My Dad's Bigger than Your Dad

What is it with guys who play role playing games, and talking about how much they know about martial arts?

I consider myself to be moderately masculine. I never cry, drink a lot of beer, don't mind stinking of sweat, watch and enjoy most sports, and I like ogling women at the gym, but on the other hand I'm not interested in cars and I quite like Sex and the City.

I also have done a bit of Tae Kwon Doe in my time, and got okay-ish at it - enough to know what becoming good at a martial art entails anyway (and enough to know I'm much too lazy to get there).

But I can never get my head around those conversations that some blokes have. You know the sort of thing. "I have this friend who is a black belt in karate and he showed me this move where you punch somebody in the chest and actually stop their heart!" "Well, I did kung fun for 20 years, and I know how to kick you so hard in the goolies that you end up coughing them out of your own nostrils." "My dad taught me aikido, and he learnt it from the modern founder of aikido who visited him from beyond the grave!" "I'm so utterly hard that every time I take a shit the muscles in my glutes break the toilet!"

For obvious reasons, these conversations always seem to crop up during role playing game sessions. Every time they do I have to just sit in the corner rolling my eyes. It's so utterly moronic; surely it would be simpler and more efficient if everybody just took their cocks out, compared sizes, and had done with it?

You get it with guns too, of course. Listen, I'm a WWII history buff, and I can compare the performance of a 37mm and a 47mm anti-tank gun with the best of them, but I never do so in public, or at least outside of the insanity of the turn-based WWII tactical wargames I play. The next time I hear somebody talking about how a .45 calibre round does x to your torso whereas a .44 one does y, when really it's just a matter of one doing d6+2 damage and one doing d6+3, I think I'll start strangling people.

Schoolboy Errors

Yeah, yeah, I know. So much for increasing the posting rate on this blog. Work and personal life are not cooperating, I'm afraid.

Anyway, last weekend, I made a crucial, schoolboy error which I once would never have made, and which proves my gamer skillz are growing rusty. Yes, I did it: I wrote on my character sheet in fucking INK. Now I'm going to have to put up with crossing stuff out, or (even worse) use bloody Tipex. What a moron.

This got me thinking about The Mistakes You Can Make as a player. I'm not talking about in-game stuff like the n00b error of trying to fight a cockatrice blindfolded. I'm talking about the meta-game stuff, like writing with a pen on your character sheet or using crappy dice. The kind of thing that makes everybody else point at you and laugh, or try to run you out of town with pitch forks. Here are some others I can think of; they may be a little subjective:

• Doing a voice while playing a member of the opposite sex.
• Forgetting your eraser so you have to keep borrowing one off somebody else.
• Making a bald statement about something you know nothing about, without realising that somebody else at the table does that thing for a living. (I once started rambling on about putting down a horse, only to discover that one of the other players was actually a vet and was busy laughing up his sleeve at my moronic misconceptions.)
• Not bringing snacks or drinks. Probably the most egregious error.
• Having a CD or mp3 player filled up with sound effects and queueing up the wrong one, so instead of a scary ghost sound playing when the scary ghost appears, you instead get the sound of somebody farting or a dog barking or a T-34 engine firing up.
• Forgetting to keep track of your hit points/gold/whatever so when the DM asks you, you look all flustered and have to shamefacedly admit that you don't know.
• Rolling 1d100 and mixing up which d10 is the 10s and which is the units, so you look like you're cheating when really you're just an idiot.
• Persistently forgetting or mispronouncing the names of the other players' characters.
• Rolling your dice too vigorously so that one of them goes flying off the table and under a conveniently placed cabinet, so you have to bend over or get on your hands and knees and scrabble around for it while you go increasingly red-faced because of all the blood rushing to your head and the other players stare at your ass-cleavage.
  

Any others spring to mind?

The Creativity of Constraint

Regular readers will know that China Mieville is kind of an obsession round these parts. It's not deliberate; the guy just insists on saying provocative things that he knows I'll want to comment on. At the gym just now I was listening to his interview on The City and The City, in which he talks at some length about how genre constraints and rules are not in fact barriers to creativity but, on the contrary, spur it. Working around strict tropes and genre expectations forces, in some respects, ever greater leaps of imagination in the drive for something new. (Of course, being a total pseud, like me, he mostly ended up talking about the Oulipo school.)

