for Harry Potter - I sincerely doubt the lack of a Harry Potter RPG is down to an unwillingness on the part of the copyright holder. (There may even be a Harry Potter RPG for all I know, but if so it's had the worst marketing campaign in the history of marketing campaigns, which is the same point made a different way.) Where is the White Wolf-produced Vampire: The Masquerade-lite for all of the swooning adolescent girls who flocked in droves to the Twilight movie?

More to the point: Where is the High School Musical rpg? Complete with statistics for Having Totally Great Hair, Having Really Clean Teeth and Being Like So Totally Cute? Would that not sell?

I wouldn't touch such games with a barge pole, personally, but that isn't the point, and is precisely the kind of thinking which has hindered the passing on of rpgs to the younger generation. Fatbeards, catpissmen and rpg.net-Right-On types thinking: "Yuk, kids' stuff."

Trollsmyth thinks Green Ronin have a good idea with Witch Girl Adventures. It's certainly on the right track. I also find myself hoping that the Maid RPG and things like it can do well - anime and manga are after all depressingly and bewilderingly popular with the young folk these days. What's also needed, of course, is something for young boys to get interested in. I liked Fighting Fantasy and Basic D&D as a kid because they were about killing things with a sword and general-derring do. I don't know if similar products aimed at boys exist, these days.

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.

GINUINITI, or, Games which I Never Used to be Interested in, but am Now Interested in Thanks to the Internet

Rifts - When I was about 11 or 12 the only place I knew of to buy RPG stuff was the Virgin Megastore in Liverpool. (I'm showing my age there, probably: those were the days when not only were Virgin Megastores still around, they actually sold role playing games.) I used to spend a long time paging through various books on its shelves and imagining what it would be like to have more than three quid a week in pocket money. I liked the look of most games, but something about Rifts products always used to depress me. I'm not sure if it was the art or writing, but flicking through the books would fill me with this profound sense of apathy and alienation. Thanks to some posts at the RPG Corner, though, and I find I'm all turned around on the subject. Funny how sometimes you just need somebody who's "in the know" to explain what's good about something.




Tunnels & Trolls: This always struck me as the poorest of poor men's D&Ds: a straight up rip-off that didn't even try to hide the fact in a clever name. But again, thanks to somebody "in the know" I'm reconsidering that position. T&T looks cool.

Traveller and Twilight 2000: As kids a friend and I spent really a rather ridiculously long amount of time playing computer games based on these two, and failing utterly to find any enjoyment, or even sense, in them. The Traveller game in particular was like an exercise in refined torture; you could spend an AGE creating an entire gang of characters and customizing them in all sorts of interesting ways, but the instant the game begun you tended to either get attacked and wiped out by random bypassers, or accidentally walk into a lake and drown. The Twilight 2000 one meanwhile had such a horrible isometric interface that it was literally impossible to control anything your characters were doing; they would consequently run about in a manner reminiscent of people who've just been told a tsunami is coming, and be picked off one by one by mercilessly tough computer opponents. This ruined any interest I might have had in either as rpgs. However, discussion forums and in particular the Godzilla Gaming Podcast have made me reconsider. Computer games are never fair representations of the rpg they're based on. Just look at bloody Baldur's Gate.

Runequest: No.... hang on, thinking about it, I'm still not interested in Runequest.

Dead Magazines

On balance the internet is undoubtedly a good thing, but it is responsible for a lot that's wrong with the world. One of its greatest sins is that it drove the final stake through the heart of the print RPG magazine. Not even monolithic house organs like Dragon and Dungeon could resist its energy-draining wight touch.

The saddest loss of the print-net war was a magazine called Arcane, which for about two years in the mid 90s constituted my regular fix of RPG reading. Not only was it eclectic and general (its articles covered everything from D&D to d6 Star Wars to Harn to WoD), it was also written with the wit and verve that Future Publishing was rightly famous for in the 1990s. (Some of Arcane's regular contributors were or had been staff writers for other great and now sadly defunct FP titles, such as the unrivalled Amiga Power.) Even though I haven't even clapped eyes on a copy in around ten years at least, I can still remember some of its classic articles, and I credit it with more influence on my gaming habits than just about anything else.

There's often talk about the 'death of the industry' and the declining cultural importance of RPGs. Young people prefer World of Warcraft, it seems, and nothing signifies this more than the disappearance of magazines like Arcane. But was this trend a cause or a symptom? Which came first: the death of the magazines or the zenith of the industry?

