Gygax Memorial - Raiding pocketbooks of the Faithful?

Only recently found out they are trying to get it together to get a memorial built representing Gygax and D&D. Although it seems to be more about Gary himself, I guess it is going to be a dragon with an inscription (yawn). I can see the children in the park now “Oh mommy, look! Skyrim!”

So there is this website you can go to for the information on this. Also, I understand the widow of Gary, Gail Gygax, shows up on convention floors with a money jar looking for contributions to this project. I can understand her wanting something like a memorial to Gary’s works, but the cash jar strikes me as kind of sad. I can’t say if Gail was left a hefty estate when Gary passed. It’s not like Gary produced a bunch of films or something. Royalties from the old D&D cartoon, and his books, can’t really be supporting a South Fork Ranch type lifestyle, could they? But anyway, the very wife of the man roaming game rooms looking for fivers from gamers just seems kind of cruddy. Are things that bad?

See, I think the memorial will be in part an ad for the current producers of D&D and their product whether they mean it to or not (plus the new reprints being sold by WOTC are tied in with this). Why is that bad? Well, I think the makers of the game, with their storied history and all, pretty much abandoned their own fanbase. That is what a lot of the voices of the OSR are about. There are a lot of older folk who stuck with the product throughout it’s various incarnations. I'm thinking the people who are the most passionate about this are the people who supported the game and it's companies, decade in and decade out, both monetarily and by bringing new people into it. I feel these are the people who have a right to ask that their voices be heard. It's a niche hobby where people come and go, but many seemed to have been buying the product for a good part of their lives. The product no longer seems to represent the game people have loved. I mean, even modern players of 3rd edition were gob smacked by 4th edition, which was just a head scratching departure from 3rd much in the way 3rd was from older editions. They don’t just want entirely new task resolution – they want support for the game they love. Many supported 3rd despite it’s differences from the old. They had faith in the company and the game, and then the company once again changed the entire game on them. You can see how the faithful would take issue with them.
Me? I'm not one of the faithful. I don't give a rats ass. I haven't bought a new TSR product brand new off the shelves of the local game jobber since around 1987. Despite ol' Gaz telling me since the earliest days of D&D that the "other" product out there was inferior and should be avoided, I started giving my money to other companies product that interested me. Hero Systems and Chaosium seemed to reward their fans by giving them what they wanted - for hearing their voices and actually having an understanding of their fanbase. I still play 1st edition, using my tore up old books. And I have props for Gary. But as far as I'm concearned I'd have more interest in Sandy Peterson or Greg Stafford getting a statue when they pass. They represented a company and product that DELIVERED.

Actually, no knock at Gary by any means, but if a memorial was going to in part represent the D&D that I play, then that memorial would be for Dave Arneson. He most represents the game I love, even though when I was young I had no idea of his contribution. When I was a little kid eagerly buying the first Blackmoor book, I had no idea who the man was or what he meant. Gary was the face of the game. I didn’t know there was this heart and soul named “Dave Arneson.”

Hey, skip the dragon and make it statues of both Gary and Dave doing a fist bump and I’ll crack open my dusty wallet in a heartbeat. But you can keep your 120 dollar memorial set, WOTC. My tore-ass old books are still workable for my games.

Arkham Horror begats Call of Cthulhu

Being down three players last night (Dan Dan the Power Game Man is overseas for awhile, Little Ben has to take a month or two off suddenly, and Big Ben had a cold), we decided to finally play Paul’s copy of Arkham Horror he got for Xmas instead of my Runequest session.. In all honesty, I’m not feeling Runequest like I thought I would. I love the setting, but the super crunch of the combat rules really killed my buzz. I’m going to go back to the drawing board on that for awhile. Like I said a thousand times on this blog, my pet peeve in GMing it to feel like its work. I don’t wanna work during a game. I want to have a couple of beers and paint a picture. I’m all heart and passion at the center, not the crunchy shell. I actually was willing to carry on without using the mind-numbing, high maintenance Strike Rank, but with a couple of the guys being heavily for using it BTB, I just wanted to step back for a bit and take another look before we spent another session trying to adjudicate a battle with the characters and a couple of weapon snakes.