This is something I can identify with, as it's true of all the RPGs I really enjoy. Being constrained by either expectation (e.g., it's D&D so there will be a dungeon) or starting point (e.g., it's D&D so you can be a fighter, a wizard, a cleric, a dwarf, or an elf) forces both players and DMs to continually re-invent, rejig, and genuflect their games and characters in ways in which a blank slate somehow could not. (At least in theory. There are of course plenty of players who end up being Bob the Fighter in every game.) If you're playing D&D and you know therefore there are to be dungeons, you put in the extra effort to make those dungeons unique and interesting so they don't come across as old. If you're playing D&D so you know you're going to end up being the cleric, you invent some weird and wonderful new deity, religion and trappings to keep things fresh.

RPGs accomplish creativity through constraint in three different ways:

• The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Model. This uses hardcore randomness in character generation to force players into boxes they weren't expecting to be put inside. They then have to shape their character on unsure and unexpected footing.
• The BECMI D&D Model. This allows some choice of role, but the roles are highly rigid archetypes that allow for little variation. This forces players to come up with cosmetic and character-based variety; if you have to be an elf you're going to play an elf who is scared of water, whose culture is modelled on Turkish horse nomads.
• The Pendragon Model. This is the ultimate in constraint: in its purest form Pendragon insists that the players will all without exception take on the role of squires about to be knighted and taken into the service of King Uther (or King Arthur). Players therefore come up with highly creative means of distinguishing themselves from each other in looks, personality, abilities and history.

Generic games like GURPS, the HERO system, Savage Worlds and so forth therefore leave me somewhat cold. The vast blank canvasses they provide often intimidate and confuse. Better to restrict, better to constrain, better to make lack of options the spark.

The GM as Reluctant Court Jester

I've returned, windswept and rain-sodden and midge-bitten from the extreme North West of Scotland. (Some people go to sunny places in summer. I can never understand this. 7 years of Japanese summers were enough to convince me, if I didn't know it already, that the sun is our Enemy and not to be trusted. I like rain.) So naturally enough I want to write some posts about Scottish Highlands style D&D, because the bleak and empty hilltops, deep dark lochs, and abandoned castles of Skye, Wester Ross and Sutherland would be a perfect place for sandbox D&D.

But first, I want to talk about being a serious and high-minded GM, because the day before the missus and I went away there was a session of a regular Call of Cthulu game I'm involved in, which contained a moment which I think summed up rather nicely something which I've noticed over the years.

Most GMs, I think, are rather high-minded about the games they run. There are plenty of gonzo-style GMs around, of course, so I'd hate to generalise, but I think by and large they tend towards wanting their games to be taken at least somewhat seriously. They spend a lot of time carefully crafting worlds, adventures, NPCs and encounters, toiling often for hours every week to make a deep, meaningful and interesting game session that the players can really be immersed in.

And yet it so rarely ever comes off, because more often than not players just don't have the same investment that the GM has. They don't put in a lot of work outside of gaming sessions, as a rule, and much of the time what they're primarily interested in is their own character, and hanging out with friends and eating lots of fatty foods. This is true of most players and is certainly true of me when I'm a player, not a GM.

Last week during the Call of Cthulu game, we'd just learned that an old arch-enemy of the group had not in fact been killed in a fire (as we thought he had) but had in fact survived. This was quite significant, as it was an NPC we all loved to hate and who had come close to killing all of our characters in days gone by. So the scene was set for some good immersive role playing reactions. One of us, I forget who, blurted out, "He's alive?", with a serious "in-character" expression on his face. To which, on cue, another player immediately murmured "Gordon's alive!?" in a pitch-perfect Brian Blessed impression. Everyone sniggered and the moment was ruined. All that careful build-up was for naught.

Just as the remark was made I glanced at the GM's face and saw writ there the GM's tragedy encapsulated perfectly: caught between having to laugh because although it was a stupid and obvious joke it was executed with such panache, while at the same time having to be disappointed and crushed by the carefully built-up mood being so utterly spoiled, he ended up doing neither. He just looked down, paused for two seconds, and carried on. But I knew that the moment cost him, as it costs all GMs dozens of times every game session, all across the land, and he had felt it like yet another pound of the huge weight which he, like all other GMs, carries John Bunyan-like on his journey through the valley of role playing.

