“Don’t Drink and Game”

Obviously if you’ve read a few of my posts from a year or so ago, you know that I am no stranger to “mind altering substances” at game time. With my love of brewed liquids (and I ain’t talking coffee and tea), the title of this post is obviously a ruse. These days I enjoy several ales during the games I run, with Bass Ale, Fat Tire Ale, and Blue Moon being current favorites (all usually on sale in 12 packs at your local Rite Aid store). I know this sounds like a lot to you, but I am over 6’2”, currently built like a Samoan, and for sure ain’t no momma’s boy Sunday drive drinker. Although I have cut down lately so I can chop down that Samoan build 5 or 50 lbs, my years of practice give me a certain amount of tolerance. And for sure when driving from a session I’ll knock it off around an hour and a half before ending the game (I privately refer to this as “Engine Cooldown Period”), and often take a walk a few blocks to shake the mist out of my melon. Maybe grab a vitamin water at the local market before heading back to the car.

Almost everybody in the group but Big Ben (total tea totaler – although now that I think of it I don’t think he even drinks tea) enjoys a few drinks. Dan Dan the Power Game Man almost always has a sixer of Rolling Rock he’ll suck down 5 of. Andy, fairly slight of build, like 2 or 3 ales. And little Ben often has a tall can of something. Paul is not much of a drinker, but a couple of times has brought along a few Jack Daniels Lemonades. Our lady player Terry likes a couple of ales as well.

And as you may know from past posts some of us like to smoke a bit of the pipeweed before the game and maybe during a break. The fact is I would probably do this more, but during the game sometimes if I step out on the patio for a quick inhale Dan will come running out thinking it’s a chance for a cigarette break, and this can cause all the other little penguins to come waddling out to see what the fuss is and take part in whatever substance they prefer. But for the most part I would not say that anything is getting used in excess. If I am getting a ride, I might drink an ale or two more, but nothing crazy or shameful.

So sometimes I think about gaming, and how for the most part my experiences outside of the group have been fairly sober. When I was running KOTOR sessions for an established group of middle aged Star Wars dorks in Hollywood the other year, it seemed like at least one of them was a beer drinker but did not do it at the table. So I ran those sessions, that were already treated like I was working for these guys, stone cold sober. And that was one place I really felt I could use a few drinkypoos, being surrounded by what amounted to very weird and ultimately unfriendly creeps. At another session I went to last year, the host made it very clear to anybody that was playing that no substances, alcohol included, would be tolerated. And hell, in that case, being a fairly mellow and happy drinker (much nicer guy than sober me) things might have worked out differently if I had had a couple of belts when something unpleasant and unfriendly ended up going down. I just might not have walked out of that game less than an hour into it, which I don’t think any DM worth his salt wants a player to do.

I’ve had a couple of nice drinky games outside the main group the last year or so though. At last year’s Socal Smackdown con I had brought a little cooler with some beers in to get me through the session, and Cyclopeatron who was in attendance even hit me up with a nice rum and coke from the hotel bar. And earlier this year Cyclo organized a little pub game in Anaheim (or was it Fullerton?) with me and Trent Foster running our early sessions, and I had quite a few pints in that one (full tab for me and my driver Terry’s drinks? 90 bucks).

But one of my attendees at the Smackdown Session, Gary his name was I think, asked me to run some sessions at his place for some people in the future, but that no drinking of any kind would be tolerated. Needless to say, those games never panned out.

What is it with the drinking hate among many gamers? This is not a new phenomenon. In the 90’s, when I was running games for a group of mostly women in the latter part of it, those were some smoke and tequila soaked gaming. But each and every person there parties. And not falling down drinking. They were several hour weekend sessions, and we would do a shot and a toast from time to time. Well ok, I was putting beer in that mix too, but I lived a 15 minute stagger away so no big woop if I was feeling pretty wet on the brain by the end of the session. Hell, I was a much younger man then. But I also remember going to some games in the area on a Friday night some guy was hosting in the late 90’s. . These were terrible games, with a GM who kept no notebooks and totally made things up, badly as he went along. But I stuck with it because I think I was low on players at that time and was sort of trolling one player he had who I felt was a right fit for my group. But by game two I was bringing a six pack along to dull the pain and boredom. A couple of games later I was alone with the host working on some GURPS character for another game, and when talking about drawbacks for a character, disabilities or whatever they called them in that system, he made a big point of telling me alcoholism would be considered a weakness, and that he personally was creeped out by it. Ah, I see. My sixer on a Friday night habit was freaking the boring little douche out. I think I was done with that group at that point.

