Jonesing for Glorantha. An impulse buy.

 I’ve talked about my old love of Runequest  here, here and here. And, well, over the years I probably at least mention Runequest in posts a dozen times so if you want to seek them out just type in Runequest in the search bar. Oh, I talked about in one of my articles for now defunct Film Goblin (the owner of the site was a hopeless, hardly functional drunk). 

The point of this quick post though is about this impulse buy…I don't buy many physical books anymore.

Running Cthulhu of late certainly has me thinking about Runequest just due to the basic role-playing similarities. Then it quickly leads to me thinking about Glorantha,  Probably my favorite game setting of all time.

It was one of those alternatives to dungeons and dragons. I discovered early on as a kid hanging out at Aero hobbies in Santa Monica. I ran a dragonnewt for a long time there, at least in young person time. Probably for like a year. but when owner Gary and the older dudes decided to move onto another game, like Traveller or Empire of the petal throne, we younger people went along with them. How I discovered so many games early on in the hobby.

It was my older teens and onward when I’d much preferred playing with my own friends or groups rather than a hobby shop with a bunch of stinky, aging wargamers and college aged nerds. That along with playing sports, surfing and of course girls I graduated from that dusty musty place to get a short campaign or two of RQ going with friends between my late teens and early 20s, but there were just so many things I loved to run. Primarily DND but I loved champions and also Cthulhu here and there. DnD always had to take the lions share of game time, but I had other loves and in every group I put together I would unleash another genre on them. They would resist but then love it. 

Then probably something like a break from RQ that lasted decades before I ran a shortish campaign of it with my group around 10 years ago in Santa Monica. 

Well, now I’ve got this bug again and I just decided to get the main book of the latest edition just to have a read through and see if I wanna go through the player finding process for it. It’s fairly thick and heavy book. More reading than I generally like to do these days ha ha. But I’m really going to buckle down and try to get a few pages in a night.

Its a really thick jampacked book. So much information on the cults and societies and all that. Far more than I remember in the ancient second edition book. Too much really I think. In the day we had to fill in a lot of the gaps ourselves. But I also realized I should’ve maybe gotten the quick start rules. there’s just so much crunch in this book. So much background info. And the Quickstart rules come with cool maps of Glorantha and of towns and stuff. I actually didn’t get the quickstart because It didn’t seem like elves and dwarves would be in that book. But they’re not in the main book either. For that you have to get the Glorantha Bestiary.

 I may just go ahead and get the quick rules anyway. The main book is kind of intimidating. Prob still gotta get the Bestiary. 

But, damn, I just want to run some Glorantha. I have used Gringles Pawn shop and the Rainbow Mounds so much for D&D it is time to experience them with Runequest again! We'll see. But it's fun reading.

Cheers

GTA5 - not love at first sight, but love did come

 

At some point after getting the newest model XBOX the other year, I picked up Grand Theft Auto 5. I had seen game play at friends' houses for years and knew I would try it sooner or later. I mean, I was long used to being years behind on my games.  But had gotten into playing with others online in other games, especially with my old friend "T." She had been a Skyrim nut for a handful of years, and I had suggested we try Elder Scrolls Online as a thing to do together, since I had been playing ES since the original Morrowind. Though we could still play together, little dungeon delves and fishing and such, she had been putting much more time into it on her own. She is now in guilds and in far off lands, while I sort of futz around when I play alone. Since she is playing ONLY ESO, and I like to diversify, we will never be anywhere near equals in that game. 

Imagine her as Valeria from the Conan movie. 
Now imagine this is me..

As I was trying to keep up with T for several months, GTA5 only got a little play here and there. Maybe an hour every weekend or so. Though much of it is intuitive, it is also hard at times for a noob. Driving was bad enough, but driving and shooting? Yeesh. Fairly early on there was a mission for main character Michael that had you chasing crooks on a big rig that had stolen his yacht (don't ask), and you drove your sports car on the equivalent of the 405 Freeway, shooting at dudes on the yacht who were trying to kill your buddy Franklin who had climbed aboard. Man, it was hard. Must have played out that mission a dozen times before being successful. 