So we finally play AH (the latest version), and it seemed pretty cool. As the only real Lovecraft aficionado in the group, I had to hold back and not bore everybody with the back story of every side street on the Arkham map and all the monsters and books and such. What was weird was they, the Cthulhu novices, seemed to enjoy it a bit more than me. In all honesty, I like a board game to be a little simpler, and to be able to be played inside of three hours with 4 people or less. I’m actually surprised that we finished by 11:30, but I think we fudged a couple of things to be able to get to the battle with the endgame god (in this case it was Yig the serpent god, and we beat him with only one character dying).

We’ll have a better handle on it next time so it will go quicker, but one really good thing came out of this: we got the Lovecraft bug, and I’ll be running some Call of Cthulhu for my next session! Next week at Big Ben’s D&D I’m thinking of taking up a half hour or so for some CoC chargen so we can do less of that when I get the Cthulhu session underway.

Usually this would be a good time to get that weekly gaming in, but some of us are having our schedules become busier on weeknights than usual. Andy is getting involved in some kind of local politics, Terry is going to start bartending at her club a night or two during the week, and in addition to my usual once weekly music practice I want to start learning some new instruments – so all of a sudden we find ourselves dashing about trying to work it out for weekly gaming now. Once or twice a year we have a longer weekend session, and I suggested we try to make that once a month or so to make up for some lost weeknight sessions, so in the long run I think it will be all good and the group will carry on with standard operations bullshit for the foreseeable future.

Sci Fi fashion goes full circle

If there is one truly weird fact I have learned from Science Fiction films and books is that fashion eventually comes full circle. That is to say, it gets to a certain point beyond military or blue collar worker jumpsuits into semi-space punk latex jumpsuits and astronaut armor, and then starts heading back to ancient garb. Tunics, togas, and robes. Cases in point: Logan’s Run, Star Wars, The Time Machine, original Star Trek, and the book version of the Dune Universe and others. Whatever it is, we eventually digress into the fashion of ancient Rome.

Somewhere in there is the turtleneck sweater phase of the future as well.

A KOTOR cast of characters

IMHO, interesting and varied characters add greatly to the gaming experience no matter what game you play. Star Wars, or more specifically Knights of The Old Republic, is no exception (just go easy on the “Muppet” races). Here are the characters that are in my current campaign. Not a goddamn Muppet in sight (unless you count the Wookie. But he’s kind of an evil Wookie).

Garvin (Paul): is a Khil (bald and having many tentacles hanging from his face that sound like chimes when he talks). Garvin is of the Noble class, and his wealth talent has him raking in the cash (something like 5000 creds each level he gains). He is also a Force User. I started him out as a college acquaintance of my major, regularly appearing NPC.

Kruk (Andy): is a Feeorin (big and strong guys with dreadlocks like The Predator). Kruk is a Mandalorian from the recent wars, although he hasn’t admitted such to the other players. He is a Soldier class that Andy is meticulously choosing combat skills for, making him a run n’ gun type commando fighter. Fairly anti-social to others outside the immediate group, he has his item shopping and other errands done by other characters because he doesn’t trust himself not to put the hurt on some shoppie who talks to him wrong. I had thought Andy was going to run this guy as less of an asshole Mandalorian for some reason, but he has proven to be fairly cold blooded, killing a foe who had surrendered and was prone on the ground. I expect more brutal violence from this character in the future. BTW, this was the type of character I was hoping for in the campaign; something aiming it more at hard Sci Fi than just another dopey Star Wars storyline.

Totha (Little Ben): is a Bothan Scoundrel (goat dudes) and general agent for the Bothan Spynet. He travels around looking for interesting tidbits to report to the ‘net. Is an excellent shot and so far seems not to miss what he aims for. A Bothan spy is kind of handy for the GM; he is constantly feeing info to his superiors, and gaining info from them in return. Macguffins can be easily inserted in the game this way.

