Some work in progress...

(I was going to write "hard at work" but after you've been in a few porn movies you just can't use that phrase ever again ever. Anyway you guys have fun with it. Here are some pictures for a big dungeon painting I'm working on...(click to enlarge but parts are blurry since I'm not using a scanner)These are details form this picture--none of this stuff is finished yet...







Here's me hard at wor...I mean working h...forget it.That's obviously a set and not our apartment, actually me working usually looks more like thisAaaaaaaand here's a couple overland maps I made...

Dear Wizards,

"Hey man. I really dig your blog. I send links to it around the office often enough that I should probably be paying you a consulting fee or something."

--Mike Mearls

So, WOTC, I know some of you read this blog--so here is what I would like for Christmas...

Let me first say I am not going to be a jerk about this:

I am not going to ask you to start liking things you don't like.

I am not going to urge you to take directions you clearly have decided not to take.

I am not going to claim that the way I want things to be will definitely make more money.

I am not going to say Look at what you did here, it's crap, do better, hire better people--I presume you are hiring the best people you can, in the opinion of your editors, art directors, other relevant stakeholders and pie-piece claimers.

In short, I am only going to ask for things if I don't know why you haven't already done them.

So, here we go:

1. Publish two big hardcover coffee-table books with all the old TSR adventures in them.

Say...everything from the beginning until '85 in volume one, everything from there until the end of TSR in volume two.

Now, wait wait wait wait wait, hold on:

I am not asking you to do this in such a way that it will confuse your audience or in a way that will in any way challenge the notion that the current version of the game is the most modern and optimal of all possible versions of D&D.

Here is what you do:

-Do it like Marvel and DC Comics do with their oldest material: put it in a crazy retro trade-dress that emphasizes it as a collection of nostalgic pop-cultural ephemera. The kind of thing wives buy for their husbands in book stores. Put the word "Vintage" or "Classic" or even "Retro" in big letters on the cover. Make it look unserious but DeLuxe. 80s nostalgia is gigantic right now--they made a Smurfs movie for fuck's sake. There has never been a better time.

-You don't need to comb through the archives--print the original material as-is from scans of old modules in a little box (scotch-taped pages and all) in the middle, then, in the margins, in fancier modern-WOTC layout, have commentary and glosses on the modules from your current design team: anecdotes "Oh, I remember this room...", historical retrospectives, discussions of how this early material lead to the (you can imply) more sophisticated material you now produce.

Since this is the kind of thing your designers like to sit around and do all day anyway, you probably won't have to pay them that much to do it. Just send a memo around: Got a favorite retro module? A favorite room? Write us 300 words on it.

Since several of these modules have already been revised for later editions, you can even use this to sell the newer versions, and instead of commissioning essays, just reprint stuff the designers of these modules already said online in interviews about the old material.

You could also fill space with snatches of old reviews from the fan press or--if you want to get fancy--reminiscences from like China Mieville and Patton Oswalt and Vin Diesel. I know that sounds expensive but seriously if you just go to a Patton reading and say "Hey you ever run 'Keep on the Borderlands'? He'll talk for 20 minutes and you can just tape record it--I've seen it. And if you can't get them you can get the Order of The Stick or the KOTDT or the Robot Chicken people. I hear they work cheap.

In addition to making these old books more useful to DMs (of all schools) and making reading the modules feel less like scavenger hunts for ideas that still have resonance--cheaply--the commentary might also convince oldsters who don't play any more and who got the books mainly as cute retro-artifacts that the folks now working at WOTC are pretty clever fellows in their own right and might just be producing games they--the nostalgic old-timers--might want to play with their kids.

Aside from the luxurious hardcover exterior and a few color-plates in the middle for cover art, you can print the whole thing in black and white--how cheap is that? How are you not going to make money on this considering you will be able to sell this easy-to-throw together book to:

-Every single person who is into Old School gaming. That's 2-3 thousand right there. If you can sell what amounts to a hardcover artbook for adults (at hardcover artbook prices) to just that many people you'll do better than break even

-The aforementioned nostalgia not-currently-gaming demographic

-A good slice of your more dedicated and hobby-invested new-edition gamers

?

Its release will be an opportunity for the geek media to rehash the same 3 page think pieces they wrote when Gygax died--only this time you'll have something to sell them.

Plus, these books will act, functionally, as supplements to all the retroclones and postclones--everyone who plays Labyrinth Lord or OSRIC or LOTFP:WF will want one. You'll be making more money off their games than they are.

I suppose it goes without saying you can put a warm and amused intro at the front talking about how far we've come since these primitive days and how tortured and hilarious the mechanics are. If you get real neat you could provide 4e conversion notes on each module for your more ambitious GMs.

So there's that. I think that's the most reasonable think I'd like for Christmas. If you can't do that I'd like to hear about why--since I know somebody at WOTC will read this sooner or later.

