One reason why I’ve been enjoying running a D&D game, even if I’ve completely replaced the system itself, is that you can draw on up to thirty plus years of common culture (depending on the players). It takes a while for exposition to sink in, even if players take the time to read it. In a standard D&Dish fantasy setting, experienced players already know the basics of navigating the world, so can roleplay like natives, without constantly asking for GM guidance and explanations.
In the session I blogged about last time, there was one key plot point that I was really worried about. Everything hinged on how the dwarf succession was up for grabs, and if a dwarven heirloom showing descent from a certain legendary dwarven hero went missing, a dwarven civil war would erupt. I personally think it’s silly to go to war about an ancient artifact, and I was really afraid that the players wouldn’t accept the premise. I had all these speeches for NPC’s to make justifying the significance of this artifact, and so on, but I wasn’t really convinced.
When it came time for it, the players were speculating why Croft Larsson wanted them to ask to examine this artifact, the Helm of Gradulf. The players speculated correctly that when they opened the treasure room in front of the court, everyone would see that the Helm was missing. Dan, who plays a dwarven fighter Urik, immediately said,
“Man, with the tense situation, if the Helm is missing, that will mean all out war! You know how dwarves are!”
And we all did know how dwarves are. No lectures required.
That’s the miracle of using a setting with bog-standard elements.
It works with the more esoteric elements of the D&Diverse too. A
xorn or an umber hulk is immediately recognizable (to some of the
players) in a way that a homebrew creature wouldn’t be. In the
last session, the party heard rumors of derro activity. Dan again
immediately picked up on this, and could spontaneously act with dwarven revulsion without any GM exposition. He probably knows more about TSR derro history than I do (I’m just going by the monster manual, I haven’t ever encountered derros as a player or read any
TSR fiction.)
Of course, you want some surprises; it’s dull if the players have deja vu with every creature in your game. But I try to use the familiarity of creatures to players as a surrogate for how common/ well-understood they are in the game world.
I’ve been running a Hero-Cities successor campaign both in San Diego
and with the Rambling Bumblers, 3 sessions each so far.
I’m using my own variant D&D rules, Brew20, linked below.
Brew 20 outline
However, so far the RB group hasn’t really needed to use rules very often, so this report isn’t much use in evaluating the new rules. I’ll try to make some posts on how the rules worked later. Right now, my main intent is to record a few facts about the game so that I and the players don’t forget before our next session, which may not be for a while. .
The RB group already had Hero-Cities PCs. We’ve played sporadically since 2003, but often with lots of elapsed real time between sessions, which only happen when I’m in town. So there hasn’t been a chance to develop long-term plots or themes, and the game had quite a different feel from the San Diego Hero-Cities campaign.
The PC’s for the most recent runs are: Chaplain Brawnwyn, a cleric of the temple of the god of war and goddess of peace (so simultaneously warpriests and diplomats); Eldor, elven sorceror, and famous for hosting city-wide drunken revels; Soren, human fighting woman, as graceful and fast as she is tough, Urik, dwarven warrior whose most cherished possessions are his greataxe and his magic everfull bottle of dwarven ale, and Sparky, stealthy elven rogue.
At the end of the last game they played in the Hero-Cities campaign, they learned that the sleeping Heroes of yore, the source of the power of adenturers, were going to be awakened. The new campaign starts about a year after the awakening. While there is potential for a New Age of heroics, with new heroes also becoming legends blessed by Sophia herself, in the short-term, the awakening busted all avatar (level 9 and above) adventurers down to eighth level. Some of the awakened Heroes are filling the gaps, but several others have their own agendas and have left civilization to its own devices. Two of the 13 Heroes, Molosh the wise wizard, and Gradulf the Grim, king of the dwarves, already ancient at the time they were put into magical sleep, didn’t survive the Awakening. There is tension among the dwarven nobility over the succession, and Durin the magesmith has shut down his forge, lest his magical weapons be used in a dwarven civil war.
In particular, the party, at 7th level, has instantly gone from mid-career adventurers to among the ranks of the most powerful (excepting Sophia and the remaining 11 Heroes themselves).
The party had done some favors for an important dwarven noble family. Duran, Thegn of Sudberry had had two sons, Durain and Curan. Durain was on the path to inheritance, as a warrior and general of some renown, when he died under mysterious circumstances. The seers predicted that resurrection would be unsuccessful. The very young Curan was forced to engage in an accelerated adventuring career to be of proper rank by the time his father died. Under this pressure, he took risks, and one time had to be saved by the PCs. Later, Curan found a clue to Durain’s death and asked the party to investigate. They found that he had been turned undead by a wight, and re-slew the wight and Durain, allowing him to be raised again. So Duran owed both of his sons’ lives to the party. Duran wasn’t a prime contender for the throne himself, but might be a kingmaker or even a compromise candidate.
