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

Once upon a time in Los Angeles

The “street” I was born on in Venice.

The world seemed like a very different place when I started a humble little underachieving gaming blog around 10 years ago. At least my world. I was working in entertainment industry finance and management (occasionally going to parties and events of household-name celebrity clients), involved in world music and Renaissance Faires, and GMing games for the longest running group I had ever had. I was doing so many things writing a blog was not a priority by any means. But I loved to talk and write about things I loved, and there was this OSR thing going on, and I had a group to run for after years off from the hobby, bringing back great memories for me of early days gaming. Decades of great groups running my favorite games. D&D, Cthulhu, Champions, even some Runequest. It was unfortunate that often times the memories of games of yore were much better than that games of now, but I'm sure that's a common condition of long timers in the hobby. When in doubt, recapture. Bask in nostalgia. 

My attempts back then at getting out of my private groups comfort zone and into the gaming community certainly had its ups and downs, with some especially bad downs. For my own blog writing I decided to go with a sort of Howard Stern "tell it like it is" mentality which didn't serve it all that well (even Stern has stopped being Stern and looks critically now at his own public persona behavior in the past). It was a reactionary style to be sure. But it seemed a way to go since I saw so much negativity in the old school online scene already. I mean, one of the first statements I read about the so called OSR when I looked at it online was "old schoolers are too busy bayoneting their own wounded..." 

That was certainly true.

RPG scene in-infighting. "Shit Wars." It didn't take long for it to make sense (or maybe it never really did). 

 It soon started to feel like I was doing more of some kind of Andy Kaufman-based gaming performance art than just talking about things game related, and I was getting negative attention when in reality I didn't really want much in the way of any kind of attention. Fuck. Just wanted to talk games with other old schoolers. But it was way beyond the simple pleasures more often than not. It often seemed like war. 

 I eventually quit the blog and the seeking of games outside my group, and for RPG's I just settled into running for my occasionally evolving group at our hosts house in the beach community of Santa Monica. You know, the play is the thing. Blogging in the OSR may start out nobly just an urge to share ideas and tell tales, but it easily just turns into a vanity project. And I was just a long time gamer. I had nothing else to be vane about. No big following, no products to shill for beer money.

 Just play the damn games.

Life went on, but I slowly realized I no longer wanted to live in the city I was born in and once loved. It dawned on me that I needed change in my life. Frank Herbert said "the sleeper must awaken."

 I had grown complacent despite being dissatisfied where I lived (a city seemingly on the verge of apocalypse; already in a state of dystopia).   I was a weekend hedonist; a lover of parties, world music, top shelf potables, and intoxicants of a mild variety. A confirmed bachelor and off and on wanna be playboy. A big city lights and beach life party boy, a Ren Faire/Burning Man world citizen semi-hippy.  But I started to crave a slightly less candle-at-both-ends life. A change.

The city I lived in, the neighborhood I was born in and lived in (now a jungle of tent cities on every street corner), the job I had for years, the people I was gaming with. A slowly growing dissatisfaction. So since I was a bachelor with no kids, and had great savings and some property investments, I had the ability to leave that job and spend time casually trying to improve myself and decide what I wanted to do next. 

My old neighborhood where I grew up currently. In the 90's most of the show Baywatch was filmed in a 6 block radius right here. Go watch the old David Lee Roth video California Girls (also filmed here) for what people have in their mind when they are on their way here. 

What I did was move out of Southern California. I decided to change everything. I moved away from the beaches and into a mountain/river community in the Northwest. Now I live in a small city. I now live across the street from a rustic park and a part of the river that is a protected bio-sphere. During fall and winter flocks of geese and ducks come to the area for months and are hanging out everywhere. Sitting in my garden looking at me like "what you gonna do about it?" I love the little bastards. I love living where you get a bit of snow. I love being away from a big crowded city  where it never rains to wash away the hubris and pee smell. 

N

The area is great for biking and hiking, and thanks in large part to that, and finally living somewhere fairly quiet and peaceful where I could get restful sleep (when I left LA I was living on the busiest street in the city), I'd lost around 40 lbs. (weight gained years before after an auto related back injury) over a year without taking any extreme measures . My time in a local gym continued the process of getting much more healthy. Discovering new things like wall climbing and battle ropes has been life changing.  A few months into my gym habit the owners named me member of the month and gave me a plaque, putting me on the wall of fame.  I feel 10 years young. 

 I have to be honest, it took me months to get used to sleeping without traffic and emergency vehicle sirens surrounding my senses. The loudest thing at night is the passenger train on the other side of the river, coming down from the mountain pass, and that is more lulling than loud. In winter as you doze off you can imagine it coming down from the mountains covered in snow. I love it. I don't know that I'll live here the rest of my life, but for now its great. 

a favored fishing or just sitting spot right across the street from my house. Yeah, about a 200 yard stroll away. 
#brandywineriveriscallingme

I got a great job, again, different. Instead of working for private firms enriching a select few Individuals, I was now working for a large not for profit health organization. Another needed change. Doing some good. 

I made some friends in town who helped me get a D&D group together. Yep, 5th edition, another change. Easier to get players for. I'll write soon about my transition to that, though I will always hold on to an old school perspective.

My local besties who helped me get a group going for D&D, and also got me boardgaming like crazy. Talisman, Dead of Winter, etc.  Every D&D game I ran they would bring a sixer of expensive beer for me even when I told them they are way too generous. Man, all players should be more like these fine folks. Players who act like I'm something valuable rather than working for them and catering to their needs as a DM. Talk about change!