2. Find a way to have your game easily work with other RPGs again.

I'm not one of those people who is going to claim Pathfinder's doing so well against Type IV D&D because Type IV is so much worse than previous editions. (Even if Pathfinder was somehow "objectively" better, we all know being good isn't necessarily good for business.) It's doing better because Type IV is so different from previous editions--and from every other game on the market.

I think Pathfinder's doing well because people already knew how to play Type III D&D and liked it and the new edition is almost completely incompatible with it so they gotta start over from zero.

Who would do that? Who would start over from scratch just to play a game in the same genre? Only two kinds of people will do that: hardcore players so jaded and with so much gaming-time on their hands that they will play a new system just to try it and totally new players who are just like "Hey, might as well buy what's in the store". You lost everybody who was just cruising along playing D&D and liking it.

Plus: To turn a 3.5 adventure into a Type IV one you pretty much have to rewrite every encounter from the ground up. Which takes almost as much time as writing the adventure in the first place.

Sure, any game not being currently supported with new stuff will wane in popularity, but if 3.5 was still being supported pretty much continuously from the second it was discontinued in the form of Pathfinder, why wouldn't people who love 3.5 just keep right on? Only one reason: the name is stupid. Who wants to Find Paths? Nobody I wanna play with. But other than that? No reason.

Say what you want about Type 2 D&D, it had a legitimate claim to simply being a tightening of the screws on AD&D--it was worth checking out if you played the old game. Type III rationalized a lot of mechanics that were already understandable to a TSR player. Type IV is just this whole other animal--not bad in itself--but it's trouble if the crux of your marketing strategy is "Why this particular fantasy RPG? It's the one called D&D".

Turning adventures written for any TSR version of the game into any other TSR version of the game was--as they say in computer programming--trivial. Even going from GURPS or Rolemaster to TSR D&D wasn't so hard because there weren't that many stats in D&D back then. Type 3 stats were like the TSR games only more of them. But going from Type IV to anything else requires more computational effort than going between any other pair of systems I can readily think of. I have literally never heard of anyone using a Type IV adventure for any system other than Type IV.

Now maybe your idea was to "wall off" Type IV so you wouldn't leak players off to other systems. But, honestly, I don't think that's working out, financially. Do you?

People who like using their brains well enough to understand and run D&D will eventually use them to try other games--the skills and enthusiasms needed to DM overlap with the skills and enthusiasms needed to hack a game system and investigate new game systems. DMs pretty much all do it. Why not use this fact to your advantage rather than have it work against you?

For TSR, this promiscuity wasn't a problem--folks trying other games didn't mean they weren't still buying TSR stuff. You could sell the Fiend Folio to someone playing MERP or Warhammer.

Now speaking here as both someone who has played and enjoyed Type IV and as someone who has a sort of vague democratic idea that all mutations must be preserved I'm not asking you to abandon that version of the game. I am asking you to do things with it that inject it back into the ecosystem of ideas that is the RPG hobby. Simple conversion algorithms on every product and notes on how to run things in older systems in every book would be nice, but most importantly of all, write the adventure stuff concretely rather than in abstracted language. This ensures that people might still buy your stuff even if they don't buy your system.


3. Switch to a more pluralistic and writer-centric model

I know you remember when Dark Knight and Watchmen changed everything in comics and the audience started getting older and I know you know that's happened in games too. One way comics dealt with that was by moving toward a more author-centric publishing scheme. Writers (and, on good days, artists) were given whole worlds to play with, alternate-universe versions of characters were published as Elseworlds, creator-owned imprints were created etc. etc.

One very pleasant effect of this was that different comics are now very different from each other without damaging the integrity of the overall IP. Grant Morrison X-Men doesn't read like Jason Aaron X Men but nobody questions that it's X-Men.

As I noted several times while looking at The Slaying Stone, there are a lot of things in there I don't think are Logan Bonner's fault. I think they are probably down to whoever decided "A D&D product is a D&D product and that means the goblins are all like this and the orcs are all like that all the time".

I do not think the world-centric approach (Forgotten Realms v. Eberron v. Greyhawk) really solves this--if you listen to the designers there's still a tremendous amount of stuff that gets left out of these products because they don't fit some overall vision. Plus we all know that if you create different gameworlds that (supposedly) don't overlap you're basically competing with yourself. That problem disappears if we're buying based on how it's Mearls or it's Monte rather than it's Eberron or it's Greyhawk.

Once a player has played for about 2 years they get how game mechanics work and they presumably have got themselves (or are) a DM who can write an adventure--the only thing a published product can offer these people any more is ideas. At some point, the WOTC stamp stopped meaning "This contains the work of the best paid--and therefore possibly best period--professional RPG writers in the world" and started meaning "This contains the most generic version of this writer's ideas you are likely to find--if it is at all interesting to you, seek out the things they wrote for smaller publishers who gave them a freer hand".