Brawnwyn’s temple asked her and her party to visit Duran and try to influence him towards a diplomatic solution to the crisis. On the way, Brawnwyn uncomfortable with the idea of too much unbalanced peacefulness breaking out, suggested that an outside menace might unite the dwarves. From this, I think the discussion migrated to a contest in giant-fighting to be king. Then Eldor suggested making it a full-fledged Dwarf Olympics, with events that capture the spirit of dwarfness, like drinking and giant-fighting and drunken giant-fighting. This hypothetical event was later christened the Gradulfiad.
Upon arrival at Sudberry Stronghold, the party was welcomed and a feast was held in their honor. In addition to Duran’s family, there were two other guests, a famous dwarven archaeologist Croft Larson and his hobbit assistant Wynne. The party broached the topic of the Gradulfiad at dinner and Durain in particular was very enthusiastic, more for the excitement of the contest than the political ramifications. Croft and Wynne didn’t say much during dinner, but after dinner Croft approached Urik to talk privately, and Wynne approached Sparky.
Croft claimed to have a delicate political matter that he wanted help with. Duran’s family’s prized possession, and one that they swore their oaths of office on, was the heirloom Helm of Gradulf. Recently, Croft was asked to examine a similar helm in the treasury of Gloin, Jarl of Daken. Gloin’s Helm seemed authentic to Croft. He wanted to examine the Duran’s family Helm to compare, but didn’t want to tell his hosts why. Perhaps the party could ask for a tour of the family treasures, and he could tag along behind?
Urik was suspicious. He observed that if Duran’s Helm was not genuine, that could discredit his whole family. Worse, if Gloin had somehow stolen the Helm from Duran, that could spark a civil war among the dwarfs.
Meanwhile, Wynne was asking Sparky for advice about dwarves. Were all of them moody and irritable now or was that just Croft? Did Urik have sudden mood swings, where he became authoritarian and stopped treating his colleagues as equals? Sparky asked when Croft’s mood swings started, and was told about an expedition approximately six months earlier when Croft and Wynne had retrieved several of the thousands of terra cotta gnomes from an ancient dwarven tomb. They couldn’t take too many, because they had to avoid the troglodytes living on the top levels. It was there that she first noticed Croft becoming dictatorial and belittling towards her. Sparky asked about what happened to the gnomes. Well, they had given several to each of the major dwarven nobles, including Duran, and kept a few more for research purposes.
When Sparky and Urik reported back, the party compared notes and strategized. Brawnwyn thought that Croft had likely become possessed by some spirit during the expedition. If he needed to examine Duran’s Helm, why would he be content with a second-hand description? Maybe he was really after was simply revealing the Helm’s absence. Then the appearance of any similar helm elsewhere could trigger a war. They shouldn’t play into his hands, but they needed more information before denouncing him. Sparky was talked into burgling Croft’s room while he slept, eventually finding a paper among his documents saying “Help!
He’s in my mind”. This pretty much confirmed the possession theory. Not taking anything, and covering her tracks, Sparky got out.
Urik arranged a secret meeting with Curan and filled him in, in broad terms. Curan gave Urik a document authorizing the PC’s to investigate in his name, but asked them not to attack Croft in the household, as that would be a breach of the dwarf hospitality code. Brawnwyn looked into purchasing spells for protection from evil from the house priest, but gave up in frustration since copying the spells onto scrolls would take too long.
(I’m not sure whether this was warranted. The long delay was if Brawnwyn returned the favor by giving the priest the spells he could use. But he was willing to give her the protection scrolls on credit.) The party decided the best approach was to lure Croft into an ambush when he left the Stronghold.
That night, there was more feasting and talk of the Gradulfiad. Duran had two suggestions. First, at least some of the events should be team efforts, to show leadership as well as personal prowess. (The subtext was that this would allow non-candidates to get some glory, and that Duran wanted Durain to participate but not be a candidate.) Someone suggested that eliminated teams be randomly placed among the viable candidates, to show capability in leading political rivals and thwarting treachery. Duran’s second suggestion was that the PC’s shop their idea around to other dwarven nobles without his support (or seemingly, knowledge). He could initially oppose the idea when it was raised by the other nobles, but be talked around, letting the others take the credit.
The next morning, Sparky met Wynne at her (second) breakfast. She told Wynne about the note in Croft’s room, and asked her to retrieve it as evidence and for information about Croft’s next destination. Wynne didn’t want to betray Croft, but agreed to look through his notes. If she saw the plea for help, and it was in his own writing, then she would agree to aid the party. She found the message, and slipped it covertly to Sparky at dinner that night, covertly. (OK, not that subtly, as slipping under the table to put something on Sparky’s lap raised snickers among the party…) Wynne told Sparky that she and Croft were headed for another dwarven tomb, in an abandoned mine in the area north of Sudberry, near the frontier with the giants.