Rookieen (Dan): is a Wookie soldier, but is no “nice guy” like Chewbacca. So far the rumor is that Rookieen has worked as a slaver capturing his own kind. Yep, a Wookie traitor (Wookies are a slave race during this time period). Rookieen is a typical Dan “The Power Game Man” character; arrogant, anti-social, and prone to violence. With Kruk the Mandalorian and this evil Wookie around, I expect to throw lots of combat the groups way. Combat is hella fun in this system. Not a ton of room for abstraction, which is a nice break from AD&D old school.

Rokran (Big Ben): is a 20-year old Zabrak (Darth Maul’s race) Jedi from Coruscant. Like Andy, Ben is leaning towards well-studied optimization, become powerful fairly quickly through his (somewhat broken) Jedi powers .

Lucia (Terry): a 15 year old Cathar (cat people) Jedi, who was sent to the Dantooine Enclave as a child after the brutal attacks and atrocities of the Mandalorians several years ago. Sort of a Jedi bumpkin compared to the metropolitan Rokran, Terry has not had much of an eye towards optimization of abilities, but is just picking stuff that appeals to her for the characters (she seems to be leaning towards lightsaber combat specialist). As Lucia is Cathar, it will be interesting to see how she feels about Kruk when/if his Mandalorian background is revealed.
Note that all the characters that were created are non-humans. That set up an interesting dynamic right off that bat. Even in this time period humans are dominant.

The Jedi characters had special reason for being around where I started this first game, but all the rest just ended up, for one reason or another, at the Muunilist space port. The Muuns are the banking clan, as shown in the Star Wars prequels. I had no idea if they existed in the KOTOR period, but decided that they would have some galactic banking, loan, and law services set up even though the Intergalactic Banking Clan status of the planet was thousands of years away.

I had Kruk and Rookieen just being mercs who were slumming it at space port waiting for a job or whatever, and the Bothan also just hanging around sniffing for interesting happenings to report to his superiors. Garvin the Khil had a computer tech gig at one of the Muun universities, where he met and became friends with a student, Solomon (my regular NPC for this part of the campaign).

Solomon is an NPC and sort of the catalyst of the main adventure. He appears to be a good looking young human male (more or less) with blood red hair and sort of “mood ring” eyes. Solomon is a student of Ancient Galactic History and Languages, and he would bring all the characters together by offering them bodyguard jobs to protect him as he went to potentially dangerous places to look for clues to the historical stuff he is interested in (old ruins and ancient caves in wildernesses).

I expected the characters to be on Muun for one full game tops, but there ended up being so many fun things I could do with these PC’s before they hit the spaceways, we actually spent 3 games doing things there. The characters have fought andrenal junkies (adrenals are stat-boosting drugs very common in the KOTOR video game that inspired me to do this campaign), brawled in the cantina, gambled, had a gun battle with well-armed and violent poachers out in the mudflat outback, and got mixed up with a conflict between gang members with The Exchange (galactic Mafia), and thugs in the employ of The Hutts who were encroaching on Exchange territory. I’ve had the opportunity to use a Darkside Maurader (force sensitive soldiers with no force training who channel the force through battlefield rage) in a couple of fights. One fight had the Maurader crash a stolen truck into the spaceport ground shuttle some characters were on, and engaging them in a brutal gunfight on the street in the blocked traffic.

The two Jedi were around just by happenstance because they were on some kind of Jedi errand to the planet. The Cathar catgirl Jedi is young, and when she got involved in drinking and gambling at the cantina with the other PC’s, she indulged like any teenager would. It will be interesting to see if she continues that behavior. I have to give her plenty more opportunities to party it up in the future to see if she bites. Partying hardy is the path to the dark side!


Next: The players are on a space flight that crashes and nobody could possibly survive it. Do they? Stay tuned.

Burning out on the game

Interesting post by a guy on Dragonsfoot known as “Prespos.”

A lot of the older (both in terms of age and amount of years spent on DF) posters there seem to have a very embittered attitude about other people and their gaming habits. No matter how friendly or sunny a new person might come off as with their innocent inquiry about this or that topic related to D&D, there is always a long-timer on DF ready to tell them they “are cheating” for using house rules or “are having fun wrong” in some way or another. Some come off with portents of gaming doom (“that campaign will be doomed to fail because…”) over very simple things. It really verges on parody sometimes. It seems to me a lot of these people are past their time of gaming fun and greatness (and often haven’ t actually played in many years), and just seem to lurk around like ghosts for the sake of their own sad egos trying to warn the living about making mistakes that can ruin the experience. You can read a lot of hurt in some of the negatives that show up in place like DF.
If you don’t check the link, here’s what Prespos had to say in part:

“…Been quite badly depressed the last few days,
and i have been thinking of quitting AD&D again, and again ....