Authors should be allowed to offer genuinely different takes on what ever edition you have out all under the WOTC banner--different presentations, formats, rules hacks (carefully explained, of course) and deviations from world canon. Don't worry-nobody is going to forget it's D&D and that you own D&D.

Also, curmudgeons like me won't be able to complain WOTC's this and WOTC's that if you abandon an obsession with house style, continuity, and regularization--each product will have to get looked at on its own merits because there won't be a blanket assumption that it is all from the same factory. Plus people who work over there will probably like it and have fun and do good work because they are having fun writing what they love. You know--freelancer morale and all that.

4. More fun tools for DMs

I know, I know--selling handbooks to players makes more money than selling stuff to us. I could make a financial case for selling genuinely useful, durable GM tools but it might be total bullshit--I don't know.

Alls I know is: I wrote a book full of GM tools and it took a month and I did way better than break even--and I am a known pervert with a funny haircut, not a company that already owns the most valuable piece of intellectual property in the industry with enough money to maybe even print it in color and hire some guys who aren't them to draw pictures in it.*

Okay here's a financial argument: Every GM tool (Majestic Wilderlands, City-State of the Invincible Overlord, Dungeon Alphabet, Vornheim) brings a different specific style of playing into focus. Putting some truly decent GM-option books out would show the range of possible ways Type IV (or whatever version you have out at any given time) can be played. This expands the audience, this expands peoples' notions of how the game can be played and therefore lengthens the shelf-life of the game.

We all know D&D has lasted so long mainly because it can be played in 1000 different ways---why not use this fact to your advantage?

You must have some designers dying to write books like this. Let 'em! Have them take all those ideas they put up on the WOTC forums and in their blogs and in the old podcasts and newsletters and work on them until they turn into some concrete tools which show us what all can be done with your game.

5. Less padding

All this usefulness-to-people-who-aren't-all-Type-IV-all-the-time ceases to be useful if we have to pay three times as much for the privilege of never being able to find anything in the damn book.

Maybe you fixed this in Essentials, I haven't checked. I do know I managed to fit my entire Type IV Warlord on one side of one piece of paper and you didn't, so that suggests someone over there is napping on the job.(And yes, weirdoes who may have found this post via some weird forum: he is not optimized. I know.)
________________________

Y'know: what I think I'm saying overall is--at this point I feel like I am more likely to pick up something written for almost any other kind of RPG than I am likely to pick up a Type IV product. Which is weird because I don't play Dread or Car Wars or DC Adventures or Stormbringer--I play D&D. Hell, I even play 4e sometimes.

Theoretically, there should be something in a WOTC product that can gives me ideas. But no: Type IV products are about Type IV and not much else. And I don't think that helps anybody in the long run. And it doesn't have to be that way.

________________________

Alright, I'm done.

Note: Vociferous edition-warring in the comments will be considered boring.






_______________
*Mr James Edward Raggi IV would like to remind readers: 1) that Vornheim was in black and white because its author wanted it to be available for a reasonably low price, not because LOTFP couldn't afford it, and 2) that the pictures were done by me because I wanted to do them.

One Simple Step To "Weird"

1. Take everything not weird and change it.

Not weird:

Ptolus is a major city of about seventy-five thousand people. It is located in the land of Palastan near a large bay on the southern end of the Whitewind Sea.

Weird:

Vrokk is a major city of about seventy-five thousand people. It is located in The Empire of Madness near a rock island floating 30' in mid air on the southern end of The Cerulean Forest.

Not Weird:

...it lies in the shadow of an impossibly tall (almost three thousand feet) and thin pinnacle of rock known simply as the Spire.

Weird:

….it lies in the shadow of an impossibly tall (almost three thousand feet) and thin pinnacle of rock known simply as the Tower of Inexplicable Idiocy.

Not Weird:

If the stories are correct, these catacombs include:
1.The sewers of the city.
2.Vast stretches of subterranean passages and chambers created by Ghul and his minions
3.The remains of an even older city.
4.An abandoned underground dwarven settle- ment called Dwarvenhearth.
5.And levels that plunge incredibly deep below the present urban area.

Weird:

If the stories are correct, these catacombs include:
1.The divination chambers of the Tenebriate Guild.
2.Vast stretches of subterranean passages and chambers created by Screel Hak and his minions
3.The remains of an even older city.
4.An abandoned underground jackalman settlement called Naqqara .
5.And levels that plunge incredibly deep below the present urban area.