The party took a few days to prepare, but still headed out a few days ahead of Croft and Wynne. As they were leaving, Corun met them and announced that he was taking personal charge of the ambush. (Corun had been suddenly promoted to PC’dom by the arrival of Bumbler-in-training Mike B. ) This proved fortunate, for although they had a crude map from Wynne’s description of the trail to the mine, only Corun had familiarity with the region.
The trip to the mine took four days. On the second day, the party easily fended off an attack by two trolls, with the only real issues whether they would turn on each other for “kill-stealing” and whether Soren could talk Urik into using a small fraction of the ale in his mug of holding to put out the forest fire from Eldor’s scorching rays. On the third day, they came across strange tracks, which Sparky and Eldor deduced were from a small mixed army, some reptilian humanoids and some small humanoids leaving clay deposits in their path. The party remembered that the terra cotta gnomes were in troglodyte infested caves, but were the two groups working together now?
They followed the tracks to a stone stairway leading up to the mine entrance. Eldor made Sparky invisible, and she snuck up the staircase,
and observed the inhabitants. The stench revealed the reptilian humanoids as troglodytes. They were moving large amounts of stone out of the entrance to the mine, under the supervision and discipline of a few active terra cotta gnomes. In addition to the few gnomes in charge, rows of stationary gnomes were lined up, extending beyond Sparky’s sight down the mine shaft. Sparky examined the area above the mine entrance, but saw no other caves or shafts. However, coming back down, she noticed several areas that seemed to be old entrances sealed with stonework.
The group back-tracked, hoping to ambush Croft. Sparky, scouting ahead, detected the whiff of the horrid aroma of trogs. She hid and observed Croft with an entourage. Two trogs carried a tarp, coiled around a squirming hobbit-sized object (presumably Wynne).
A pale, flaccid trog walked a ways behind them. Several stiff-moving zombied trogs and three of the terra cotta gnomes competed the group. Sparky hurriedly ran back and reported this to the others.
Croft’s group was headed in their direction, and would notice them in about 30 seconds unless they did something.
This is continuing a series of observations about what I think has changed in role-playing over the years.
In the old days as I remember them, and in Mac’s old-school style game, adventures are isolated from the game world. This is done intentionally, or at least as a matter of habit. There is a setting where the characters live, and there is a second setting or sub-setting where they adventure, usually a “town” and a “dungeon”. Neither setting is static. PC’s can interact with NPC’s in both places, open up a business in town, explore a new wing of the dungeon, open up a business in the dungeon, get married, have children, whatever. But although the “town” changes, adventures don’t have any (direct) impact on the town, and the town doesn’t have any (direct) impact on the adventures. (The exception is implicit trade between town and dungeon, as adventurers bring loot from the dungeon to purchase things in town, and bring adventuring gear from town into the dungeon, where it frequently stays upon their deaths.) I’m using “dungeon” as shorthand for all the isolated monster-inhabited locations in the game, be they literally dungeons, wilderness, wizard towers outside town, or zombie-infested ancient cemeteries.
In Mac’s game, adventures are dungeon-crawl sessions, and missions. Even when there are missions, they tend to be of the form “Go to this isolated place and find the McGuffin, and bring it back for me.” Missions rarely involve the day-to-day life of anybody in the setting, except the patron who is hiring you. On the other hand, many of the memorable moments in Mac’s game take place in town: simply hanging out in the inn, engaging in revelry on the many holidays, or going shopping in bizarre stores.
Adventures might be about “Free a hostage in the dungeon”, but they rarely involved more than such individual stakes. Nothing that you would do as adventurers would save a village from goblins or change the political balance between two rival guilds. The towns had a history and politics, and the dungeon had a history and politics, but the two weren’t really related.
In a campaign where adventures are isolated, it’s hard to be a real hero. Your character can be a nice guy or a bastard, but no matter which, you’re basically in it for money and individual power. If a PC retires, no one will suffer. Adventurers don’t really have responsibilities, and that makes them less heroic for me. That’s why I prefer an integrated campaign. I don’t want to “save the world” every game, but I do want to feel that my character is helping others.
With no power comes no responsibility. Because your character’s adventures don’t change the world for better or worse, you are free to play nastier and more anti-social characters than you might in a game where adventures are integrated with the outside setting. Since the stakes are just personal, it doesn’t really matter if you win. So your party doesn’t need to be a flawless fighting team and characters don’t need to be optimized or to like each other. And the GM can wipe you all out without wiping out part of her setting. On the other hand, the party can have great victories without really changing the setting either. You can slay the dragon and get a mound of treasure, but back in town, you’re still just opportunistic scum (but rich scum, which does make a difference!)
So there’s less pressure to railroad, with the exception of the isolationist third rail itself. By that I mean, the gap between dungeon and town has to be enforced. Players aren’t allowed to have their characters run for mayor, or start a revolution, or establish a new religion. It just won’t happen. That’s why the bartender is always a retired adventurer who’s more powerful than the PC’s, the court wizards can turn you into frogs by thinking nasty thoughts, and the houses are all magically protected against thefts.
