Thursday, January 13, 2011

The Talk


So I had "The Talk" with my ten year old son in the car going to school this morning.  It went something like this:

"Son, since the Savage Worlds campaign really never took off, I'm thinking about running an original D&D game.  A whole campaign, not just like the stuff we do in game store."

He tilted his head.  "You mean the one we started on - the one before Essentials?"

"Eh - no.  That's 4th Edition.  I mean the one way before that.  The one I played when I was about your age."

He looked at me as if I was a bike thief.  "I don't know."

"The one I told you about before.  You don't need minis because you do everything in your mind.  You don't have all of those powers.  A fighter would make their basic melee and that's that - but you'd get to describe it how you like and pull off special things not in the power description.  Combat goes a lot quicker that way, so you can have a lot more fights."  I hastily tried to sell the abstract combat system in the school drop-off lane.

"I like the old way."

I shrugged.  "Well, I'm thinking of pulling together a game, and if you'd like to play, you can."

He thought silently as the car behind us grew impatient.  "I guess so, but if it sucks, can you run a real D&D game?"

I smiled.  "Sure.  But it should be fun."

He eyed me as he got out of the car.  "We really need to talk more about this when I get home."

I chuckled.  "Sure thing.  Now get going before you're late."

Sheesh - the trials of being a parent.  I swear. :)

- Ark

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Changes

I'm going though some changes here, so bear with me.  I've added some art that I had commissioned a while ago and didn't quite know what to do with.  Well, now I do.  (Yeah, I paid for them, so hands off.) The demonic looking guy on the title bar is by Angel Urena.  He's a great artist.  Go see his stuff here.  The poor succubus to the side was drawn by Matthew Humphreys.  His awesome gallery is over here.

Other changes are occurring in my brain takings me places I don't quite know yet.  I've been reading through the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide.  The original ones - you know - those thirty year old musty tomes.  Okay, maybe you don't.  I never thought I's say I missed AD&D.  I ran screaming from TSR in the mid 80s to other gaming systems and never looked back.  It was a bit of nostalgia that brought me to 4e, but really, the fact that it was D&D that wasn't D&D was the thing that interested me.

Hell.

I want to play D&D again.

The way I used to describe D&D to people was it was kind of like a board game but the board was in your mind.  Frankly, it's been a while since I saw a role playing game like that.  As a teenager, I used to dream of being able to afford lead minis and paint and having the skill to make them look pretty and use them in a game.  Well, dream come true - and BLEECH.  I'm rather sick of minis.  I'm sick of tiles and maps and dry erase markers.  I'm sick of fighters with spells - er -  POWERS.  I'm sick of opportunity attacks and TWO HOUR LONG COMBATS.  I'm sick of skill challenges.  I'm sick of a flat saving throw of TEN.

WHERE IS MY PAD OF BLUE LINED FOUR SQUARE AN INCH GRAPH PAPER?????

I actually understand what Zak and Jeff and Alexis and James have been moaning about with the whole Old School Renaissance thing.  Ugh.  I do.

Dear God.  Now I have to go start up a campaign, now don't I?  I have to dredge up some players who don't think I'm crazy.  I have to decided whether to use my old, musty AD&D books or hunt down some Holes or Molday or just go with something like Legend Lord.  Holy Hell, I'm going to have to READ!

Crap.

- Ark

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Alignment Languages

Nostalgia was the driving force behind me cracking open the old AD&D reference manuals a few days ago. Amidst Gary's loquacious prose, I saw something that I did not remember from 30 years ago in the Player's Handbook:

" . . . all intelligent creatures able to converse in speech use special languages particular to their alignment."

Back then, I think I paid that as much attention as I paid the rules for encumbrance and morale.  But the concept of alignment languages is very interesting.  Like-minded people can communicate better, and in the fantasy word of AD&D, even have their own languages.  But Gary goes on:

"If a character changes alignment, the previously known language is no longer able to be spoken by him or her."


I was always fascinated about how AD&D's Outer Planes were based on alignments, but looking at this effect on the creatures in the Prime Material Plane puts a different spin on things.  If I change my alignment from True Neutral to Neutral Good (in essence caring a bit more about other people,) I either have a chemical and biological change in my brain that allows me to speak a new language and forget the other, or I am suddenly in tune with some frequency of a universal harmonic that gives me the power of a new type of speech and understaning.