Not Weird:

The city is ostensibly ruled by a council, at whose head is the Commissar, a representative of the Empire of Tarsis. The other main council members are Kirian Ylestos, the Prince of the Church, and the Mother Superior of the Sisterhood of Silence (see below). Other City Council members (with less influence) include guildmasters, the heads of the noble houses, and a few wealthy merchants. People of the town often refer to this body as the “Council of Coin,” because money is a powerful and influential force among its members.

Weird:

The city is ostensibly ruled by a female beggar, whose half-coherent alcoholic ravings are interpreted by agents of the Empire of Madness. These agents are Stoya Sel Nirik, the Baroness of the Fourth Doom, and the Child Inchoate of the Sisterhood of Need (see below). Other agents (with less influence) include guildbarons, the heads of the houses of mathematics, and a few wealthy choirmasters. People of the town often refer to this body as the “Council of The Drowned,” because their meetings take place in chambers half-filled with plum-colored liquid. (This ensures civility, as violent disagreements inevitably result in one or the other of the contenders being knocked from his or her floating platform into the poisonous ichor.)

Not Weird:

Helping to enforce the law is a special order of monks called the Sisterhood of Silence. These nonspeaking female monks patrol the streets and apprehend criminals, even though they are not— strictly speaking—sanctioned to do so officially. A male eunuch always accompanies a small unit of the Sisters of Silence to speak on their behalf.

Weird:

Helping to enforce the law is a special order of parasites called the Sisterhood of Need. These small, moist beings dwell in the ale sold in low haunts and crawl into the stomachs of criminals, even though they are not— strictly speaking—sanctioned to do so officially. A male eunuch always accompanies a small unit of the Sisters of Need to speak on their behalf.

I only killed one PC with this dungeon. Your turn...

Here kids, have a system-agnostic dungeon. This is the one the girls just escaped...

(Believe it or not, the obvious-if-you-just-look-at-the-map cunnilingual motif was an accident produced by randomly rolling monsters...)

Cathedral Of All Flesh Notes & Stats

This is an abandoned stone cathedral on a hill overlooking the edge of the rugged and inhospitable area known as The Bleak.

It is shaped like four enormous, many-eyed goats leaning together like sticks in a campfire, struggling toward the sky. The exterior is pitted and cracked.

Roughly rectangular rooms have been carved inside into what appears to be solid rock. There are no windows. The cathedral was built by devotees of Tittivila, Goddess of All Flesh before the church of the Insect God drove them from the Hackleth Isles during the War of Golems. The Insect Priests who dominate Hakleth have declared it a forbidden place.

Its appearance is so terrible that no-one who can see it clearly can approach within 30 yards--as such, it can only be approached blindly or at night.

A corrupt Tittivilan cult from the East--lead by the insane cleric, Pearl Viper, uses the Cathedral as a secret meeting place.

Each night of winter, she summons the Orth--an inscrutable extradimensional creature--into a sacred circle on the roof of the Cathedral and commands it to slay random inhabitants of Hakleth in the night. She is accompanied by her servant, Otto, an illusionist. The ritual begins each night at sundown and goes until to midnight, at which point the Orth is summoned and begins to seek victims.

The local authorities have installed a sentinel in a small watchtower--30' high--a few hundred yards from the hill, to keep an eye on both the Cathedral and the pass out of The Bleak. The sentinel is dutiful and carries a small telescope.

The cathedral is rumored to contain fabulous wealth. Also, naturalist Myria Essik of the Isle of Oth is offering 12000 gp to any party who can bring the Orth back to her alive and 4000 gp to anyone who can bring all of it back dead.

Plying the locals for information will reveal most of these things and uncover a rumor that one man claims to have driven if off with fire and another claims it was invulnerable to fire.

The adventure as written is suitable for a party of 3-5 adventurers levels 2-4, however it is easily scalable-there's no particular reason the foes couldn't be made more or less powerful.

-If a party should enter the Cathedral, be noticed, and then retreat, Viper will send Otto to follow them--and kill them if necessary. She will also then hire six mercenaries to protect her for the next week--five will attempt to seize control of the watchtower and one will roam the cathedral while she performs her rites each night.

-Note disabling the trap in room 17 requires simultaneously flipping the switches in rooms 10 and 4.

-Assume all nonhuman creatures attack and fight as typical fighters of a level equal to their hit dice. Any details not given here can be made up by the DM--for example how much of Pearl Viper's armor class is down to her talisman.

Orth (A tentacled thing from beyond) HD: 14 AC: 18 or 2 Speed: 3/4 human Intelligence: Animal
Attack: 5 tentacle attacks for d8 each. An unmodified "to hit" roll of 17 or above indicates the target is grappled and can be automatically bitten by the central maw for d8 points of damage the next round unless the target makes a successful escape roll on his or her next turn (using whatever your local mechanic for that is--assume the Orth's strength is 16 per tentacle).
Defense: All forms of attack damage the Orth, but the Orth will always be immune to the last form of attack it was successfully hurt with. For example: if it is attacked with steel, it will be hurt but then be immune to steel until it is attacked with (say) fire, in which case it will once again be vulnerable to steel but invulnerable to flame.