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.

We're so evil!

There's a big fuss being kicked up about Geoffrey McKinney's new homebrew campaign setting for OD&D, the grandiosely titled 'Supplement V: Carcosa'. It has generated a lot of understandable outrage about its depictions of demon-summoning rituals (most of which seem to involve a level of sexual violence against children which would put Gary Glitter to shame), and a predictably vehement defense from some quarters to the effect that the violence is fictionalised, we should respect free speech, villains in the source literature do similar things, etc. etc.

This post isn't about that issue, directly. All my points have been made already, more eloquently, by other people, and you can and will make up your own minds. I should also say that I absolutely support the production of new 'old school' products and I'm glad the author has made the effort to put his creativity out in the public domain. I also think he's a very brave individual for risking the obvious backlash his publication would invite. However, I think that 'Supplement V' brings up some other worrying issues for the little niche of the RPG world we call 'old school gaming'.

My biggest concerns about 'Supplement V', rather than the infantile - and I use that word advisedly - reveling in blood and gore, are these. First, there is the near unforgivable hubris of its title, deliberately setting the supplement up as some sort of spiritual successor to the OD&D supplements. I find this distasteful. It's grandiloquent. It's putting oneself up on a pedestal. Frankly, it lacks class. More seriously, it panders to the notion that people who play older versions of D&D have to continually walk in the shadow of its creators. Again I'm forced to ask the question that I have before in this blog, numerous times: what's wrong with doing something new? Why does this have to be 'Supplement V', unable to stand on its own two feet as something novel?

Second, the continued use of paranoid shibboleths like "Supplement V: CARCOSA is a book of rules options for the original fantasy role-playing game published in 1974" really gets my goat. It's a completely unnecessary rhetorical genuflection designed to avoid being sued by Wizards of the Coast for using the words 'Dungeons & Dragons' - something which has a likelihood of precisely nil. Wizards of the Coast do not own the words 'Dungeon', 'and', or 'Dragon'. They own trademarks of certain logos and sets of lettering which happen to have those words in them. The level of concern exhibited by some members of the 'old school' in this regard is completely misplaced.

Third, I have a broader anxiety about 'amoral' games, and I've noticed a tendency among various old school bloggers to over-egg that aspect of Original D&D to the point of absurdity. Yes, grave-robbing and theft of treasure in an amoral (or immoral) manner was a cornerstone of the game, and the fantasy genre, for many years. It's a trope, and happens to be a lot of fun. It's also a truism that D&D characters are almost never truly 'good' in any meaningful sense of the word, unless ones definition of 'good' includes unthinking slaughter. And the characters in the source literature which inspired/inspires D&D were never angels.

But there's a point at which behaving amorally in a game turns a corner into the vicarious acting out of urges - urges that are better left at the very bottom of the id. Murder, theft, and even matters like torture and rape (on the part of the villains) are not something that I would absolutely forbid from ever arising in my games. And the moral ambiguities associated with the killing of 'evil' creatures are worthy of exploration. But there is nothing morally ambiguous about, for example, sexual abuse. I don't have any interest in exploring that as an outlet for the player-characters (villains are a different story), because it's an intrinsically negative, destructive and, dare I say soul destroying thing to do. Just as I gave up playing the original Grand Theft Auto because I realised it could have a numbing effect on my attitudes towards other people, so I don't wish to be involved in D&D play which involves something similar.

Trends in Nerdish Pursuits - or, I wonder if Emily Short and Ron Edwards have ever met?

As well as playing RPGs, I sometimes like to dabble in the playing and writing of text adventures, or 'interactive fiction' as I believe the kids are calling it these days. The developmental paths of interactive fiction and RPGs are surprisingly similar, and it makes me wonder if we can't draw any half-baked and ill-thought out theories from this odd fact.

RPGs and IF, how similar hast thine development paths been? Let me count the ways:

A. RPGs and IF followed an exactly similar career trajectory - namely, they started off as the prevail of a small group of nerds, suddenly enjoyed a growth and boom period in which some of their most famous examples became household names, before finally coming up against the oncoming wave of console/video gaming and falling back from the universe in fear and confusion. Then they went back to being the prevail of a small group of nerds again.