Really, i look at the tabletop AD&D (1E) scene, and i really have to wonder ... if i ever want to be part of that scene ever again,
the tabletop scene, the convention scene.

Really, i look at the AD&D community ... what i see : confusion, a waste of time/life, degeneration, and, what is worst of all ...
some kind of a mediocrity, a nostalgic mediocrity that feeds upon itself ... perhaps, by worshiping the words of the dead.

Really, it is the mediocrity, the lack of excellence, that, perhaps, distresses me the most about the AD&D 1E scene.

Really, if i had the choice of being at the lejendary TSR building, or the lejendary SSI building, Now, really: i think that i would go with the latter…”

The thing is, of many of the old timers do, Prespos never struck me as particularly negative or embittered by his years of gaming experience. He often offers helpful advice on DF, and is working on big old school projects of the types that are popular in the OSR crowd. But it is obvious that both his time on DF, and in all things gaming related, has eaten away at him in some way. I think you would have to feel pretty strongly to go on a public forum and open yourself up like this. But really, when you read what is bugging him, it makes some sense. Conventions, game shops, forums; the gaming world is full of true cretins and creepos of every color and kind. It’s one of the big reasons I don’t venture outside my own group more often. Sure, I’ve had some good experiences in the last couple years of my return to gaming after several years off, but any regular readers of my blog know full well that I have had some really major balls-ups when trying to get more involved in the outer scene.

From nit-picky, overly entitled middle-aged Star Wars fanatics, to a geektard regular player of a session I sat in on killing my character in the first 45 minutes of games start, I personally have plenty to be depressed about such as Prespos gives voice too. I think a couple of things give me hope though, besides my great public OD&D experiences of late. One, I have this blog as a place to vent, and hoo boy have I vented. But two, and most importantly, I have a regular group of people to play with who are decent and only marginally piss me off from time to time.

I think that is key to gaming happiness among old schoolers who hold unto much of the old way. Actually playing the dead editions you grew up with and loved goes a long way to keep the bitters away. So many of the negative or depressed voices in the OSR community seem to come out of a place of “the best years are behind us.” I tend to see the 90’s as my Golden Age of gaming, but really now that my Night Below campaign is finally finished, I look back at how amazing it was. How challenging it was for my player AND me. Maybe this is my true Golden Age. I guess I won’t be able to tell for sure until sometime in the future.

But yeah, for sure if I don’t have a regular group in the future, and I keep blogging, or even working on some thankless OSR project to be part of the gaming zeitgeist along the lines of what Prespos was working on (yeah, right, I’ll get on that right away), I may experience a certain amount of burn out or unhappiness with it. I think that was sort of happening by around 2001 or so for me, and was one of the reasons I went into semi-retirement. And I wasn’t even online then seeing that there are actually some intelligent non-creeps in the gaming community beyond the fields I knew.

But most important in Prespos’ words I think is a warning against putting too much stock in the words of the dead. Being too faithful to poorly edited and sketchy rules from almost 40 years ago.

The elusive all-Tavern game

All DM’s rely heavily on the inns and taverns of their world. These are iconic places where, whether it is in-game time or in-between game time, characters ultimately spend more of their life in these places than anywhere else.

If I had to guess, I’d say that 3 out of 4 of my campaigns from around 1978-1990 began with a bunch of characters who didn’t know each other (actually, I had a habit of having at least a couple of PC’s meet on the road to the tavern, just so there is some role-play back n’ forth right off the bat) hanging out in the boozer when some wizard/cleric/nobleman tripped in with a hammer, nail, and poster advertising for a group of stalwarts to go crawling into the local dungeon jobber for one reason or another.

