Monday, June 6, 2011

Gaming on a Harley - The DCC RPG Experience

Harley Stroh is a modest man who apologized profusely for us having to sit through a playtest of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, instead of getting some 'real' gaming in at the North Texas Role Playing Game Convention.

"Are you kidding?" I said, "Do you know the kind of buzz DCC RPG is getting out there?  Get on with it, man!"

I chose a fourth level pregen Wizard and named him Urlik the Blemished.  The big thing that intrigued me about DCC RPG was the variable nature of spells, in order to emulate 'true' Vancian mechanics - so I had to had to play a wizard.  Had to. 

The Boy picked a Dwarf fighter and, of course, named him Regdar.  One thing I've noticed about my son, he either wants a character who is exceedingly tall, or exceedingly short.  There are no inbetweens with him.  The rest of the party was comprised of another fighter, a cleric, and a thief.

I won't get much into the mechanics of the game, as they are discussed elsewhere - and the beta should be available for download on Wednesday from the Goodman site.  Interesting features include:

  1. A wizard can 'burn' her stats to increase the power of spells and also to invoke the power of her patron,
  2. Thieves appear to be able to burn luck points in order to improve the chance of pulling something off (although I think anyone can burn luck points - it's just more likely that thieves have more,)
  3. And the warrior has a special 'Mighty Deed of Arms,' kind of a carte blance combat maneuver where the player can describe some combat feat of awesomeness and roll a d5 to pull it off.

That reminds me.  ZOCCHI DICE!  DCC RPG uses zocchi dice.  I love those dice and try to invent ways to use them in my Labyrinth Lord campaign.  DCC RPG uses them inherently.  Of course, you can emulate a d5 easily enough - but it's much cooler just to have and roll one.

The set-up for the game was that I, Urlik the Blemished, hired the rest of the party to go and beat up some baddies, basically.  However, Harley took me aside and gave me the skinny on just what was going down.  While it wasn't horribly nefarious, that fact that I refused to give the party specifics of what was going on, and that I played Urlik the Blemished like a very creepy Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, made them very untrusting.

The game culminated in a scene to stop the big bad.  The fight was going poorly and Urlik called upon his patron.  An amazingly lucky roll allowed Urlik the Blemished to suck the souls out of the big bad and the henchmen, gaining their power.  This completely freaked out the other players, who decided to kill poor - and somewhat evil - Urlik. The fighter began to smack Urlik with a grate, to little effect. The thief gained part of Urlik's true name (long story,) and tried to turn his spells back on the wizard.  That didn't work too well, and Urlik charred the thief into dust.  Then the cleric popped off a super-charged banish spell and blew Urlik to kingdom come.

The rest of the day, people came up and asked me why our table was cheering and whooping so loudly near the end of our session.  I had to tell them, "Well, they were cheering so loudly because they killed me."

I've heard some moaning on blogs and forums about the complexity of the spell-casting charts.  Yes, They are more complex than OD&D or AD&D.  They require spell casters to have a copy of the book, or at least a print out of each spell.   If you are wanting dead simple - this isn't it.  But you know, compare DCC spell-casting to the obnoxious spew of powers in 4e, and you still have something incredibly simple - and what that small amount of complexity buys you is an awesome spell system that feels like a book, not video game.

It was an great session and Harley Stroh is an awesome DM.  This is the first new system in quite a while that I've wanted to play.  Let me be clear about this.  I DM.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, I'm the DM.  I look at games as a DM - think about them, analyze them, digest them - as a DM.  But I want to play this.  I want to roll up another wizard, hunt down a  DM, and be a player in a Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG game.  I haven't had that strong a feeling for a new system since - oh - 1981, I think it was.

Well done, Goodman dudes, well done.  Thanks, Harley

- Ark

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Get Thee To A Convention

As I sit here, winding down from three days of convention going and getting ready for a fourth, my mind keeps on going back to the huge joy it has been, meeting people like Jim Ward, Tim Kask, Erol Otus, Frank Mentzer, Jeff Dee, Paul Jaquays, and Dennis Sustare.  These were people I knew as a child - I knew them from their words and art and designs.  I knew them, but I never really met them.

With the smiles also comes the sighs that this is my first RPG convention.  I am kicking myself that I never went out to meet Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson or Eric Holmes or Jim Roslof or the many others who contributed to the early days of rpgs and have passed on.

Go to a convention - these smaller conventions especially.  Meet these people.  Meet the other game designers and publishers who are following in their footsteps.  Go meet an ocean of people who love rpgs as much as you do.  It's well worth it.

- Ark

Friday, June 3, 2011

Stapled

Spent day at NTRPGCON.   RPed with The Boy, Timeshadows, and Cyclopeatron.  Big ass smile stapled to face.  Bought too much merchandise from Finland.   Exhausted.  Must sleep now.

- Ark

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Wonders

Earlier this week I was digging through a stack of Renaissance paintings. They were un-inspiring me and making me frustrated and mad. After all, this was to be only my second blog entry for Dungeonspirations. But I had an idea. Screw a period piece. Go with someone I knew could inspire me - Salvador Dali.

After flipping through countless images of melting watches, elephants with mile long legs, burning giraffes, and people with their insides on their outsides, I came upon something non-surreal. It was the Lighthouse at Alexandria. A great painting, but pretty normal. There were others in a similar vein - the Statue of Zeus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pyramids of Giza. What was up with Dali? Why was he painting normal things?