I think one thing that D&D 4e players find “old school” about this system is that there does seem to be a return to isolated adventures. The “points-of-light” setting really means indestructible towns surrounded by dungeons to adventure in.
After thinking about this for a while, I realized that most of the recent settings that my friend Josh Macy of Rambling Bumbler fame has been coming up with have explicit an isolated setting-within-the-setting for adventuring. Dungeons are gateways into Faerie, and magic only works in dungeons. Or ancient artifacts create zones of magic; settlements are well understood zones, dungeons unexplored or corrupted magical
zones. Or a new continent, home of an ancient evil, is being opened up, far from civilized lands. (In the Haunted Realms setting, there are actually three settings: the New World (civilized lands, where you come from, but not actually seen in game), the port, and the rest of the continent.) Josh, would you care to comment?
To my mind, one of the key differences between “old-school” and modern gaming was that old school gaming had no notion of character design. Instead, we had systems for character generation. The difference between the two is not entirely captured by randomization versus deterministic methods, although at least some randomization seems essential for old school character generation. In character generation, you are creating a typical inhabitant of the world (possibly conditioned on the inhabitant deciding to become an adventurer, the effects of which were much debated. Were adventurers more skilled than average citizens or just more desperate?) Designed characters are meant to meet challenges and/or be the protagonists of the story.
When I’m designing a character, I try to think through what new kinds of experiences I want and what my character will bring to the group and trying to help the GM connect me to the story. I’m in author mode, going from what kinds of stories will be in the campaign to who would make a good protagonist for these stories. When I’m “rolling up” a character, I have no control. After I see the random results, I have to invent the same details, but how I’m thinking about it is different. I’m filling in the blanks in the most plausible way. I’m responsible for interpreting the numbers in a consistent way, but I’m not responsible for making the results dramatically appropriate.
This lack of responsibility is also liberating. If I designed a character, I have no excuses if they are obnoxious or incompetent, if they endanger the group or do not cooperate with the plot hooks. With generated characters, I am given a role and play that role even if its one of back-stabber or comic relief. It’s no reflection on the player as a person. If my character Ignatius is a creepy lecher, I can point to the low charisma and high sexual intensity numbers on the sheet. That’s not me, I’m just playing my character!
Generated characters can be surprises. With a large number of random variables tying them into the setting
(which I strongly recommend. For example, my ideal of this style, Mac’s game, has about two dozen random rolls per generated character, which determine sexual orientation, place of origin, family composition, and social class, among other things), some aspects of almost every character are bound to be exceptional
and unexpected. I probably wouldn’t have ever designed a male Amazon or klutzy dwarf.
Generated characters have no need to be dramatically appropriate. If they die meaninglessly, well, that’s how things go. There was no meaning to them in life, why should there be one in death? If they don’t do anything interesting, nothing interesting is likely to happen to them. They are not special, so there’s no need to give them cliched origin stories. They weren’t the sole survivors of a goblin attack that wiped out their village. They weren’t the misunderstood geniuses. They do not have special powers or training. No one prophesied their births or discovered them as prodigies.
By the same measure, you frequently end up playing a character that is incompetent, anti-social or perhaps just plain boring. Or maybe just one that doesn’t appeal to you. I may not want to play a bisexual half-orc cleric worshiping the spirit of feet, no matter how tough he is. By day 2 of D&D, players had figured out the trick of rolling characters until they got one they liked. By day 3, DM’s insisted that the players roll in front of them and play the first one rolled. Day 4 witnessed the first PC suicide.
It was somewhat surprising that the idea of character design didn’t catch on sooner. I think it was the nature of the philosophical change that prevented it, not a lack of imagination about mechanics. My 1982 college home-brew D&D had a mix of randomization and point-buy for attributes. But my reason was to be more “realistic”, to reflect both nature and nurture in people’s talents. (Naively, I didn’t allow point-buy in Constitution because I couldn’t imagine someone training to become healthier. Now that I’m middle aged, my peers spend half their lives training for health.)
Although I guess the fantasy trip had point-buy, my first real experience with character design was Champions, which I started playing around 1984. The most enlightening aspect was the idea of Disadvantages. Disadvantages to me were never just ways of scoring points for powers, although I wasn’t past adding a few cheap shots to balance my sheet. They were also a check-list that said what ingredients a properly dramatically designed character should have: motivations for being involved in adventures, morality, friends and loved ones that could be put at risk, long-running enemies. In short, you created your character’s own adventure hooks for the GM, who in turn promised to use them. Really, the idea that adventures would be centered on who the character was, rather than generic missions open to all who dared, was very new to me. Even in games without disads, I still use my internalized Champions checklist to design my character’s personalities and backgrounds.
Although the bulk of games I play feature designed characters, I still play in Mac’s game. I like both styles, although I probably wouldn’t run a character generation game myself. However, they feel very different. I think many of the other aspects identified as “old school” emerge from this distinction, such as high PC mortality, low-powered characters, de-emphasized group cohesion, and unstructured adventures that do
not center around the characters.