B. RPGs and IF followed a broadly similar design trajectory - namely, they started off emulating simplistic 'fantasy fucking Vietnam' dungeon crawls, then gradually broadened their purview to include the more epic, the more personal, the more experimental, and the more unusual. This had the unforeseen consequence of splintering their fanbases into 'old' and 'new' and 'I like both' schoolers.

C. RPGs and IF followed a vaguely similar theory trajectory - namely, progressing from 'gamist' puzzle-orientated approaches to more 'narrativist' story-telling play. (God, how I loathe those terms, but they do get the point across.) This coincided with a mysterious name-change in both cases, from 'text adventure' to 'interactive fiction', and from 'role playing game' to 'story game'. (The cynic in me puts this down to people feeling ashamed about playing things called 'text adventures' and 'role playing games'.) It also coincided with a greater degree of player freedom and power, moving away from the GM is God/Designer is God starting point and ending up in a more airy-fairy world of non-linearity, narrative control, and 'plot'. (Compare Galatea with Zork, and the The Mountain Witch with Basic D&D.)

I wonder why this should have been the case. Do all nerd pursuits follow these paths? (Not that these trajectories were bad - I like both Galatea and The Mountain Witch.) Half-baked and ill-thought out theories on the back of a postcard. Or, alternatively, in the comments.

Where's the Innovation? Or, Forget the Realms

A while ago I made a post lamenting the lack of innovation in the so-called old-school revival. Basically, I felt it weird and faintly obsessive of people to only use old-school products to create endless pastiches of musty adventure modules from the early 80s. I thought that the whole revival movement would live or die by the creation of genuinely new stuff, and to that end even started up my own campaign setting for labyrinth lord, "OzCthulu", to prove it could be done. (Work on this was temporarily postponed when I lost absolutely everything in a laptop hard drive catastrophe.)

I was thinking about this the other day when participating in this thread over at therpgsite. It was started by somebody complaining about the 4e iteration of the Forgotten Realms setting. (You can read an excellent negative review by Nitessine, of Worlds in a Handful of Dice fame, here. Suffice to say, they've made a whole raft of changes mainly for change's own sake - or in other words to justify selling a whole new range of books to gullible fans.) Now, I should say straight away that I'm no fan of the Forgotten Realms. I always felt that it was bog-standard high fantasy of the most bog-standard kind, and if I was going to buy into a campaign setting it would be one I'd never think up for myself - for example Dark Sun or Planescape. But I know that a lot of people love it, and fair play to them. It seems unfair to slaughter all of their sacred cows. (The argument here always comes back: nobody's putting a gun to their head and saying they have to accept the changes. But they will if they want to play any newly published FR adventures.) More to the point, though, I just don't understand why WotC are even bothering with a new FR edition at all. Here's what I wrote in the thread:

Just so long as they keep away from the one D&D setting I actually like.

Seriously though - talk about creative bankruptcy. I was never into FR, but I recognise the tradition means a lot to a lot of people. So why fuck it over when you could be, I dunno, creating a new setting?

I mean, does anyone else find it odd that TSR managed to come up with Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Dragonlance, Birthright, Planescape, Dark Sun, Al Qadim, Greyhawk, Spelljammer, etc. etc... and all WOTC have ever created is Eberron (and that was developed by somebody else through a competition)? Get a grip, Mearls et al!

In other words, what on earth are they doing fiddling about with Forgotten Realms and annoying its fans, when they could be flexing their creative muscles and coming up with new and interesting settings for the new edition they're so proud of? Even though it was a financial basket case by all accounts, TSR was a veritable hive of innovation in its heyday: settings like Spelljammer, Dark Sun and Planescape are amongst the most interesting ever created in the fantasy genre, full stop - way superior to the vast majority of what even most best-selling fantasy fiction authors come up with. (Don't agree? Pick up a novel by David Eddings or Terry Goodkind or heck, even George R. R. Martin - who I love, by the way - next time you're in a bookshop.) The people who worked on those settings were titans of world creation. So what's WotC's excuse for not following suit?