Fighting Fantasy Monday: Fangs of Fury (III)

[I'll be away hiking and camping in the Scottish Highlands until the end of the month-ish, so this is the last update from me for a while. I know posting on this blog has slowed down a lot over the last few months, so I hope after the break I'll come back refreshed and full of energy.]

Back here, we were confronted by a naughty goblin who seems to have mistaken us for an ally and wants to know our regiment. Being a bunch of deceitful scumbags, you decided to bluff and give him a name.

In Zamarra, you've heard stories about the Bonecrusher Battalions so you decide to use that name. The Goblin immediately pulls out a sword and holds it to your throat. 'The Bonecrushers have not landed yet, Coney!' He calls out to one of the soldiers, 'Get the list. I think we have another spy.' The Goblin marches you to a deep earth dug-out as another Goblin arrives clutching a large battered book. He looks at you, then flicks through the pages. The book seems to contain information about King Elidor's knights, squires and nobles. The Goblin shuts the book, disappointed. 'Nobody important, no ransom, kill him.' Do you shout out that what you meant to say was that you want to join the Bonecrushers (turn to 250) or 'admit' that you've deserted from the Citadel garrison (turn to 181)?

Something tells me it's all happening at the zoo

There are some animals which really hog the fantasy-monster-beast limelight. Wolves (werewolves, wolfweres, dire wolves), bears (werebears, cave bears, owl bears), snakes (yuan-ti, medusae), lions (lamia, manticores), eagles (rocs, griffins). Enough with these trite creatures of cliche! Instead, what about:

• Seagulls. Herring gulls and black-backed gulls are mean, noisy, vicious and cocky. They swagger about picking fights and causing trouble. Humans don't scare them - as you'll know if you've ever had one stare you down as you walk past with your shopping in a busy city street. They have sharp, strong beaks and powerful wings. Imagine one eight foot tall and the damage it could do to you. Now imagine a dozen of them.



• Chameleons. Colour-changing lizards with spooky independently moving eyes, eerily smooth movement, and hyper-fast extendable tongues which can grab prey at a distance. Endless patience in ambush. They swallow you alive and let their digestive juices do the rest.



• Walrus. A walrus is big, heavy, fat, and can scare off a polar bear with its turks. A giant walrus would be able to crush you like a flea, and unknowingly capsize a ship in its wake - then gobble up the survivors, floating helpless in the sea, as if they were plankton.

I also think there is mileage in dugongs, beetles, turkeys and ostriches.

D&D is About...

I've been playing some more 'modern' or story gamish games recently - things like Blood & Honour, Unknown Armies and Burning Wheel. One thing you notice about modern games is that they all tend to be 'about' something. They're not just tabletop games that you play to have fun. They're supposed to enable you to explore certain deep human emotional themes. Thus Burning Wheel is 'about' having your beliefs challenged; Blood & Honour is 'about' how obsession with honour leads to tragedy; Unknown Armies is 'about' making sacrifices for the pursuit of knowledge; Changeling: The Lost is 'about' finding onself after personal tragedy. And so on.

I think there's a tendency to contrast this with more trad games like D&D. You find this on both sides of the old school/avant-garde divide, so OD&D grognards poo-poo story games because "it's about the game, not the narrative" and story gamers poo-poo OD&D because it's "incoherent" and doesn't have a goal. Both sides perpetuate a supposed gulf between the two different play styles.

Au contraire. I think D&D is actually 'about' something too, and moreover, it's about something very specific. What it's about is ambition.

What else could it be? PCs begin at 'level 1' and hope to progress upwards to level 9 or 20 or 36. They progress upwards by gathering ever more wealth and doing deeds of derring-do of ever increasing magnitude. They learn new abilities and magic spells. They behave avariciously, whether in terms of wealth, power, or experience, and are never satisfied with what they have. Their goal is almost universally to dominate the world, even if this is usually unspoken, because world domination is implicit in their drive to succeed.

Ambition even seeps into the metagame, because in my experience it's generally only in D&D that you get DMs doing the crazily obsessive worldbuilding which you find all over the blogosphere and which I also engage in with so much gusto. You don't get people DMing Unknown Armies and coming up with the gargantuan folders stuffed full of random encounter tables, maps, random treasure generators, weather and climate charts, new monsters and NPCs, and campaign notes. You don't get the almost megalomaniacal ambition of a true D&D DM to catalogue an entire world in other games. Or, at least, not at all as commonly.