I’ve said that Mac runs the same style game she has for 25 years or so. Recently, after one of Mac’s games, Elyssa, a relatively new player, asked why we had spent so much of the session on mapping the dungeon. We had been given accurate directions to place A, and then used a magic dog to track from A to B, which is where things really started, but still about half of the session was my mapping, and everyone else sort of dozing. Of course, I remember many other adventures where everyone died horribly because of an inaccurate map.
In a real old-school game, it feels like cheating not to spend time mapping, but I don’t know anyone who really enjoys it, and most of the players are totally uninvolved. It’s not something I’d feature in games I run.
But there are lots of other examples where players are rewarded for being willing to suffer boredom or punished for lack of patience. I had one game where two players insisted on searching for traps every step, even when they were told that the place they were in had low security. They had been in a game where failure to specify that you were being cautious always was punished severely. I originally was going to give tedium as currency as a hallmark of the old-school, but then I thought of all the hours I’ve spent running through spell lists and calculating effects of different spell combinations in 3e, or carefully budgeting my magic item selections. Or before that, min-maxing a Champions character’s points. There, the tedium is done off-line, but it still exists.
Call me a slave of the fun tyrant, but I try to minimize the tedium as currency part of games I run, and would really like them to be gone from games I play in. It tends to slow the pace down, it breaks immersion, doesn’t add to the plot, and at worst stops players from interacting with each other. It does give you a feeling of having worked for your goal, but that’s not enough to make it worth it for me.
My last post was about how I think of doing-it-yourself and experimenting as definitive parts of “old-school play”, more than any particular content or style. Towards that end, I thought I’d share my latest project, the Brew20
homebrew D&D style fantasy role-playing system.
BREW20 RPG
links to the home-page for the game. This is definitely the alpha version, so buyer beware.
Feel free to use as much as you like. Comments are appreciated.
At the end of the Hero-Cities campaign, the PC’s made a world-changing decision that would loosen restrictions on magic and adventuring careers. I was thinking that this would be a good opportunity to migrate a successor game to the next version of D&D (announced but not available), but then 4e was totally unsuitable. (It made career paths less flexible, rather than more, and the consequences of converting would have left the world unrecognizable.) So I started thinking about what I was hoping for from the next edition, which was a more stream-lined, flexible version of 3e, and began making it up myself.
I’ve played 3 sessions so far with a mixed group of experienced 3.5′ers and non-roleplayers. So far, I’ve been pretty happy with the results. I’ve been able to make up characters to player specifications, such as “a spy that dabbles in magic” or “a very bookish wizard that values broad theoretical understanding more than applications”. While rule questions do come up, both the experienced players and new players seem to find things basically intuitive. We had some pretty elaborate combat scenes which were still pretty fast-paced and to the point, without using miniatiures or a lot of quibbling about position. Of course, I’ve spent a lot of time in general on the system, but actual “encounter prep” time is lighter than under 3.5. So while it’s not perfect, it seems to meet or exceed expectations for my purposes. Of course, one of the joys of using your own system is that you are the complete authority on the rules (meaning, when you misremember a rule, it instantly changes to the way you thought it was….), so I’m not sure how much the ease of play will transfer to GM’s that didn’t write the system.
Last post, a very long time ago, I reminisced about my old high school gaming and how lacking it was. Fortunately, when I got to University, the gaming scene was a revelation to me. This was in 1981, which I think still qualifies as Old School in some vocabularies. But the spirit of the gamers at that time was about experimentation and individual creativity. The good roleplayers didn’t use a kit. We really made things up as we went along. A homebrew game was one where you made up all the rules, not just added the usual thirty pages or so of supplemental rules. Modules were rare, and published settings didn’t enter our thoughts. We tried out new genres of games, and rule systems from encyclopedic to minimalist. Every GM had a completely different style, usually different rules, and these evolved from campaign to campaign or even session to session. Published rulebooks were used for inspiration and to fill up the spaces between house rules; the real system was in illegible handwriting in a set of repeatedly-erased notebooks that the players were given access to on a need-to-know basis (and why do they need to know anything anyway?). That’s why the idea of marketing clones of D&D rulebooks and modules as Old School is totally alien to me. To me, if you buy it from someone else and use it as written, that’s not Old School. If you’re using the same rules you used last week, that’s not Old School. If the players know the rules, that’s not Old School. (The GM always knows the rules, because the rules that the GM forgets are no longer rules….)
As a freshman, I was lucky (or geekish) enough to get to the first meeting of the Wes SF club early, and be the first to sign up for Mac’s highly sought-after D&D (variant) game. This was the first game that came close to living up to the description of role-playing I had seen in IASFM all those years ago, and is still in many ways my all-time favorite game. (The game continues to this day, with Mac, her family (now almost always including her 14 year old daughter and occasionally even the two younger boys) and my friend Josh and his wife Elyssa, and myself when I’m on the East Coast. No, after 28 years of playing, I still don’t really know what the rules are.)