It hit me and I started laughing. Here I am thinking that the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are ordinary. They were the most fantastic and surreal things that commentators of Ancient Greece had ever seen. In fact, this was a period where tourism was just beginning to take hold in Greece, and the Seven Wonders were kind of a bucket list.

Set your mind back before skyscrapers, before electricity, before cathedrals, before the glories of Rome, and take a look at Dali's Lighthouse. From what I understand, this image is pretty close. It must have wowed those who saw it. Imagine sailing and you see it on the horizon - perhaps just before down with the light flaring brightly. And as your ship approached, it got only bigger and bigger and bigger.

So what are the wonders in your worlds? Where do people dream of going? Do they have bucket lists? What wonder would they travel days upon days just to see? What sorts of architecture are unlocked with magic or high technology?

Are there travel industries devoted to hauling people from one amazing sight to the other? Are there crooks and thieves ready to bilk tourists out of their savings? What about those poor, dirty people on the side of the road, selling little carved statues of the giant obelisk that almost touches the clouds? Does the local Tourist Board try to squash them out of existence?

Imagine Salvador Dali, backed by the purse of a wealthy King, given arcane support by a council of wizards, and the muscle of an army of skilled dwarven craftsmen. Would he chisel a hill into Möbius strip? Would he carve an entire mountain range into a mile high herd of four legged eyeballs? Would he carve the moon into a wedge of Swiss cheese?

I would certainly hope so. :)

Happy dreaming.

- Ark

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Players Pondering Alignment

Tim, one of the players in my Labyrinth Lord campaign wrote me today about alignment.  He came of age in the 2e time frame, so his understanding of alignment can be sometimes different than mine.  He wrote:

I was thinking about the game world, with the razing lands and everything, and how things seem to be divided among chaos and law, rather than good and evil, and it got me thinking.  What would a lawful society with no regard for good vs evil look like?  I mean, I think that Imbroglio (Tim's character) is pretty obviously straight Chaos - or Chaotic Neutral in 2E parlance.  He commits acts of kindness with the same lack of regard as he does acts of . . . questionable morals.  So what would the lawful version of Imbroglio be, writ large to a society?  This got me thinking, and it reminded me of a game that I'm playing on my X-Box, Dragon Age 2 .  In it, there is a race of beings called the Qunari that are as close to an amoral Lawful society that I can think of.  It's actually kind of interesting.  They have a philosophy called the Qun, which basically amounts to institutionalized slavery, but slavery to themselves - the goal of their every action being the betterment of their society.  Over the course of the game, some Qunari come to the human lands and are disgusted by the rampant chaos endemic to human society.  Eventually, their need for order overcomes them and they try and take over the city, which I thought was fascinating - their need for order was so intense that they had to capture the world around it and bend it to their will. 

Tim continues on with interesting quotes and links about the Qunari, which you can go dive into with Google's help if you want. I don't know much about Dragon Age,but the Qunari do seem like an interesting spin on Lawful Neutral.

My idea of Lawful Neutral, on an organizational level, is a mindless machine - like the US Post Office, or the British Civil Service.  It's a soulless machine bent on doing what it was designed to do and following the rules, with no attention paid to whether the results are good or evil, beneficial or destructive.

So are the Qunari Lawful Neutral, or is Tim high on drugs?  What does Lawful Neutral look like in your games?  Are your games more involved with the struggle between good and evil, or law and chaos?

- Ark

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The World As They Know It

To the players in my Saturday Labyrinth Lord campaign, the map to the right represents the entire universe.  It's just about every place they've ever been or heard about.  I have an overwhelming desire to flesh out more - but I stop myself and let dice rolls and the player's wanderlust shape The Wild Lands.

My intention was to start the players in Audrain Keep (actually the Keep on the Borderlands,) flesh out the main east-west road, and have the players move north towards the Razing Zone - an area of many monsters and a place for high adventure.  I even named the campaign 'The Razing Zone,' as I figured the players would be all over that place.

As you can probably tell from the map, the players have made a almost direct bee-line south, in the opposite direction. 

I think this might have something to do with my new DMing style.  When running a 4e campaign with the same group of people, the mere mention of a monster set them charging off to go fight it.  They knew I would play 'fair' by 4e rules and give them reasonable challenges.  But they know the kid gloves are off in Labyrinth Lord, and it's not uncommon for me to throw monsters 5 to 10 levels higher than they are - all at the whim of my evil red twenty-sider.  "Old School Runs" just doesn't refer to the dungeon, but the entire world - apparently.

In fact, last game when the party found out that the dragon Abaraxis and a cadre of orcs had taken over Audrain Keep, there was heated debate on exactly how far away should run away.  One party member did press the group to go vanquish the dragon, but in the end they party agreed to "explore a potential economic partnership" with a distiller who lived even farther south than they had already traveled. 

When fleeing (I mean strolling in a calm, economic sort of way,) south they came to a bridge, and of course that bridge was guarded by orcs in the employ of the dragon, but that is the kind of asshole - I mean DM - that I am.  :)

- Ark

PS - I'd like to mention how proud I am of the players.  They are now fighting and conquering monsters far above their level by using their smarts.  They almost never stand toe to toe against an enemy without some trick or trap ready to spring.  They are getting quite brilliant and it's starting to get difficult to out-think them.  I love it.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

A Quote From Tonight's Game

"If we steal the bones, we loose the opportunity to surprise the door . . . you know, only in a D&D game would you ever say something like that."

- Ark