What do this people think is going to happen? Am I, or anybody else who wants a few refreshing adult beverages, some kind of old west Indian savages who will go nuts and kill the whole family if we get our hands on firewater? What’s the deal with that?

You only have to read a few threads on Dragonsfoot or RPG.net to see that there are drinkers out there in the game community. But that seems to be not the norm, and for the most part gamers are some kind of dorkish prudes who see it as evil. They probably would even see drinking half a Near Beer as some kind of pathetic persons personal struggle with Satan. I don’t get it. If you have kids, then I understand not wanting smoking to go on around your property. But a few beers? What is the real harm? Would these people see prohibition come back to save all the poor sick souls who enjoy a handful of suds during a several hour sit down were pretending and mind expanding seem to go hand in hand?

I myself would not want to run a game on mushrooms or acid or have players doing so, but I think that is a far cry from a little alcohol. Nobody is going to come to your game, have a few drinks, and wreck the place. They aren’t going to offer any to your kids (if you have kids why are you having weird strangers over to your place anyway?). What the hell is the real harm here? Stick up the ass may be the best explanation I can come up with for each and every time I have encountered anti-drinkers in the gaming scene.

Goatees and Black Trench coats

I never put much thought to gamer fashion. At least here in California, it tends to be the same stuff you see anywhere on the streets – t-shirts and jeans or shorts.

Sometime in the late 90’s I noticed a strange fashion trend in gamers. Around 1998 or so I had gone to a handful of GURPS sessions in West LA. This was a rare move for me; for most of the 90’s I had decent sized groups and consider it the heydays of my D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions campaigns. But my group was slowly petering out towards the end of the decade, and a couple of strong players had moved away or got married or whatever. So I will admit that I looked for some local groups to game with and maybe troll for and cull some decent players for my own group. What was I to do? I still wanted a large group, and I didn’t go to cons or hang out at game stores. At the time I had no idea of what was going on in the gaming world outside my circle, besides the occasional trip out to Long Beach to The Warhouse (for some of the reasons I would not set foot in the more local Aero Hobbies of Santa Monica, look at this old experimental post).

So there I was sitting in on sessions of some kind of GURPS games, run by a dude who used no notebook and made it up as he went along. And not in any kind of good way. It was some kind of science fiction thing where all science fiction things existed at the same time. Sounds like a great idea (which I think the dude stole from Nexus Comics, but he denied it), but the execution was pretty poor. You would go out and do something, and he would brainstorm on what to have happen to you. The host of the games thought this GM was “imaginative,” but I did not agree. Over a couple of games my guy would go out jogging or out to a bar, and the only thing the guy could think of was “a predator from the Predator movies is jogging there too,” or “a predator from the Predator movies is on the barstool next to you. “ I guess Predator was on HBO the night before or something.

Ugh. Horrible. But here is the rub, the guy wore a black trench coat. Not bad you say? It’s fucking summer here in So Cal, dude. Really? A black trench on a warm summer night? OK, not that big a deal. Columbine was still a year or two away, and the black trench was yet to be thought of nationwide as the gear of pathetic loser geeks who got picked on and went batshit instead of lifting weights or taking karate or whatever. it struck me as weird. But hey, I’m a lifelong beach dude, so what do I know of trench coats?

I did not last long in that little group. My gaming life with my own group continued on.

Sometime around 2001 or 2002 I went for a couple of hours to the Gateway convention over at LAX to do a little shopping for miniatures or what not. I parked a few blocks away, and I noticed groups of the pretty much all-male convention goers heading back and forth to the Jack in the Box across the street. Of the 20 or 30 guys I saw in that few minutes, 90% of them (I’m not kidding) were wearing black trenches. OK, so I don’t recall what time of year it was, but this is Southern California. In deepest winter it is often 75 degrees. Jeez.

Now, keep in mind this was not all that long after columbine. Granted, Columbine had nothing to do with goatees. The Columbine jack-offs were pretty clean cut and studly compared to the squirrely dorked-out trenchers I saw around that con hotel. And at the time I did notice a lot of goatees in various fandom gatherings in general, especially at Renaissance Faires. So I guess that is neither here nor there (outside of the fact that combined with the coats it made the con dudes look like a bunch of clones).