I figured that even harder missions would follow, and that was intimidating. It may have kept me from playing it as much as ESO. But man, this game setting did appeal to me. So much of it was not just based on Los Angeles, but even parts of my home town Venice Beach (Vespucci Beach in the game), the side streets and alleyways, was spot on. Buildings I had been in and neighborhoods I grew up around were recreated, often in loving detail. My favorite was the Venice Canals, my birth place. Having a gunfight in my childhood neighborhood was mind blowing. 

And this familiarity with Los Santos/Angeles was super appealing to me. But what else to keep me involved? I mean, every time I got in a car to drive I ended up rear ending other cars, and accidentally running over pedestrians. You see, if you don't drive crazy, you are pretty much just stuck in traffic. The main reason I actually Left Los Sant...uh, left Los Angeles. So even just tooling around you are blowing street lights and driving on sidewalks. Otherwise its an LA traffic simulator. Yeah, fuck that mess. Then the cops chase you, and you crash and get out to run as bullets blast into your body. 

Yeah, a bit disappointing at first. But in the last couple of weekends I suddenly went from "meh" to "omigawd I love this shit". Here are some reasons why:

Maybe some 10 or 12 hours into it, I get it. Understanding has come to me. You see, you spend 10's of hours putzing around, driving and walking around nice areas, getting into occasional fist fights and gunfights and wondering what the hell is the point. Well, it finally dawned on me. As I started getting better at driving and other activities, I realized that the game has a grand plan. It is training you for what is to come. Basically, this is the prelude for you putting together your gang of bank robbers. The game is letting you fuck around so you can get familiar with just being alive. The physics of your world. It knows you will be a bad driver at first. It knows you will be bad at shooting people. And it wants you to get better by just plain experiencing the school of hard knocks in Los Santos. It knows that no setback is permanent. You die or get caught by cops, the just try again. 

When I turn the game off and go to bed I imagine
myself as that Mayhem insurance guy walking
away leaving this behind..

I started regularly going to the shooting range to be a better gunman. I started driving at high speeds around the city to be a better driver. I stopped worrying about being a better driver, and just drove at high speeds through the city. And suddenly I was exponentially better at that.  School of hard knocks.

 

Suddenly I could feel the improvement. Not just in my personal skill, but the game engine itself eases up on you, steadies you. A sort of smoothness starts setting in. 

The other night I was playing the main character, Michael. I decided to go down to "Santa Monica Beach" at the California Incline (his psychologist lives down there), and ran into a jogger lady. You know, one of those older, cut, kinda pretty but hard jogger ladies you see who are way serious about it. She challenged me to a race down the incline stairs to the beach, and though I was wearing a suit and dress shoes, I took her up on it. I was doing OK for a middle-aged guy dressed up, but I kept faltering. I clearly did not have the stamina to keep up. So another activity goal; do some jogging to get better at running. I'll probably need that for bigger missions later anyway. And to eventually beat that lady. Oh, sensible shoes probably don't hurt.

The boy from the hood character, Franklin, gets in a street race. All the other racers seem so much better than me. I try and try but just can't win it.  I keep crashing into poles or houses on tight corners. Then around the 6^th try I remember that Franklin has a special ability to go into "slow time" when driving. Boom, I win that race. Again, this will likely be important skills during a heist. The game is prepping you. School of hard knocks. 

OK, also, for whatever reason playing Tennis was unlocked. Michael's big Sunset Blvd house, surrounded by office buildings, has a tennis court. Wandering over to it, the choice to play is activated. Michael's alcoholic, cheating wife shows up to play. I quickly get my ass handed to me, while she chides me and insults my manhood. Ugh. My vow to get better at tennis happens. And there are other tennis courts around the city where I can play other people to get better on the side. And this isn't for nothing. I looked it up, and playing tennis makes your character all around stronger. Hell yeah. School of (kinda) hard knocks. 

Now that's my kind of hard knock school 😍

As an aside, an encounter happened to me playing Michael last week that just blew my mind. I was tooling around downtown, and saw a question mark in the courtyard of some big office building. I got out the car and walked over to see what was up, and some guy had a marijuana legalization table set up by the fountains. After his speech he gave me a doobie. And when I hit it I realized it was clearly sprinkled with some stronger drug, because ugly aliens suddenly appeared in the area. A ray gatling gun appeared in my hands. Suddenly here I am, in the heart of downtown, being charged by weird aliens as I gunned them down one by one with my Buck Rogers blaster. It blew my mind. This was truly when I knew I loved this game. Anything can happen. School of hard knocks.