Now that is very odd and very hard to explain.  It's probably one of the reasons whey I tended to ignore the alignment system in my campaigns as well.  My view of the universe, even made up ones, never included such things.  But it is interesting to ponder now.

- Ark


Sunday, January 9, 2011

Living Forgotten Realms

For the last several months I've been playing Living Forgotten Realms.  It's basically what is left of the RPGA.  What is nice about it is that just about every weekend I can find a couple of D&D games to play.  My preference is to DM, and they even let me do that.  I can choose the time slot, the module, and the people I play with.  What is even better is that my son plays and loves it.  For the most part, it is great.

Except . . .

Except that so much of why I like to play RPGs is not present in LFR game play.  I like world building.  The Forgotten Realms is built.  I like a universe where the characters contribute to the development.  No luck there.  I like characters grow and change as a result of their experiences.  Aside from leveling up and getting better stats, that isn’t happening. 

LFR is basically a 30 minute sitcom.  The formula is already hashed out.  The PCs are all interchangeable.  Lucy and Ricky figured out just about everything you can do in a sitcom over half a century ago.  Evidently, the RPGA figured that out for canned RPG modules as well - and that is what LFR is. 

I'm not saying it's a bad thing.  Even wonder bread will keep you alive.  The LFR experience just isn't filling as a full course meal - and after decades of role playing, I can get pretty snobby.

Living Forgotten Realms has been there for me in a time when I wanted to game, but didn't have the intestinal fortitude to chase down a pack of players to start another campaign up.  So - I'll complain about LFR - but I am still thankful for it.  Since I am almost always a DM, I had never thought that my son and I would sit down and play PCs side by side - and we are.  That in itself is completely awesome. 

- Ark

Friday, December 24, 2010

Death at the Table

I've been absent from this blog as of late, and it has in large part to do with the death of a friend and fellow gamer.

When Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons came out, I ended my long RPG hiatus, posted a campaign idea on Pen and Paper Games, and waited for nibbles from players.  The campaign was called "The Sea of Tears," and was set in post-flood water world, sans Kevin Costner. The bites on the line came rather quickly.  I met some really great people, among them a guy named Merlon. 

Merlon was dying.  He had good days and bad days.  Sometimes bits of his body worked, and sometimes they did not.  He had played RPGs for decades, but hadn't much since he had been sick.  Merlon knew he was dying and told me that he wanted to go out playing what he loved.

The new gaming group turned out to click really well.  We had a hoot island hopping and saving the day in the crumbling and soggy remnants of the Old Empire.  Merlon was one of those players who was a joy to role play with, breathing life into his character and  showing both the polished and rough sides.  He also played as an excellent tactician and loved the fiddly type classes with lots of knobs and buttons.  He was, however, obviously not healthy.  He would become very ill and not able to play sporadically and on very short notice.

After digesting the gravity of the situation, I found myself looking at the campaign and the game mechanics in a different light.  How does a DM prepare for something like that?  I've long been a proponent of not handing out XP if not earned.  I am not a friend to lazy or flaky players who just want to play whenever they feel like it.  But how do you handle a player who may be well one day and sick the next on a regular basis?  I mean, how do you avoid punishing someone for their body betraying them on a regular basis?

It turned out to be quite easy.  My first caveat - each character gets the same amount of experience points per session, whether they show up or not.  This led to being more lenient with retraining.  If a player wanted to try out a different feat or power, they could retrain at any time, assuming it made sense within the game.

I then opened the door to (what they used to call in Champions) nuclear accidents.  A player could completely rework their character - changing class, etc, as long as there was a good story mechanism for it.  I then just dropped most pretenses and let the players bring in a completely new character at the same level, should they get bored of their character.

Mechanisms that I had introduced to make sure that a sick player didn't feel left out and wouldn't get bored turned out to benefit everyone.  I was surprised that no one abused the very flexible character guidelines that I had set forth either. 