Not long after Columbine I was partying at the So Cal Ren Faire one night and saw the head of security giving a hard time to a pair of black trench donning teenagers for being so stupid as to adopt the fashion of a pair of losers who shot up their school because they were the only two kids in the school who couldn’t get laid. And those were teens, lots of these con dudes looked well into their 30’s at least. I remember also thinking about the crummy “imaginative” GM from those GURPS games, who attended that same con from what I understood. But at least that douche was doing it without the stigma of the shooting hanging around.

I only had a pass for the shopping area, but from what I could see there was an ocean of these black trenched yobbos at the tables.

I just didn’t get it. Why would you want to wear anything associated with the biggest high school losers in human history? It was mind boggling. Maybe after 10 years or something, but a couple? C’moan. Some of them in addition also seemed to like to wear those fingerless driving gloves with the coats which was just extra weird.

Next week I am going to be in attendance for a couple of days at a So Cal game convention. No shit. That’s right, hell froze over. And this isn’t for lack of my own decent group. I’m actually trying to get out there more in the game community since I blog and all that. I’m getting older, and who knows if this is my last big hurrah for gaming. I’m not sure I can see myself doing this at 50. But of course, I said I wouldn’t be doing it at 40 when I was 30. My, how time flies and we lie to ourselves.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the latest con going fashions. If it’s just t-shirts and shorts I guess I might secretly be a little disappointed. Hmmm…maybe I’ll drop by the thrift store and see if I can find a trench in my size.

“It’s about bunnies!”

I had never read Watership Down, nor seen the movie by the time I first saw a copy of Bunnies and Burrows over 30 years ago. There it was on the stands at Aero Hobbies. All the older pricks were geeking out about it at the game table, like they did with most unique new games that came out. I don’t remember anyone actually running it at the shop, but I was somewhat smitten by it’s strange nature.

I had of course heard of Watership Down in the school yards over the year. It would usually be one of the timid, shy girls reading it at lunchtime (this was before Goth kids came into their own and started to be recognized), or one of the seemingly speechless boys from the “special” class. It’s not exactly a “feel good” story. As Sawyer on the TV show Lost once sarcastically said, in a gleeful singsong voice as he was caught reading it “It’s about bunnies!”

I saw no sad little sick rabbits on the run from all kinds of scary things as I read the B&B rules. Only herbalists, fighters, and the incredibly appealing Maverick character class. The rules were fairly light, as were a lot of the new games coming out. It left a lot open to interpretation, which as any Grognard knows is the salt of the earth in a fun-to-GM game.

B&B came out in 1976, only two years after D&D, and it is recognized as the first game to have all non-human characters, and also as the first game with a detailed martial arts system. Your skills and abilities varied depending on your character class, and task resolution was on percentiles. There were great little “simple life” rules in the game that gave it a very quaint flavor. Your rabbit could only count up to 5, and I don’t think you were allowed much more than that in the way of objects in your backpack. Yeah, that’s right. These rabbits weren’t exactly humanoid, but it was obvious that they were more intelligent than animals, and could stand upright and manipulate things with fingers. This was not specific in the book – only some of the skills, and some of the drawings (a maverick holding playing cards, the soldier rabbits of the book cover, etc.) lead you to believe that they were more than plain old bunnies. Well, that and the fact that somebody had to have made the backpacks.

Seeing as you are a rabbit and one of the weakest creatures on the planet, role play was key over combat encounters. All forms of animals are listed as enemies, but only human beings with their “alien minds” were true monsters. Snares, poison, and natural hazards filled the daily lives of the little fellas as well.

The rules book itself was pretty poor quality. It looked typewritten (as were a lot of my favorite gaming material of the time), and the “artwork” can only be describes as “scribbles.” I drew better looking artwork of cops beating up hippies on my high school Pee Chee folder.

A couple of editions came out in the following years. There was a GURPS version with a cover that could only be described as hilarious. It had two small rabbits furiously attacking a guard dog, like the two raptors attacking the T Rex in Jurassic Park. That seemed to kind of miss the point of the original game right there, but newer gamers probably would not want to play a game were you mostly just forage for truffles all day, Before heading down to the Doe cave to hammer out babies all night.

I finally saw the Watership Down movie and read the book in the 80’s, and the game reflected a lot of that inspiration

Figuring I would probably never run it, I sold it on Ebay several years ago for about 50 bucks. Now that I’m going through my own retro gaming fad, I wish I had kept that one. I even created my own little gameworld for it about 10 years ago. Called “Rabbit Valley Days,” I was hoping to evoke those original rules using another system eventually, but I doubt I can sell my current players on it now. The game is about bunnies, after all.