D&D is about ambition, greed, power, and the will to win above all costs.

Fighting Fantasy Monday: (And it's actually Monday!) Fangs of Fury (II)

[I hear there's some sort of celebration in America on the 4th of July. Can't imagine what it is, but I hope my American readership had a nice time.]

It's been a while, but if you cast your mind back you'll remember that, after a very convoluted and contrived back story, we were in a labyrinth trying to decide whether to go right down a tunnel and disobey instructions, or climb over a pile of rubble. The votes were to be a good boy and climb over the rubble like Captain Laski said.

You scramble up the pile of rubble. It moves under you and, suddenly, you see bright sunlight. You scamper up and at once hear gruff voices shouting commands. Just then you slip, and a large warty hand stretches down and helps you up. You stand there blinking in the bright light and see a Goblin smiling at you. Behind him a group of soldiers are pushing a giant battering-ram against the huge outer defences of the Citadel. There is dust and smoke everywhere. You look down to see the rubble move again and the hole you emerged from seal itself. The Goblin shouts at you. "Watch your step! Next time I'll let you get buried! Now, who are you and what regiment are you marked for? I don't see any insignia."

Do you admit that you don't have a regiment (turn to 298) or do you give him a name (turn to 378)?

My So-Called [Gaming] Life

Here's what's going on right now in Noisms Wonderful World of Role Playing (tm). I am:

• Playing in a monthly Call of Cthulu game set in 1920s San Francisco.
• Playing in a monthly d20 Modern game loosely based on Joe Dever's post-apocalyptic gamebooks.
• About to start a monthly Blood & Honor game.
• Planning a Japanese-soldiers-in-China hack of the Cyberpunk 2020 rules.
• Running a WFRP game by email.
  

You'll probably have noticed something: none of this is D&D. This isn't a coincidence. I've recently become so sick of D&D I could puke blood. This is maybe an odd confession, because well over 90% of the entries on this blog have been related to D&D either directly or indirectly. But what can I say? I went through a cycle of massive enthusiasm for Old Beulah this past two years or so, and now I've come out the other side and just want to think about something else. We all go through these stages.

It'll be back, of course. That's the thing about cycles. I predict that in a year or so I'll be chomping at the bit to try to hit Armour Class 0 and save-vs-death magic. But for now, I think D&D and I need a break. Much like Ross and Rachel, except D&D knows that my flirtations with other games will never amount to anything much. That's the beauty of game systems, really - your marriage to one is always open.

The Luck in the Head

Before a combat begins, a player can elect to test his luck. This involves picking a dice - any dice - and rolling. If the number is high (e.g. 4 or more on a d6) he is lucky. If the number is low (e.g. 3 or less on a d6) he is unlucky. He should then roll a d100 and consult the following table, designating an opponent as necessary. If the results make no obvious sense, reroll.

Table of Luck

1. Sunlight. The sun happens to be shining right into his enemy's eyes; for the first round of hand-to-hand combat, the enemy is at -2 to hit. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.
2. Diorrhea. Something the enemy ate that morning disagrees with him. The effort to restrain himself means he's at -1 to hit for the duration of combat. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.
3. Slippery surface. There happens to be something slimy or wet underfoot at the start of combat. The enemy has to roll 1d10; on a roll of 1 he slips and falls prone. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.
4. Daydreaming. The enemy was thinking about something else when combat started. He is last in initiative order for the first round. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.
5. Butter fingers. The enemy loses his grip on his weapon and drops it. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.
6. Flutter flutter. A bird, insect, bat or similar suddenly flaps into the enemy's face, distracting him for a round. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.
7. Happens to the best of us. The enemy gets an attack of the nerves and is paralysed for d3 rounds. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.
8. Migraine. The enemy has a crushing headache and sees flashing lights. He's at -2 to hit for the duration of combat. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.
9. Flu. The enemy is weak and lethargic, and does -2 damage for the duration of the combat. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.
10. Omen. The player has inadvertently performed an action which the enemy interprets as a bad omen. The enemy comes last in initiative order for the first round of combat. If the player is unlucky, the situation is reversed.

I just need to think up 90 more entries. But you get the idea.