The Sea of Tears was the most rewarding campaign I've ever run.  We played for almost two years and covered two major story arcs - saving the world from extra planar horrors not once - but twice.  Guest players came in to share the experience, including Merlon's son and daughter. 

Eventually, however, we were done with that world.  The stories had been told and the heroes rode off into the sunset.  We then began to plan another campaign with another gaming system.  Shortly thereafter, Merlon fell into a coma.  Three month later, he was dead.

The planned game fell apart and the gaming group dissolved like mist in the night.  It's been a while since I've even talked to the guys.  Merlon was very much the glue that bound us together.  It makes me sad.

I've never really had to deal with the death of someone I knew that was so close to my age - and of someone whom I shared so much in common with.  I still have dreams about Merlon, and about his characters.  I miss him a lot.  I miss the spectacle and revelry we created around that bright and noisy table - for that brief moment - in this vast and dark universe. 

As the year comes to a close, I to reflect on my blessings, and knowing Merlon was definitely one of them.

Peace,
Arkhein

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Walk the Plank!

Okay, I've been on a pirtate kick recently, but the book I'm writing has nothing to do with pirates.  Still, when I feed the book into the 'I Write Like' website, it spits out this:



I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!



Arrr, he hearties.

- Arrrrkhein

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

My First Four RPGs (Part One)

The decade of the 1970s didn't end that well for me.  We had moved to a po-dunk town in the foothills of the Ozarks, my parents got divorced, and I failed fifth grade.  When we moved back to Houston, I didn't know anybody and was very lonely.  The only thing that really held my interest at the time was my Star Wars action figures and Battlestar Galactica.

One day at school I saw a classmates with a strange book called Deities and Demigods.  He told me it was part of a game and I was fascinated.  I borrowed the book from him and read the cryptic stat blocks of gods and godesses and tried to figure out how the game worked.  Of course, Deities and Demigods had no rules in it, so I figured the game was something like chess, and each character had different moves on a chess board and dice were used to determine which player took a chess piece.  I began writing up the rules for this game of 'God Chess' I had in my head.  Due to the divorce, convincing my mother to by me a game printed in big expensive hardback books seemed an impossibility, so making a game of my own seemed like the reasonable thing to do.  Within a few hours I had sketched out the rules for a miniatures war game with dice - a concept I had never even heard of before.

My dreams were dashed the next day when my classmate gave me a brief overview of how Dungeons and Dragons was played.  Characters - dice with sides that I had never dreamed of - no board - a game you played in your mind.  Okay, well, so much for 'God Chess,' because this Dungeons and Dragons thing sounded a lot more interesting.  He also told me some very good news - I could buy a simple blue softcover book and some dice, and that's all I really needed.  Man, my mother never saw what was coming.  Poor lady.

The guy who introduced the game to me turned out to be pretty much of an ass, so I never played with him.  After my mother shelled out the money for the blue D&D book and some dice, I found another guy in my class who was interested in playing.  The first session we sat in his room and used construction paper to make pointy wizard hats with stars and moons on them.  Then we colored the dice with a crayon, since that was what you had to do back in those days.  The construction paper hats were hot and itchy, so we quickly ditched them.

My friend and I (because by the time you are playing D&D with someone, you must be friends) took turns being the Dungeon Master and we killed each other in horrible ways in dank caverns with various ochre jellies, green slimes, black puddings, and gelatinous cubes.  I'm sure we only used about 7% of the actual rules, but we had a hoot. 

Because of a simple blue book and some funny shaped dice and a friend to play with, the stresses of family disintegration and academic failure eased up a bit.  Of course, Dungeons and Dragons was not some kind of panacea to cure all of my ills, but it let me take a breather.    I have a very warm place in my heart for Gary and Dave and all of those other people who allowed me to forget my worries and actually have time for fun.

- Ark

(An interesting side note - I heard about GEN CON shortly thereafter.  I sooooo wanted to go.  It was a burning dream for a long time, but I could never assemble the staggering amount of money to go, or get an adult to agree to go with me.  I never made it to GEN CON.  However, I did attend my first gaming convention this year - Reaper Con - with my son.  Four days of games and minis - I had a blast.  Maybe I'll make it to GEN CON one day.  Maybe . . . one day . . . )