Pearl Viper (Cleric, level 6) HD: 6 AC: 19 or 1 (magic talisman + dexterity) Speed: human Intelligence: 15
Attack: Spiked chain for d6 or by spell. Her unusual spells include:
Choking Garment-Single target's clothes begin to choke him/her for d8 damage per round. Strength roll required to tear off collar. No save. Range: 20'
Defense:
-Prismatic Denial -Caster becomes immune to attack from anything of a chosen color and anyone wearing that color. Only one Prismatic Denial may be in effect on a given caster at any time.
-Runic Prisoner-Range: 20' Area of effect: 15' diameter circle Save allowed. Prevents targets from performing whatever their last action was until caster is slain. Attacking with an axe is considered different from attacking with a sword, for example, but running north is considered the same as running south. DMs judgment is required here.
-Note: Once per day, Viper may teleport without error within 200 feet by emerging from a shadow and then he may disappear into the same shadow and return from whence she came the next round after taking one action. You may fill the rest of her spell list with the number of spells appropriate to a cleric of her level in your system.

Otto (Wizard/Illusionist, level 5) HD: 5 AC: 17 or 3 (dex) Speed: human Intelligence: 16
Attack and defense: To keep things simple, just assume Otto has 2 spells, each of which he has prepared 3 times-- One allows him to create illusions that affect one person within 40' who saves at minus 2 and one that allows him to create illusions that affect everyone within a 40' radius--all of whom get an ordinary save. The illusions have visual and auditory components but he must save to maintain them if he takes damage. If you know your illusion rules backward and forward you can have the spells behave as they should in your system, if you don't assume, they otherwise behave as above and make judgment calls.

Lingua Necrotica (or Plague Tongues--rotting pale creatures 3-4 feet tall) HD: 3 AC: 16 or 4 Speed: human Intelligence: non-
Attack: Their touch does d4 damage and (failing a save) transmits an unspeakable disease. This malady causes the sufferer to be seized with the desire to lick the nearest living being. A successful grapple causes a network of thin yellow filaments to spouts from the sufferer's skin, attaching the plague victim to the unfortunate target of his or her affections. If left unbroken, these growths will eventually grow together into a viscid cocoon connecting and entombing both parties and transforming them--over the course of days--into a new cohort of lingua.

Clockwork Needlebirds (Small brass birds with syringes for heads) HD: 1 AC:15 or 5 Speed: 1.25 x human Intelligence: Animal
Attack: A successful "beak" attack does d4-1 damage and puts the target to sleep for d6 rounds if they fail to save. There is only enough juice for one full attack per bird. Subsequent attacks only do damage.

The Hive Demon (A creature entombed in ages past by the Insect Cult, to be awoken should the Cult of All Flesh return to the temple), if awoken, should be rolled on this table: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/09/demonic-attribute-table.html The DM may roll this creature in advance but I recommend having a player roll during the game (to watch the creature take shape). The DM should keep the results of the ability rolls secret. Otherwise the creature should have the following stats:
HD: 12 AC: 0 or 20 Speed: human intelligence: 17
It will be wreathed in a halo of flies. It will be attempt to slay any living thing in its path other than a cleric of the Insect Cult.

Mercenaries (Hired by Pearl Viper if she becomes aware of the PCs-they are Level 4) HD: 4 AC: 18 or 2 (splint mail, shield, high dex) Speed: human Intelligence: 10
Attack: light crossbow, net or longsword

Diseases, Dungeons, Bookbinding, Alcohol, Bestiaries, etc.

-First, A Picture

-Then, two public service announcements:

-Jim Ward--as in Drawmij's Instant Summons--needs help. Hook him up if you have a buck.

-You guys like miniatures right? This one's called Sasha and fights cancer:

Get an exclusive 28mm miniature and help combat Cancer and MS. Full details here:

http://frothersunite.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=36069

and on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Frothers-Charity-Thingy-2012/239388002780960

-Now, a picture from some Danish guy's house that I think is funny:

-Noisms asked us all some questions:

Book binding. I presume I speak for like a gazillion gamers when I say I'd like to have my RPG books bound well and would not like to read thousands of blog posts about how RPG books should be bound well.

"Doing a voice". Ding.

Breaks. I have a break if someone has to take a phone call anyway and we're not in the middle of something. I also have a break if a major objective just got finished and so we might keep going or we might just stop and hand out xp--figure out after the break.

Description. Ding.

Where do you strike the balance between "doing what your character would do" and "acting like a dickhead"? When I'm playing I generally just ask "Is that ok?" to the other PCs. When I'm running the game--the few times it comes up--it's a question of knowing the individual player well enough to know how disruptive they can get and knowing how to communicate with that specific person.