The mean part of me wants to say: they just want to milk Forgotten Realms and Eberron for all they're worth. But I don't credit Mike Mearls and the other designers with that level of cynicism. I may not like 4e a great deal, but Mike Mearls has never struck me as anything other than a thoroughly nice individual. And he's obviously a very thoughtful, creative and intelligent person. Is the problem that he and the other designers are directing too much of their creativity into the mechanics of the game, and not enough into what the games are actually about? Another possibility is the financial one - it's often argued that a superfluity of campaign settings somehow watered down the market for TSR and contributed to their demise. I've never bought into that: what's the difference between one FR book which a million people buy, and ten Dark Sun books, each of which are bought by 100,000 people? Cost of production? In any case, I'm not arguing for twenty brilliant innovative new settings. Even one would do.)

Anyway, in light of these thoughts, I feel much more charitably inclined to the old school revivalist movement, which at least makes no bones about rehashing old material. If people are going for creative bankruptcy, at least let's be honest about it.

Runaway Slave Never Going Back

I think I've identified what my problem with self-consciously indie, Forge-y games is. And it can be encapsulated in the blurb to a popular (as much as those games ever are) indie rpg currently making a bit of splash in circles where they care about such things: Steal Away Jordan. See, I'm happy for games to exist in which

players explore the social and psychological implications of life in a society where people can be property.

And I'm happy for there to be games in which

players consider slavery’s long-term impact on a society and on the descendants of slaves and slave owners.

But it sounds, to me, like what my GCSE* History coursework was designed to achieve, and therefore not an enjoyable or worthwhile experience as I understand it. Other people's mileage, needless to say, may vary, but I don't really want to play GCSE History coursework; it isn't my idea of a fun evening.

I think if I was going to play Steal Away Jordan and enjoy it, I wouldn't want much, or indeed any, consideration of the social and psychological implications of slavery. Rather, what I would want would be pulpy, let's-have-a-revolution-and-start-up-a-quilombo, old fashioned, swashbuckling, runaway-slaves-fighting-crocodiles, voodoo-magic, Indian-burial-grounds style adventure. I'm not sure why that's frowned upon, but it apparently is, so my interest falls to pretty close to zero.

I suppose the problem could be summed up as: I don't mind taking games seriously to a point, but at the end of the day, all we are is a bunch of nerds sitting round a table rolling dice and pretending to be elves (or Wolofs). If I'm going to be a nerd, let's at least have fun and forget about all the bloody learning and consideration of implications.

*GCSE: General Certificate of Secondary Education. Examinations English and Welsh kids have to take at the age of 16.

Women

Okay, so I've done race in two recent entries. Now it's time to turn my hand to women in gaming. This post is mainly inspired by this rpg.net thread, about female berzerkers.

First things first, the whole fighting-woman cliche (you know the one - ripped, nubile young female, leanly muscular, hyper-sexualised, probably bisexual, and yet of course uber-sexy) has totally passed me by. It's one of those fantasy/sci-fi tropes that I just Do Not Get. (Like elves. And vulcans.) Now don't get me wrong - I yield to no man in my liking of nubile young women. In fact, in my liking of women full stop. But I'm old fashioned enough to like my women to be women, thankyouverymuch, not simulacra of men. The idea that such female characters somehow strike a blow against sexism is utterly laughable to me, given that they do exactly what feminism was supposed to fight against (see women as objects - in this case sex objects).

At this point I expect some snarky reader somewhere is thinking "I bet he's just so insecure in his own masculinity that he feels challenged by such female characters." To that I can only say: Damn straight. I don't like my masculinity being threatened, especially not by women. Having it threatened by other men is bad enough! Why any man would fantasize about a woman stronger, fitter and faster than them is utterly beyond me. And at the same time, why any woman would want a man who was weaker, less fit and slower than them is also completely mind-boggling to me in the same way that, say, foot-fetishism is. Well, I never pretended this post was going to be objective!

But be that as it may, and like it or not, some people like to play tough-girl women in games. To this I say, great, go for it, if that's what you want to do, but let's be realistic about it. Tough-girl women are NOT likely to look like this:



She ain't hurting anybody. No, tough-girl women in the real world mostly look like this:


And I would argue that if were are interested in striking blows against sexism, we should be depicting more East German shot putter-type women both in our play and in our art. Because doing so would send out the clear and simple message that we all (claim) to believe in: It doesn't matter what a woman looks like. Which is the opposite message to what role playing games mostly send out today.

Why I like D&D, Reason # 1567

One thing that non-role players rarely give us (as a collective) credit for is the creativity that goes into our hobby. In popular culture, role playing is seen as somewhere just below Sunday School and Morris Dancing in the coolness stakes, and its players are viewed as uniformly fat, smelly and socially inept. This is doing us a great disservice. Many of us are fat, smelly and/or socially inept. But we are also, most of us, creative and imaginative dynamos.