Mac is my Old School GMing hero, but I’m not sure the Renaissance men would recognize her game. Her game had avant garde elements at the time, with rules that meshed AD&D with (I think) the Fantasy Trip. The most radical element for me was that the players were only told the rules on a need to know basis. This had some downside (I didn’t know that the melee rules were “roll beneath your DEX on 3d6 to hit” when I made my DEX 3 character a fighter…) but it had the effect of insulating us from game mechanics and allowing us to concentrate on our characters’ point of view (immersing, to use an ambiguous and contested term of art). People played up personalities, with weaknesses being at least as much fun to exaggerate as strengths, and adventures were surrealistic, with bizarre elements and Rube Goldberg plans. There were two adventure formats: party initiated dungeon crawls, and short jobs for NPC’s (usually, “go there and get this thing, and bring it back to me”). I’ll try to get back to Mac’s game for at least one whole post.
There were other very different games on campus. For example, I remember sitting in once in a massive Traveller game with two GM’s, maybe 20 players divided into two teams in different rooms, and use of multi-media equipment to allow the teams to engage in a huge space battle against each other. (Mostly, I remember never getting a turn and waiting as they desperately tried to fix the buggy video equipment, but it was an interesting concept….) You could consider this a proto-MUD.
Mac and her husband left at the end of my freshman year, but Josh started the next year. I ran my own D&D based game. I would have followed Mac slavishly, but 1. I didn’t know what she did, 2. I couldn’t do what she did if my life depended on it, and 3. Josh quit my game and refused to play until I improved as a GM. I had my own D&D-based rules, which were more of a work in progress (replacing more and more of the AD&D rules as they annoyed me…) than a real system. I didn’t go out of the way to hide them from the players, but if the players started quoting my rules to me, I would just change them again. Many of the rules I introduced were similar to later D&D versions e.g., characters had attack bonuses and defense bonuses based on class and level, and you added a d20 to your attack bonus and compared it to the opponent’s defense bonus, and fighters had maneuver points they could spend to do stunts. OK, I thought many AD&D rules were stupid, but my main motivation in introducing mechanical innovations was simply so that I would always know the rules better than the players. I felt like my high school games sucked because I wasn’t in control, and this was a way to keep control.
The new rules didn’t really change the nature of the game. But when Josh told me he found my game boring, he really convinced me I needed to experiment in a deeper way. The real experiment was to introduce “plot” into my games. I had never played in a game where the characters had missions or goals other than personal advancement, or fulfilling a task as part of a job for an NPC patron. My plots usually were fairly unstructured, usually one shots that were more extended encounters than quests. For example, the half-orc rogue’s half-brother asks her help in becoming chief orc of his village. The party psychic triggers a mating instinct in a massive psychic fungus, who telepathically calls him to it. My game lasted for two years, both at the University (with Mac’s players, Josh, and a few extras from my dorm and from the SF club) and with my old high school group during summers (still unregenerate power gamers, but Mac’s lessons in controlling the game paid off even with them.)
Meanwhile, Josh exposed me to wider horizons in gaming. He came from a completely different gaming culture, with more flamboyant characters and epic plotlines that actually influenced the gaming setting, to some extent. Josh has gaming ADD to some extent. Now he has a group that’s stable and flexible enough that they enjoy rotating between various games. But at Wes, Josh had trouble maintaining a group of players because he wanted to play games that were less familiar and he switched games frequently. Lots of his games ended up solo adventures for me, or with perhaps one other player. But I discovered the joy of world-creation from Josh, and over the years, we have made up (collectively or individually but with feedback from the other) scores of game settings, most with either their own homebrew system or extensive modifications of whatever system we were using. A large number of these settings got played in, but a greater number of equally good ones are still untouched.
My first non-derivative system was a modern fantasy/science-fiction game, sort of a proto-X-files. It was to feature as much investigating as combat, and player character classes were things like reporter, detective, psychic, mystic, scientist or (street-level) superhero. Alas, I only ran it once, at a Wes mini-con, but my players were a select group: Josh, Mac and Walter were all in the game, although I doubt they remember it (and didn’t get to know each other until years later.)
Later, Josh and I wanted to play with non-roleplaying friends. We devised a minimalist system: characters were rated on a power scale from 1: crippled hobbit to 10: Sauron. You then picked about three abilities and one weakness, and rated them on the same scale, and negotiated until everyone agreed that that was the right power level. When the GM was unsure what might happen, they rolled a die. High was good for the players, low was bad. Games in this system tended to be philosophical conundrums rather than a real setting or any kind of immersion, so I was actually left with a prejudice against freeform games.