Well, then all this virus/helter skelter stuff. Again, big changes. But this seemingly negative change begat new things. I've started playing friends for the first time online with my XBOX Live. But even bigger than that I finally got into Roll D20 and have a great online group to do D&D with during these end of times. A whole new world. Loving it.

In hobbit cottages awaiting a spider attack

But talk about changes In the old school gaming scene. As mentioned my style of blogging lead to some negativity, but there was a ton of negativity online in relation to gaming at the time. But really nothing compared to that of the OSR the last few years. Negativity and argy bargy online? You can have your "OSR shitwars." 

With being settled into a happier and more satisfying life-space I've decided to come back to my old blog to talk about some of these gaming changes in my life. Not that I or anyone else needs it so much, but I was recently inspired to start blogging about my old comic collection just for shits and giggles and I thought what the heck, why not drop in here from time to time to document my changes and ideas in gaming. And if you (or anybody) actually reads this, maybe you'll have some comments about your changes or whatever. I have no desire to sell anything. I have a career and investments to make money in. Though it is nice to share some gaming ideas, my scenarios are for my players and that is all the attention I need from my game prep. But it can be fun to put your gaming ideas out there, if only for yourself. A blog can be a way to get in touch with your own personal gaming id. Moments of reflection.  Do it for yourself. That's my main motivation. So here I am again for however long it is fun to do.

And gaming goes on. 

Cheers,

Mac

Temple Of Demogorgon – 3 Years and still underachieving

As usual, a day late for my own party. Yesterday, Saturday, marked the 3rd anniversary of this most humble, somewhat under the radar and highly underappreciated gaming blog. I’m obviously not keeping a real keen eye on things like that. I’ve never really felt like this was a “vanity blog.” I hardly ever talk about my life outside of games. Having a big, noticeable voice in the online community was never my goal (less than 175 followers after three years is fairly pathetic). I don’t work at all at it, or try to be on a lot of blog rolls. What would even be the point of that? You don’t get paid to blog with under 10,000 readers. You don’t get prestige in any circles that matter for shit in the world at large.

I mean, this is a community that rewards blogs with huge followings because the particular blogger is a skeeve who happens to know some low end sex workers (poor me always having females in my games who were mostly legit actresses and entertainment industry people, professional artists, or successful business women of one kind or another), or made his bones by posting fairly droll commentary of various kinds 3-5 times a day. I don’t constantly post charts and tables (I stopped having time for coming up with that shit when I got out of high school), or focus on corny-ass old school cartoon dungeon mentality that tries to recapture the vibe felt by a 14 year old playing D&D in the late 70’s. I don’t make post after post of “Mr. Nice Guy” gamer fluff that is about as interesting as watching flies fuck. I don’t laser focus on any one thing, like games about Mars or Cimmeria. I don’t try to be especially wacky, refined, literary, or insightful.

This is just a dude who was out of gaming completely for almost a decade, and fell ass backwards into a host who was willing to help put a regular group together and lived fairly close to me and was looking for a 1st edition DM. Luckily we found some folk who were (mostly) not hopeless, catpiss-smelling nons or disturbing geektards. It was a perfect storm that swept me up into putting hours of precious time back into this hobby. And some of that time went into this blog. Yeah, it’s weird, because before that I had zero interest in blogging.

But I sometimes do tend to over think things, and starting this blog may have been an offshoot of that. It’s mostly because I actually enjoy writing down my thoughts, but I really felt I had a lot to say, and had a lot of unique situations from back in the day to talk about. My early, often shitty experiences as a youngster playing in a filthy game shop full of older weirdo’s; girlfriends who played in campaigns (once again non-skanks, sorry); friendships gained and lost. Growing up on onward all while gaming on the sidelines of a fairly full, non-nerd life.

A couple of times doing the blog felt like it was overshadowing the games, especially with my less than satisfactory exploits trying to get involved in the local gaming community outside my comfort zone of a regular group of hand-picked non-cretins. But earlier this year I had an epiphany and decided my focus would be on playing and not writing about playing. That is what it should be about, no? Enjoy the fruits more than you study their roots. Having a bunch of people read your words is great, but having 6 people in front of you hanging on your words and laughing, moaning, bitching, begging, cursing, and yelling is priceless.

So this last year big changes at work and in my career, a couple of somewhat regular relationships including one at work (Sam Adams might tell you that is NOT always a good decision) and some other good life things gave me less time to post. It comes and goes of course, and through the holidays up to right now I’ve had more freedom to post more often. But the fact is I’ll probably post less again. I’m going to try and struggle through a few Runequest games (one game and I already want to houserule half the shit) so I’ll want to post on that a bit just because it’s new. And hopefully I’ll get some Call of Cthulhu games going, and I know from past experience that will be worth posting about. But again, I want the actual gaming to be more important than reading my own thoughts and sharing them with a small, closed community.

So going into another year of this, and who knows how far it will go. Another three years? That’s a long time when you are getting into middle-age. Then again, my doctor tells me because of my outstanding Scottish genetics I could get back close to high school shape in a year if I skipped a few beers and got back on my mountain bike on weekends. Miracles can happen. In two years I could be married, have kids, working harder to make even more money. Who knows. I still want a beach house and a super-model as mother to my future children. Weirder things have happened. Just look at the very existence of an OSR. Who would have thought 30 years ago that this was a possibility.

Thanks for your support and best of luck in the new year!