Unusually, given its reputation in the wider RPG world as the most cliched and unimaginative game going, D&D has probably the most innovative players of all. (By virtue of the size of its player base, it probably also has the most uninspired and insipid players, but that's by-the-by.) As some of you may know (I've mentioned it ad nauseum), I've been writing a thread on rpg.net in which I'm going through the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual monster-by-monster, doing a little commentary on each. When I started the thing it was supposed to be a pure nostalgia trip, but over time it has evolved into possibly the most concentrated collection of weird and wonderful ideas that currently exists in the world. Almost none of it is down to me - it's all been contributed by dozens and dozens of different commenters riffing on each other's ideas and volunteering thoughts. We're not even half way through yet and already there are getting on for 1,100 replies.

Some examples:

• Old Johnny in the lake, the crayfish demigod - a gargantuan crawdad worshiped by a cult of backwater peasants whose faith has transformed him into an actual deity.
• The Voice of the Storm - a legendary figure or group of figures who travel across the world sewing confusion, hatred and fear in the aim of starting wars and civil strife. This is for the sole purpose of providing nutrition for Tempests: Living storms who feed off the blood of people killed in combat.
  
• A re-imagining of gnomes as filthy vermin who live in the lairs and bedding of giants like oversized fleas.
  
• Farmers secretly breeding ankhegs as a kind of super-powered earthworm fertilisation system for their land. The only catch being that the ankhegs have a habit of killing farmhands and travelers - which the farmers explain away by blaming on an innocent local band of mongrelmen.
• The definitive solution to why blue dragons are blue - it camouflages them against the sky from below; the electricity coursing through their bodies prevents them from becoming a black silhouette.
  
• Elephant paladins of Ganesh and sperm-whale arch-magi.
  
• An ancient ruined city whose very mortar was made of living sandlings - who, driven slowly insane by time, are gradually shuffling and vibrating the place into dust.

Ideas like these make me proud to be a D&D player. What other hobby allows you to tap into such seams of raw creativity?

It's time for the hobby to get an image overhaul. Not through 'kewlness', which is what the design team at WotC seem to think is the Big Leap Forward. No: We should be stressing what a massive headtrip the thing is and how it allows you to come up with literally anything you want, and run with it. That's a game, surely, that anybody would be interested in playing.

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.

Scooped!

I know there's nothing new under the sun, and everything, but blimey, I really thought I had an original idea there.

My 'take' for OzCthulu is going to be different, but still, imagine how galling it was to find a link to the above product and read this:

TERROR AUSTRALIS includes three roleplaying adventures, "Old Fellow that Bunyip," "Pride of Yirrimburra," and "City Beneath the Sands," as well as extensive information about the Aboriginal inhabitants, their mystical concept of Dreamtime, inhabitants of the Dreamtime, Australian history, transportation in the 1920's, contemporary Australian slang, famous hauntings, and a special chapter analyzing the Dreamtime (Alcheringa) in roleplaying terms. Intended as a roleplaying supplement and useful in for any roleplaying game, TERROR AUSTRALIS also contains many pages of illustrations and maps to intrigue any Australia buff.

Bloody Chaosium. Why do they have to be so darned creative? Oh well, I'll press on with LL OzCthulu regardless.

*

In other news, there's been a bit of talk about a section of Dragon Magazine #364, in which the 4e design team are quoted as saying:

In past editions, we'd describe things like cave slime as if the DC of the Acrobatics check to avoid slipping in it were an objective, scientific measurement of its physical properties. "How slippery is cave slime? It's DC 30 slippery." But setting a fixed number like that limits its usefulness -- cave slime would be too challenging for low-level characters and irrelevant for high-level characters. In 4th Edition, we tell you to set the DC to avoid slipping based on the level of the characters, using the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table. So when 5th-level characters encounter cave slime, they'll be making a check against DC 22, but 25th-level characters have to make a DC 33 check.

Does that mean that high-level characters encounter Epic Cave Slime that's objectively slipperier than the Heroic Cave Slime they encountered in their early careers? Maybe. It doesn't matter.