They have mental powers. I have a Sci Fi
gatling gun. I like my odds.

But yeah, the improvement of mechanics and physics as you go along is something I always loved in games.  The Elder Scrolls seems to have lost that, but I remember loving it when it was present in Morrowind and Oblivion. But it is so obvious in GTA5. I can actually feel myself getting better as I do things. Yeah, the feeling has won me over. 

So Michael's old geek buddy Lester has a jewelry store heist in mind. We staked out the Rodeo Drive jewelry store and everything so far. But before the mission I think I need to maybe put a few more hours into practice to get prepared for the big time. More driving around the city. More time in the shooting range. And of course, more tennis and jogging. For the job. And of course to be able to beat my nagging, ball busting adulterous wife at tennis, and to win a race against that mouthy jogging bitch down by the beach. School of hard...well, you get the point. 

I predict I will be playing the campaign mode for a long time to come. Hell, I'll probably mostly be jogging and playing tennis around the city for the next month. Just driving around there are always nice things to look at as you level up your skill set..

And testosterone level

Cheers

Player Appreciation and Beyond

 

(note: for most of my gaming life my groups were made up of friends I already had. This post is about experiences with mostly strangers that made up a new group)

I've probably mentioned in a lot of my posts over the years that my main pet peeve as a GM was to feel like running a game was a job that didn't pay. It has been a few years since I actually felt that way. But during my 10 years run for a group in Santa Monica (my first group that was mostly made up of strangers) from around 2008 to 2018 I felt like that fairly often. Now, it's not a TOTAL buzzkill. Sometimes it was even fun. At first. Kind of "pretend player vs. DM." One of the long-time players was a guy we called The Power Game man. A big white South African guy, he would create a character that seemed interesting and layered, and you would soon realize he was just min-maxing. Using stats, race, and class in combination to create especially powerful characters. 

Now on the face of it that isn't so bad. That is kind of baked into current D&D.  Lots of players do it, and it's part of their process. It's part of their fun. But where I get frustrated is when that kind of play treads on not just the other players fun, but especially mine. A couple of these "power game types" came along during that group's existence. And don't get me started on our long-time host then, who was not just a min maxer to a degree, but also one of these guys who liked to live vicariously through his characters getting laid and seemed to think I was his PC's pimp. So while Power Game Man was busy treating every NPC as an enemy (a power gamer trait I have always noticed), the host was always trying to fuck them. 

Look Andy, I'm not going to role-play the
process out for you; just roll your charisma
and we'll leave it at that...

As a DM you are in a unique situation where you have the power to pretty much come up with a sneaky way to kill any character that bothers you. But I was never like that. I was never an "enemy" DM who was out to get characters. Quite the opposite. I was fair to a fault, even in my earliest childhood games. And the worst players, like Power Game Man and some others, could tell that and use it as an advantage. And Therin is where the worst of my frustrations come in. I don't usually have some well-crafted story written up, or a way things have to go in game in order for me to have fun with it. I just try to make it a fair and interesting setting for the characters to romp around in and look for hooks. If I get into a players vs. DM situation, its because I got dragged into it. I'm not really into that mess and I resent it when I feel I've been put in that situation. I just want us to all have fun together.

I may complain (a lot), but I can see silver linings on any cloud. In the case of our old host, though in a lot of ways he was a pain, he was very supportive of my desire to run things other than D&D. It was in large part due to his support that I had successful campaigns of Champions, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, and even Metamorphosis Alpha. I will always be grateful for that.  Power Game man? Naw, I have nothing to be grateful for there. Just an ass in a seat at best. 

But hell, for any player at my table who isn't a total annoying wack job, I'm grateful for them giving their time and putting their gaming fun in my hands. But every now and again I have to appreciate the players who, without even trying, seem to value what you are doing as a DM, and in turn are valuable themselves. 