Why did we make up our own rules and settings? We wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t fun, but we really didn’t feel like there were good alternatives. The published stuff was bland and largely non-sensical. If we wanted to know the world, it had to be our invention. If we wanted characters that felt like they belonged to that world, we felt we had to have a new system for each world.
Towards the end, we started playing generic systems such as GURPS and Champions (not yet Hero System). But again it felt like unless we spent alot of time tailoring the system to the world, the setting and characters never matched. So while we might translate our thoughts into Champions mechanics, we still filled up notebooks with specialized rules and setting information for each potential game.
Recently, I started role-playing with my 8 year old “grandson”. I bought him Fairy Tale, a non-violent, freeformish kids’ RPG . The next day, he showed me the table of weapons he had added to the system. Old School lives on in the new generation!!
In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s an Old School Renaissance competing with the New School of 4e players. Both groups seem to have been in diapers when I started playing D&D, or maybe that was their parents. I don’t know what irritates me more: the New Scholars who go around claiming old, bad ideas that we discarded before they were born are the new, innovative ideas, or the Old Scholars whose idea of Old is “20th century” (which, since they weren’t actually born at the time, and have never read anything written then, means anything they imagine happened in the 20th century.) Have I insulted everyone yet? No? I’ll keep trying, then.
I started playing D&D at around 14 years of age, which would be 1977. So I don’t consider myself “Old School”; D&D had been published for 4 years, and it had been played before it was published. I had been eager to play for years before I actually found a game, based on an article in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine that told how “you made up your own rules and played characters from stories like the Hobbit.” That’s what I wanted to do ! Play out stories like the fantasy books that I was reading, and have them come to life, either starring me or starring my (also largely fictional at the time) friends.
There’s an old Peanuts cartoon where, after falling painfully, Lucy concludes: “Whoever invented roller skates hated little girls!”. My feeling was that Gygax and Arneson must have hated geeky teenage fanboys like myself. I spent all my allowance on whatever D&D materials I could find (I seem to remember having to buy the pamphlets INDIVIDUALLY because I couldn’t afford them all at once, but maybe I just pooled my money with my brother and my friend Jonny and rotated possession. I had to coax my mom into driving me to a neighboring town to the only hobby store I knew that carried D&D materials at all.) We had some laughs, and killed some monsters, but no matter how many dungeons I stocked with random monsters from the charts, no matter how many rules I added about falling into underground rivers or time travel, it still wasn’t living a story. I wasn’t doing it right, and I didn’t even know exactly what I was doing wrong. The pamphlets gave no guidance at all about role-playing. In fact, they were minimally coherent about dungeon-crawling, and were full of references to other books that weren’t available, like Chainmail.
Then came AD&D. It was encyclopedic, had rules for everything, except for what I needed: how to get this damn thing to be a story. I had more nerdy friends (or made nerdy friends for the occasion out of anyone I could coax to play) and all they wanted to do was rule-lawyer, min-max, cheat, and sit around bragging about how tough their characters were. It was dreadful, and I was a dreadful GM, with reams and reams of dungeons that I literally populated at random from the charts. I tried a minimal plot, but it was predictably lost in the hackage. It was what I had dreamed of doing for years; it was not fun. (OD&D was more fun, because AD&D you spent more time arguing. )
When people use modules or settings written at the time to talk about what Old School gaming was like, it seems bizarre to me. I never knew modules existed. They weren’t sold near me, no one I knew used them. The idea just would have made no sense: why be the DM if you don’t create the dungeon?
Let me tell you, Old School rules sucked. The only reason the hobby survived is that enough groups realized that YOU DON”T PLAY BY THE RULES!! YOU USE THE RULES AS LOOSE INSPIRATION! As a kid, I had no one to tell me this. And it seems like a lot of the Old School proponents are just saying, “We should use obviously sucky rules so that people realize not to use them.” I can almost get behind this, but not quite.
No matter how obviously sucky they were in hindsight, my friends and I DID try to follow all the sucky rules and only the sucky rules, and it sucked.
When Josh suggested I have a RPG blog, he suggested “How the players changed the Hero-Cults world” as an initial post. It’s taken me 25 posts to figure out the answer, and the answer is spread out over those 25 posts. So I’ll try to summarize in one post, illustrating the interplay between GM and players, with the GM introducing plot elements, and the players determining which ones were significant and how.
GM: As treasure, head of Pythiax.
Players: David’s Faenor freaks out about necromantic artifact.
GM response: Rolf the necromancer, the Revivalist fringe religion.
Player response: let it go fallow for a year or so, then take on Revivalist project as own goal (esp. Ted’s Zelan.)
(Back-track to Pythiax).
GM input: Ancient shamans, totems
Player response: Eli’s Calyps puts much xp, identity into icicle totem.
GM response: Make Calyps center of ice/fire/water prophesy, introduces Lillend plot.
Player response: Don’t pick up clues for a year, then Eli uses Lolth boon to get explanation.
GM ideas: Evil army, with intelligence agent Nadolan.