PC-on-PC violence. Aside from Mandy's brother, most of my players know each other and are socialized enough to at least know how far to push it. And with Mandy's brother it's just funny because there's a whole big-sister little-brother dynamic going on.

How do you explain what a role playing game is to a stranger who is also a non-player? I don't explain RPGs to strangers.

Alcohol at the table? On a 5 or a 6. My players' PCs tend to act exactly the same whether they're drunk or not, so far as I can tell. The only difference is they have an excuse when they can't remember NPCs from the session before.

What's acceptable to do to a PC whose player is absent from the session? I just have the PC disappear and be carried off to fairy land while nobody's looking.

-Now, a dungeon:
(click to enlarge)



-And finally, an observation that could probably be its own post but whatever:

Monsters. The monster bestiary in a published game book (if the game is D&D-like) isn't just things the PCs fight or things that define the setting: they are also a reason PCs care about leveling up and going on with the campaign.

Some players want their PCs to acquire power or wealth or status, but I think a lot of them leaf through the Monster Manual and see Asmodeus and go: I wanna meet that guy. And I want to be tough enough to beat him. And I want to have earned it,

Game-defining monsters like the dragons in Shadowrun or D&D or the beholder or the demons in Warhammer give the PCs the constant unconscious feeling that there's more out there in the game.

Games which don't have that, or game genres that don't have that--I think they need something else to keep PCs on the hook. Like I can see being playing a cowboy for a session or two--but why keep going? What am I gonna see in the 80th Boot Hill adventure that I didn't see in the first? Or, rather: what do I unconsciously anticipate that I am going to see in the 80th Boot Hill adventure that I didn't see in the first?

So having a sort of "public" awareness of the monsters in your game--so public even your players know these monsters--is a useful thing. The value of that has to be weighed against the "all-unknown-monsters-create-mystery" thing.

Put On Your Beret, Light A Gauloise, And Here We Go...

The...

(circle one)
problem with / awesome thing about

...classic D&D is it's not focused around any one way of playing.

So I was walking around Montreal today, where everything is French, and I realized that the frequent inability of the garage rockers of DIY D&D and the prog rockers of story-games and other forms of aggressive new-schoolery to understand what each other are on about isn't just a philosophy of gaming thing. It's a philosophy thing. A French philosophy thing, to be specific.

I know, I know, but trust me. Trust me. You trust me, right? Hold on...

So:

The Han vs. Luke issue points it up: Han is the Old School character whose heroism is basically incidental, whereas Luke has an epic heroic destiny from birth since his dad and the Force is strong with him and all that. The whole story is wrapped up with Luke the way Hamlet is wrapped around Hamlet.

Luke's dilemma has the symmetry, structure and choices of classic drama, Han's adventures (or the ones we imagine he has) are more picaresque.

_____

So what Han is is an Existential character. Big "e".

We don't have to go into all the ins and outs of existentialism in this post on this blog about D&D, what's important here is:

It reached the height of its popularity around World War II when Jean Paul Sartre gave it it's most recognizable-to-us form and it was basically a philosophy that caught on in an environment where everybody was asking:

Hey, there are Nazis, what do we do?

So the idea is people are defined by their actions. You aren't your stats, you're what you choose to do with those stats. Existence precedes essence, as Sartre said. You don't have any "essential nature" aside from that which you've done. I very purposely--more and more so every time I do a script--give characters no back story. The way you find about these characters is by watching what they do, the way they react to stress, the way they react to situations and confrontations. In that way, character is revealed through drama rather than being explained through dialogue as Walter Hill said. Character background is what happens between levels 1 and 6, as Gary Gygax said.

More importantly--for this point I'm making here--than actually being sure of all the ins and outs of the philosophy is just being aware that certain aesthetic ideas were attached to the word "existential" in the public mind: The lone figure in a landscape, cowboy movies, bold abstract paintings, lone heroism. Individualism, too, to some degree.

Likewise we don't have to get into the real guts and history of the next philosophy to leach its way into the public consciousness over the course of the 20th century: post-structuralism (aka deconstructionism). We just have to know about it's pop version.

Basically post-structuralism was a philosophy developed while people were all asking the question:

Well, ok, those Nazis were bad, right, but can we be all smug and say we're not like them? No, they were products of an environment. How do we make the environment not produce Nazis?

The post-structuralist big idea is that everybody is enmeshed in social structures and they are affected by them and (according to some of them. anyway) there is no acting or thinking outside these structures and ideologies.

The pop version of post-structuralism is basically heavily associated with critiquing every cultural product from prison architecture to zombie movies from the point of view of how they might eventually make people act like Nazis. Some of these folks are lovely people and smart and clever, some of them are the kind of drooling submentals who call themselves progressives but still wish you would stop drawing boobs.