So I'll mention two "points of light" in my player pools. First is my old Friend "T." She has been in a majority of my gaming groups since the early 90's. She doesn't exactly go out of her way to make my experience better. But her mellow and consistent play style jibes well with my styles. She just...plays her characters. There isn't a power gamer bone in her body. Oh sure, she wants strong characters. But its usually just enjoying the life path that unfolds for her many characters in my campaigns that motivates her. She accepts the good and the bad that happens in the game. She is patient as hell. She gets along with other players. She quietly and steadily just role plays her characters. Even the very infrequent evil character she runs isn't a pain in the ass. But she is the anti-power gamer. In my Night Below campaign years ago her fighter character got a wish from a Deck of Many Things. Of all the things she could have wished for, she wished for an NPC her character fancied to propose marriage to her! Some would call that a wasted wish, but that was her just role-playing her character. Outstanding. T still lives in my old town, but we get to play here and there through Roll20, and she remains reliable and dependable player. 

In most recent times there is "B and L," who I mention a lot in my board game postings. Its thanks to them I got my first group together in my new town. L had no experience with gaming, but B played 1st Ed. in the service (D&D in Afghanistan, ya'll!). They were looking for a DM through the local shops Facebook page, and we hit it off right away. They are not the most outgoing players, they certainly are not there for community theater. But I specialize in somewhat introverted players, and they have come out of that shell pretty well. Quiet players much like "T," but they come up with some interesting moments. L, a woman straight as the day is long, had her female half orc fighter end up in a same sex relationship with an NPC. It was a situation that I certainly did not push, but the fact that it happened organically in the course of the games points very much to a role-playing frame of mind. 

Anyway, not just getting me as a DM and putting a group together, B and L would bring me a six pack of expensive beer or ale every damn game just for me. Even now, a couple of years later when we have a board game day, they bring me the same. Even during the times they are on health kicks and not drinking. I'd be like "look guys, if you aren't even drinking its not right to being me drinks." But deaf ears. Any time they come over they bring it to me. And me being raised on not showing up at a house with empty hands means I very much appreciate it. Its not the main reason we became so close so quickly (I'd take a bullet for them, meanwhile my oldest friends I've known for decades can go take their own bullets). That is mainly because this younger couple sort of adopted me at a time I didn't know anybody in my new town. Had me over for Xmas day only knowing me a brief time, when I would otherwise probably have spent it watching TV and eating Jack in the Box tacos (or maybe in a casino). I have been in a couple of relationships (with non-gamers) since coming to town, but most of my time with B and L is just me and them (and sometimes with some of their local pals). Dinner, drinks, local theater..I love being a third wheel with them. 

Now, you aren't always going to get close to people you met through gaming. As a matter of fact, they are the only case where it happened to me. We are already like brothers and sister. I appreciate the hell out of them in games or otherwise. They are my besties. And as I get older, in gaming or otherwise, I try more and more to focus away from the pain-in-the-ass players (or whoever) of the past, and put more of it, more positivity, into those who truly deserve it. People being positive towards you should make you want to be a better person. For them and for yourself. 

But we should all go through life doing that.

 

Old School vs. New School

Yeah, I was a pretty tried and true 1st edition guy. I can nail down a handful of reasons for spending decades NOT trading up to newer edtions:

1)  it's what I knew for most of my life. 

2)  It was easy not having to memorize the DMG. Just proclaim "rule of cool" and wing everything. 

3)  Who wants to learn a new system?

4) Who wants to buy a bunch more books?

When rejecting 2nd edition back in the day it was easy to just say "its not Gygax." But even then it was more about the 4 points above. 

In the 90's it was easy to stick with 1st ed. 90% of my player pools would be friends who wanted to play but had little experience with it. So no rules lawyers or power gamers. They were happy to play and didn't care about system. Those were the salad days. Long, amazing campaigns of a half dozen genres. 

Then in the 2000's after some years off I entered a period of years where most of my players were seasoned 1st edition wonks. Here I was forced to be more rules wary, or what passed for rules in 1st ed. Forum folk would argue that it's a sound system. But they are wrong (IMHO). Its a mess.  So open to interpretation all it leads to is argy bargy and rules lawyering. So many "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situations. It could get annoying. I mean, all you want to do is present a fun game. That thing right there is not even in the top 3 list of what many 1st edition enthusiasts want out of it. 