I'm getting so sick of the double speak from WotC: "In past editions, we'd describe things like cave slime as if the DC...." No, in past edition, singular, you would have. It's like they can't resist the opportunity to take sly digs against older versions of the game, even if it means being economical with the truth in the most obvious ways, like acting as if 'past editions' and '3.X' are the same thing. (It reminds me of that awful article on Treasure in 4e, which I happily can't find a link for, where about half of the word length was devoted to painting a patently ridiculous picture of 2nd and 1st edition in a snooty and obnoxious way.)

Having said that, I really don't know what to make of this intelligence. It certainly ruins verisimilitude, but then again, since when has there ever been true verisimilitude in D&D? My major concern is that, well, a 25th level character is practically a demigod. What sort of a demigod slips on cave slime?

Does this mean that, for example, a 1st level and a 25th level rogue who want to climb the same wall have to use different difficulty checks? Or that a 1st level and a 25th level fighter who want to kill the same goblin have to use different 'to hit' targets (or whatever 4e uses)?

Concerning times in Dungeons & Dragons land, my friends. Concerning times.

A Gauntlet Has Been Laid Down

So Max, of Malevolent and Benign fame, has gone and given the bee-hive a good kick.

"Tell you what, noisms," he says, "If you work on an Oz sourcebook (or whatever you see fit) [for one of the retro-clone systems] perhaps I'll put together some notes for Dark Hollow, my own folkways heartbreaker based on Appalachian Werd setting based on tall tales, bilues and old time ballads, and Manly Wade Wellman."

Well, I'm not one to turn down a challenge, so I hereby state that I will go ahead and do just that. Within an indefinite period of time, there will be a new Labyrinth Lord Australian-Aborigines-and-Cthulu-Mythos-sourcebook out there on teh internets for your perusal, enjoyment, and/or derision. This is, I believe, what is known as putting one's money where one's mouth is - rather than just ranting about unimaginative old-schoolers from the sidelines.

But let's not let my readership off the hook. If I'm going to do this, I want to do it properly, and in order to do so I'm going to want people to read through, playtest, and offer advice on what I come up with. Even better than that, if we're talking pipe-dreams, I'd love to have some budding artists, layout people and computer-nerds to give the thing the veneer of professionalism, and turn it into something that people are really going to want to read and play. In other words: collaborators. What do you say, talented people of the role playing blogosphere?

Link-and-random-blah

One of those lazy link-and-random-blah posts.

• Max, who seems to have similar tastes to mine, has put up a Rules Cyclopedia Changeling half-elf variant off the back of my own elf series a few posts ago, and it's a good one. I love to mix a bit of folklore with my D&D, and this does exactly that, being full of fairy-tale weirdness. On the very same subject he's also statted up both 3rd edition and Labyrinth Lord versions of a kind of fey called a Rhyme Stealer. I think it gets the malignant tone of a nasty fey creature just right.
• I've been listening to quite a bit of Have Games, Will Travel recently. It's a one-man podcast by somebody called Paul Trevis, and is a catch all for all kinds of role playing, card and board games. As you probably know I'm very much a D&D guy, and Trevis isn't, but we have a few areas of overlapping interest (Burning Wheel, Unknown Armies) and it's always nice to hear new perspectives and to find out about new games. Of special interest to me recently has been a show he made a few years ago featuring an interview with the famous (or infamous) Ron Edwards ("Forge Midwest Gathering 2006: Special #2); I'm not a great fan of Forge theory or a lot of the games that come out of the site, but the man has some very wise and interesting things to say about independent publishing of rpgs. He's certainly inspired me to get off my backside and just go ahead and give it a shot.
• Brian has made a reply to an old post of mine in which I waxed nostalgic about animal fantasy stories; according to him there's a role playing game, now a GURPS supplement, called Bunnies & Burrows - loosely based on Watership Down. Whatever next? I wondered. Well... how about a Risus version? Definitely time to start a thread about it on rpg.net.
  
• I'm going to be running a first-ever Superheroes game via facebook messages soon. It'll be a solo affair for an rpg virgin, done with Mutants & Masterminds, and promises to be interesting: I'll be setting it in our shared hometown (Liverpool), which is something I've never done with a game before. The player is a reader of this blog (hey Nate - I'll try not to squish your character...too much), so I can't give anything more away, except to say that I think setting a game in one's home town could bring a whole other level to one's gaming. Let's see if it does; I may make a post about it once we're underway.

Now back to work...