Post-structuralist aesthetics emphasizes groups, social behavior, the collective.

(Note every argument about edgy art in games seems to devolve to: "What's good for most people" vs. "Your right to like, make, or promote something without being considered a Nazi". Note both of these philosophies--like most philosophies that catch on with large groups of creative people--are generally philosophies of the left. They boil down to a more paternalistic left vs. an anarchistic one. Also: since we're talking about culture and not politics, and so the question isn't: What should the laws be? they're: What constitutes good art or good fun? these positions don't map cleanly onto existing nameable political divisions.)

________

To existentialists, art and things like art are, at most, a means to an end (the end usually being encouraging folks to hang Mussolini from a meathook or understand the nature of freedom) or an expression of what people are like. To post-structuralists, art and things like art are much more important: as important as art is to conservatives and traditionalists--and for the same reason--art is a thing that influences your behavior whether or not you want it to.

The same goes for rules: the existentialist sees rules as one more thing you might have to ignore or get past or weigh as the price of doing what needs done. To post-structuralists, rules create mental structures that influence people in subtle ways.

So: D&D.

On the surface level, the difference between existential and postmodern aesthetics is obvious in the actual games:

90% of what goes on in White Wolf games makes no sense outside a complex social context and social pressures, Dogs In The Ohmygodyou'replayingagameaboutMormons is entirely about seeing the social grid as an interesting and influential environment in itself, Type IV defines roles and teamwork more powerfully than any other combat game I know of.

Meanwhile, in classic D&D, beyond "never split the party" (whether issued for the DM's convenience or the PCs' survival), classic D&Ders as a group have no particular shared conception (that is--no conception they could all agree on across the DIY D&D world) of how the PCs should or shouldn't fit into a larger social context--how the PCs fit with each other or with the gameworld. It's a game full of tombs no-one else has picked over and clerics without congregations. (And the post-structuralist Newie would say that's because the rules don't suggest it, and the DIYer would say Well if I wanted to have my priest have a flock I could. And they are both right, they just care about different things.)

There's the question of freedom and creativity. To the DIYer freedom is the freedom of the PC to make the choice in the game and define the PC through those midlife choices (not through decisions made before the PCs "born"), to the Newie freedom is the freedom to define the nurture or the nature that decides which questions get asked in the first place--Sir Chauncey Middleton Paladin-Ackeworth probably won't ever have to make the whole steal-bread-to-feed-his-family choice. Both narrative control and extensive character building tools are about deciding the kind of story/genre structure you want you game to operate in.

The Newie seems to say: let's have a tale of ____ and ______. The Old Schooler says: whatever you've got, hit me, and we'll find out what I'm made of.

________________

But this is all surface--there are many exceptions to these "rules". The biggest difference is in how the games are designed and how people evaluate these game designs:

The DIY D&Der will tell you that you can pretty much do anything with classic D&D.

The most important words here are "you"--that is, any individual, and "can"--that is, it is possible.

New schoolers will tell you that most people tend to do certain specific things with classic D&D.

The most important words here are "most people"--meaning, the community, the average consumer, the guys at your FLGS who answer the ads--and "tend to"--that is, what activity is encouraged.

To put it another way: DIY D&Ders are judging the game based on what can be done with it and judging it rad. The new schoolers are judging it based on what the social collective has, as a group, done with it, and finds it wanting.

The DIYers pull obscure games apart for their useful parts, the Newies judge famous or milestone games in terms of their impact.

(Not irrelevant: in the System Does Matter essays that were so important to the Forge, Ron Edwards talks a lot about disappointments caused by gaming with random people who had different ideas about how games should work--at conventions, etc. That is: the overall. Whereas in these blogs, people tend to talk about how this group or that group, specifically, worked or did not work. That is: the possible.)

That's why you see New School people writing articles saying "In truth, most old school games I've seen tend to..." and, if you're a DIY D&Der, you immediately scratch your head and go "Why would anyone care how most games tend to end up?"

DIY D&Ders don't care what the rules or the artwork or the setting suggest, they care what can be done with them. Newies ask: take away the rules, artwork and setting and what's left?

The question is how much communicating needs to be done by the game itself, as opposed to by actual human gamers.

Seen through this lens, the otherwise incomprehensible debate about James Raggi's version of D&D that I linked to at the beginning of this post becomes easier to understand. Why does this game have rules for investing in real estate and prices for 17 different kinds of boats if it's about Weird Fantasy? Because it's not really a Weird Fantasy Role Playing Game by your definitions, Newie. It's a game that is supposed to be able to do everything over the course of a loooooooong campaign, just like D&D does, but be Weird a little more often and maybe a little easier to run.