Player response: Pose as agents of Nadolan.
GM response: Nadolan offers to be patroness for group.
Player response: Seize on double-agent identities.
GM response: Send them to investigate Army plots.
Player response: Oh, look! Pirates!
GM response: Drop Lillend/Army plot for pirates/Hellspawn, but things going on in background.
(Back-track to boon for Lolth)
GM input: List of sites related to Lillend.
Player response: Go after Widow.
GM response: Widow sends demons to capture
Calyps to sell to Outcast. After stand-off battle, demons offer deal.
Player response: Take deal with demons, accept plan of Outcast’s. Then decide to save Lillend.
GM response: Tie back to pirates, magic murals, Rapigal.
Player response: Use suicide to convince Lillend
that her healing powers are operational.
GM response: Morgan’s Eille becomes immortal.
GM initiiative: Widow tries to capture Eille.
Players: Make new deal with demons.
Consequence: Defeat widow, capture her research and colleagues.
Putting it all together: Players decide to revive
heroes using Lillend’s tears and Widow’s research.
A related question is why I gave the players that choice. First, the players had SAID that that was their long-term goal, and brought it up repeatedly. Second, because it made sense from the way that game events turned out that they COULD do it. If what the players want makes sense, I usually have it happen. Third, because it made a satisfying conclusion to the campaign. Fourth, because it would be an interesting opening to a new campaign.
Josh, does that answer your question? Do you have any new questions to keep me busy for the summer?
The big fights are over, many plot elements tied together, and others left hanging. The campaign is at an end. The players, including myself, are leaving town and going separate ways. But ending with a fight scene is in some ways unsatisfactory. What about the player characters as individuals? What was important to them? What were their ultimate fates? Also, what were the most significant parts to the players? Finally, there was one major party goal, resuscitating the sleeping Heroes, that never got addressed. I decided to try an experiment, an epilogue game that would be more personal, and where the players could decide whether to change the game world.
As I mentioned, many of us were graduating, starting new jobs, or leaving town for some reason, so it was a somewhat chaotic time. For a while, we were going to do the epilogue by email, but decided to meet in person after a long discussion. Unfortunately, Jai and Ted couldn’t attend, and Ted had been the most enthusiastic about Revivalism. But I think the experiment worked well anyway.
The premise was that, five years after their adventures together, the party is reuniting at the request of the heads of the respective cults to give them guidance about an important decision. In character, they catch up on each others’ adventures and lives. I told them to make up what happened to their characters, with really no limits. Some players were obviously much more comfortable with this than others. Morgan is a professional quest designer and has no trouble spinning tales, and David is used to being the GM in other games. Eli and Tom needed a bit of prompting, because they were more used to asking permission before adding story elements.
Anyway, a few things were pretty interesting. While some of the elements they made up were power fantasies (Calyps absorbing the ice magic from the glacier in the Efreet’s prison, Tesla’s vicious revenge on the Hellspawn (the reason for which I’m still not sure anyone else understood)), there were also stories of sadness, regrets, and ambiguities. Eille rescued her aunt, and returned to her circus roots only to find that she had outgrown her days as a simple acrobat. She and her aunt (after having mended fences in game) go back to a somewhat rocky relationship.
Faenor, who spent a great effort bringing the Trogs into the hero-cult fold, decides that his efforts have over-civilized them and ruined their unique culture. He overthrows the Trog leader that he has been educating and grooming for years, and the Trogs revert to their previous ways. He deserts the hero-cults and lives for a while with the eco-terrorist the Outcast, before becoming dissatisfied with that way of life. (Remember how I mentioned that the Outcast passed the villain survival test, but the Hellspawn didn’t?) It was pretty insightful into what aspects of the campaign were most important to different players, and how the failures and challenges were just as important as their victories.
One thing that was fun and unexpected is that the players retconned their stories to fit together well. Calyps grabbed the glacier power while Eille was distracting the dragon guardian. Calyps and Faenor studied ancient ways of magic with the araneas at the same time.
Then came the Council meeting. The PC’s old adventures had given the sages the tools (Lillend’s tears, the Widow’s research notes, etc.) to actually revive the Heroes.
As the ones that had made this possible, and the best experts on these ingrediants,
the PC’s were asked for their guidance on whether to actually do this.
Since their way of life was based on tapping into the Heroes’ power, doing so would be a great sacrifice and risk. Powerful avatars (like the PC’s) would be busted down to low-levels. Powerful magic, such as resurrection, would become incredibly rare. Over time, a new generation of Heroes would emerge, but would civilization last to see it? The Heroes and even the gods were divided on whether to risk it.
The actual decision was brief. All of the players argued forcefully for reviving the heroes. Their arguments were moral rather than practical. How could a society built on leaching the power off its best citizens justify not doing their utmost for those whose sacrifices made the very civilization possible? I tried my best to have some Council members play devil’s advocate, but it wasn’t even a close call. The world would never be the same.