Dissatisfaction with old school D&D and the people who were the most into the edition  lead to me running anything but D&D for around three years. And I was happy for it. Some Metamorphosis Alpha, Cthulhu, Runequest, and even Champions filled my gaming needs.  

The group suddenly got an influx in its last year or so, of younger dudes who were 5th edition guys who had zero 1st edition experience. I ran a somewhat short campaign1st ed, using the environs of Tegel Manor. It was some brutal scenarios and a couple characters died, which the newbs were unfamiliar with. Though I think this campaign was some of my best DMing ever, they wanted to play 5th edition. So we decided to give it a go with a more or less noob DM. 

I ran a bard. What struck me the most was how pretty much every character class is a magic user of sorts. I found that very odd. A bard casting thunder wave? But there were things I liked, such as the standard stat modifiers. Not having to have the hit tables handy was nice. But I wasn't really sold. In all honesty it may have been the ability of the DM that kept me at arms length, but at any rate I wasn't ready to make the full move to the new edition. Though there were good points for doing so:

1) straight up rules so you have less arguing about them. 

2) You don't really need all that many books. The PHB and Monster Manual will do (if you don't have power gamers). 

3)  there is a far far far far far far far greater player pool if you want to start a group. And they skew 20-40 years young. And, heaven forbid, lotso grrrrls..)

4)  you can still run games with an old school feel and mentality. Its still D&D if you think of it as that.  D20's. Rangers. Elves. It's D&D as you want it to be, dog. 

Along the lines of this post but also as an aside, a couple of years before leaving LA I had a shot at putting a Champions group together with a lot of people who weren't in my regular group. I love running Supers campaigns so I gave it a real go, but my Grognard attitude about edition got in the way. I wanted to use the old Hero 4th edition, the one that was a sort of all inclusive system for all comic book stuff, not just superheroes. I even had multiple copies.  But the folk I was looking at running for where insistent at using the newest Champions edition, so I demurred on the whole thing. If I had at least tried to learn a newer edition I'd maybe have had some great games of Champs. 

When I moved into my new town the other year, I started an old school rpg meetup and tried to get some 1st edition going. Though the meetup had a lot of folk join it, there just was not that much interest in actually playing it. 

So I got involved in a new campaign at *gasp* a game/comic shop. Dungeon Crawl Classics seemed super popular, but I got involved in some D&D after a few fun games of DCC. The 5th edition DM I played under for a few months was a good guy, and a sort of unofficial community leader, but he was inexperienced. Though fairly talented at running from material he did not prepare all that much (the revamped Keep on the Borderlands), for me the lack of prep shined through. Lots (and I mean lots) of reading the text box descriptions out loud. And actual role play was about zero. In one session the other players would be gung ho wanting to kill all humanoids, then the next would have all this sympathy for them and be anti-killing. It was all fairly annoying, though to be fair many of them were more or less noobs. One guy, a young redneck construction worker who showed up covered in drywall dust, was a jackass at a nuclear level.  When at some point I asked the DM what a particular statue represented and he replied, annoyed,  "it doesn't matter"I knew I was more than ready to get out of the shop and get my own hand picked group going. Something like that should matter to a DM, not to mention a player actually showing some interest. If you are unprepared with the material just make something up that makes sense. You don't have to look at it as art, but put a little work into it. 

So I did with the help of a couple I met through the local game shop Facebook page.  They actually became my besties in general in town, also getting me involved in a local poker group. I got to do a bunch of great games (centered around that old classic The Lichway, which I'll probably talk about in another post) but then the whole virus thing hit.  So I started looking into running games on Roll20, with some helpful remote guidance from  the comic shop DM I mentioned above. 

OK, its all kind of off topic from the title of this post. Getting back to that I guess my point is a transition to a newer edition was fairly easy. I find it enjoyable because I can inject my old school philosophies, such as they are. Noobs at the shop didn't want to hear about it, and maybe they were right. Stop talking and just run new edition games and find my old school nostalgic joy within what I bring to the table as a DM. 

More play injected with my old school style, less reminiscence. Walk the walk.

Cheers