Newies imagine a world where you choose Weird Fantasy Role Playing off a shelf with every game in the world on it because tonight you want to grapple with the dilemmas specific to a world of Weird Fantasy. DIYers are imagining you'd get Weird Fantasy Role Playing off a shelf with 30 other flavors of D&D on it because during your next 90 weeks of throwing yourself up against D&D you'd like to push the Weird a little more than you did in the last 90.

The Newies tend to be obsessed with creating rulesets that will result in Exactly The Right Buttons Getting Pushed for anybody who buys it, no matter how dumb they are, whereas the D&Ders tend to focus on outlier customizations of their own game that they know might only apply to a tiny handful of campaigns.

The DIY D&Ders don't really care what the game (a device for communicating with a collective) is about, they care what the GM (a device for communicating one-on-one with a small group) is about and about creating repositiories of possibilities for all games. LOTFP can be seen in this way as not so much a new game as an attempt to export practices associated with the D&D GM known as James Raggi to your table.

The Newies appear to want a thousand different games that will each communicate transparently what they're about to anyone whereas the Old Schoolers seem to want one game that is specifically tailored to the very precise needs of their own single group and yet has the flexibility to go on and on and on with that group in an ever-changing campaign forever, being about whatever the group wants it to be about until they finally get to be 60 years old and kill Orcus.

Why is Carcosa or Plansescape a hack for D&D and not just a whole new game about whatever Planescape or Carcosa are about? Because then you can make one single campaign that's Vanilla and then Carcosa and then Vanilla and then Planescape and then Eberron and then Dark Sun and then d20 Stormbringer and then Vanilla and then whatever on and on forever.

So: A million rulesets that do one thing each, aimed at a million gaming groups, or one game that only works for one group but allows it to do a million different things.

Ex-Flumph Attacks Actress, Thwarted By Dwarf In Airport Bar

Notes from yesterday's game:

-I went to all the trouble of converting the Midkemia "Where's your PC been during that session s/he missed?" table to an easier-to-use format and used it but it seems kinda dull, really. I've switched to using the "Lost In Faerie" table from The Great Pendragon Campaign.

It consists of a What you were doing in Fairyland section, with stuff like:

1-3 ...captured by giants and forced to cook their hideous provender.

and a Why you're back section with stuff like:

13-14 He hid from their mocking laughter

(Rules in many Pendragon books assume the PCs are male knights. Even stranger, they assume you are using their rules to play Pendragon. What Greg Stafford doesn't know won't hurt him though, I figure.)

It's also better at explaining how the PC disappeared after killing a squid four weeks ago and just now turned up in a 12' x 14' room: she took a wrong turn and goat-horned sprites crawled out of the walls and took her away--then she ran off and said There's No Place Like Whatever Hellhole My Friends're In and Taaa-Daa we're back.

Me: "...and you returned because...d20..."

Kimberly Kane: "4"

"The elves thought you ugly or uncouth."

"I hate elves."

"Which is weird because you're half-elf."

"Yeah, I'm a self-hating half-elf. That's why I drink."

-While KK's barbarian was lost in Faerie and forced to sing for the elves in exchange for their scorn, the real actual KK (who can, oddly enough, be seen above on the lead singer of Aerosmith's shirt) was on some webcam porn site and forced to play Magic: The Gathering for money.

"The guy was nice and trying real hard to make it fun for me but I was just like What? There's no story, it's just cards? Can't I just make you cum? But I beat him though."

-Yeah I lost my dog and wrote a blog post about it and swore revenge. Kimberly's dog is just called "Sueno #5". Or, was. Until that mechastirge trap. Can't remember if they healed it or whether we're on Sueno #6 now.

-So they're going through this temple dungeon and they find the scriptorium--they spend a half hour looking at the books. So I rolled on the 100 random books table. Got "architecture-history" and "demonology". Which, the way I see it, if you're looking through a temple trying to find a demon is about as good as you can roll. Of course this book explains how temples like this are usually laid out. Of course this book has a ritual you can use in it...

-Not that it did anyone any good. They barricaded themselves in the book room and waited for the monster to come to them and the wizard died of a self-inflicted stab wound trying to hustle up some blood to compelte the ritual to control the atrocious Orth...

-The nice thing about tentacle monsters with five attacks is you get to use your random hit location dice. "It has you by the right arm and...right leg". It would've killed Connie (desperately smoking the charm cigarettes she got last week to no good end) had Mandy not run over and caused serious wounds.

-Likewise causing serious wounds was Darren's dwarf.
Look at his jetset shit:
-everyone spends an hour looking through the dungeon without him
-the monster attacks and Connie gets 20'ed by it and it's chewing on CP's head
-Darren suddenly pops up in videochat from the airport bar in Portland or something (escaped from Fairyland, I guess), fights the monster, delivers the killing blow
-then he gets on his plane, leaving everyone else to sort out getting the monster back to town and sailing home