While these public houses are great places to get adventuring gigs, info, and entertainment, they rarely take up large amounts of actual play time. They are usually just places that keep characters from having to hang out in the street or market squares in between dungeon delves. If things are going slow in the game and the characters are listlessly mooning around the beer hall, you can always have a gang of rakish rogues or barbarians march in as fist-fodder to pass some time. Doesn’t matter if it is some fancy uptown establishment, or some half-orc shit hole, a nice dust-up always gets the juices flowing. I almost can never resist creating a bar fight (it doesn’t help that in my younger, more aggro days I got involved in more than a couple of fights at dive bars here in Venice Beach and other places).

I always wanted to run an entire game set in a tavern. Characters drinking, brawling, wenching, gambling, etc. Recently I played a video game called Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and in your first levels you are hanging out at an Inn that is haunted by an elvish girl’s ghost, who sings a melancholy tune as you drink your ale and chat to the locals. Eventually you get a job clearing out the rats from the basements, and then deeper below where undead stalk around in the catacombs beneath the establishment. It’s great fun and easy to pull off in a low level game, but it doesn’t really count as a “Tavern Game.”

What I always wanted to see was characters mostly taking it easy, having fun on their time off. Play some cards or dice, chat to the lassies, have a brawl or two. An entire game of just hanging out. But in the past it doesn’t seem to take long for players to get antsy about moving on to big fights and big treasure. I mean, you cannot just force them to play out their roles in a tavern for several hours. A lot of it just seems to depend on their mood. If they have been involved in a lot of violent, life or death combat, it seems to make it easier to get them to take it easy and do some character-developing role-play.

So finally in the last game it just sort of happened. The party is still in a large town on the souther frontier. Having just fought wererats and a gnomish automaton below the town, and an alleyway encounter with the drow party from the previous games, the players decided they wanted to hit the big dive bar for a bit of a rest from the mayhem. So we started the game with them traipsing off to Silvio’s.

I’ve used Silvio’s in games of years past. Formerly a violent den of scum and villainy where a party once attacked it to rescues a child held hostage by gangsters, the place was now run by Silvio’s son, who has made attempts to clean the place up a tad. No longer involved in rackets and gangs, Silvio Jr. just wants to make legit money. So the Tavern now had better booze and food, fair card and dice games (and rat roulette), a small stage for bards, and a cage fighting hall downstairs in the basement.

It was the time of the spring festival, and lots of things were happening in town, but the players seemed content to have their characters relax for a bit. I didn’t mind, I just want the players to have fun and sandbox their own evening. So they decided to spend it at Silvio’s (probably prompted and enticed by a flyer I printed out and had a street kid distributing in the game).

Helena the fighter-girl settled down with some rat roulette, while Ormac the gnome and Dell the elvish monk rattled some dice. After jamming with the house musicians a bit, Vaidno the bard picked up on a dark-haired, doe-eyed serving wench who was sending him smiles. But it wasn’t just quiet gambling: Krysantha the female drow fighter/druid with the double scimitars went down to watch the cage fights, and after seeing the mountain of a man “Creature” whipping ass on all takers, she decided to volunteer to take to the cage. All the other characters came down to watch, and hefty bets where laid on Krysantha. With wooden swords Krysantha and Creature wailed on one another, until finally the big man went down like a sack of bricks. Krysantha took on a couple of more fights before striding out of the cage to collect her winnings.

Other characters were waiting in the wings to assist, like the corner handlers in a boxing match . So even though only one character battled, the other PC’s got to be involved, and some went around making bets. Everyone made money. Betting on herself, Krysantha made a few hundred gold pieces.

Helena was the funniest: the young fighter sat herself down at the rat roulette table, and spent a good chunk of the evening making small, one gold piece bets on the rolls. She was so excited to finally get the right rat, and get 3 gold in winnings (after losing around 6). This is a character who had adventured a bit, and had previously earned hundreds. Ah well, maybe she was just happy to make a little cash without having to steal or kill for it.

OK, my Wednesday night games are only around three hours long. I never could have stretched this encounter out to one of my old 6 hour weekend games. Or could I have?

Anyway, that was fun, and the players all want to go back there for an evening before leaving town. I hope this really fun game where not much happened wasn’t a lucky fluke.