Time Passages

Over at Grognardia this week, James M. blogged about keeping track of time in his classic D&D games for Dwimmermount. As James is trying to evoke the earliest form of play, he goes with all the big tropes, from 10 foot poles to hirelings and henchmen. The very much wargame inspired methods of time tracking in OD&D include specific periods of time that it takes to explore a hex in the wilderness, or explore a dungeon level.

I scratch my head when I think about why anyone would need anything but their own perceptions. OK, maybe I am in tune with my long-time gameworld more than many others, but I think anyone can figure out that “OK, it has been a couple of hours so it’s midnight now”. You know, if a thief picks a lock then it probably took just a minute. If he fails and needs a second roll, then have an hour go by. I think that everyone should be able to judge the time passages no sweat, and the only major consideration is how long the players want to set up camp for the night.

Dungeon exploring may be more difficult than land travel. I mean, everyone pretty much knows a man can walk 20-30 miles in a day, and a horse at a steady pace might take you 50-60. But those original editions, again, go the wargame inspired route of things taking specific periods of time. The book might tell you that it takes a half hour to search a 10’ section of wall for a secret door, or that searching a large chamber takes so many hours. But why the need for such precision? I know we ultimately have to know a day goes by so Joe Fighter can get a hit point back (give me a break, most PC’s have fairly cheap access to clerics and potions, so what fighter lays around for two weeks trying to heal those 14 points?). Yawn. Let’s face it, precision is not always fun (why I was not a big wargame fan).

Take it from me, 120 years of player continuity has gone by in my game world. Tracking time is no big deal. Have a calendar, have a few holidays, and you are set. Do it all in your head. Make a slightly imprecise decision. You’ll have more time for the stuff that is really fun!

Let me admit now that I do take time seriously in the game. Having a little bit of perception of it goes a long way in bringing color to your world. You don’t need a chart or a table, you can figure out the basics of “little time,” the day to day activities of the players in your head. If a player complains because it suddenly matters, then retcon things slightly to make up for it. No biggie.

Much to the chagrin of some of my players over the years, I love to have time go by. It seems more real, and it adds a lot of gravitas to your world. In between campaigns, I like characters to be doing something else for a few months here and there. Settle down a bit, open a business. No end game there though, when the call of adventure goes down, they get sucked back in.

I’m notorious for having years go by in my games when a group ends. Whether some of the same people or almost all new, I’ve had maybe 6 or 7 major gaming groups since around 1990. If it has been a year or so since I ran a campaign, I like to have anywhere from 1-3 years go by in the game world. Gives me a sense of cosmic motion. In this new campaign of mine, started several years since my last active gaming period, I went ahead and had five solid years go by. Yep, my game world is getting old (hence, 120 years of character continuity). It just feels like the world has more weight if I do it this way. Hopefully this new group will last a year or two though. I’m not in a hurry to have another fiver go by.

The game that doubled in price overnight

Earlier this year when I agreed to do A Knights of the Old Republic game in the Star Wars Saga game, I picked up the core rules, and of course the KOTOR campaign guide. Both were around 40 bucks, and I managed to get both for close to 30 on Ebay in great shape.

I heard rumors a week or so ago online about how the KOTOR book was suddenly super-rare. A couple of the players at my first game Sunday mentioned it as well. I just looked on Amazon, and it's going for nearly 100 bucks! Dang.

What would cause an RPG supplement to go critical so fast? I dunno, but it's popularity may be helped by the fact that the XBOX game from years ago is still popular. I considered getting this sourcebook a year ago anyway, because I loved the video game so much and really loved the setting.

What other game books have shot up in price so fast? I got 60 bucks for my 70's copy of Bunnies and Burrows a couple of year ago, and that was almost 30 years after it went out of print.

Inferno - "Go to hell!"

Written by Geoffry O. Dale and released by Judges Guild in 1980, this was one of my favorite modules I hardly ever used. Described on the back cover as an adventure you can use if a high level wizard tells you to "go to hell" or a cleric put a geas on you to steal a demon lord's magic item, this was an an area that only high level characters should tread.

On it's own, the module is a great read, full of the type of atmosphere that Dante's hell tends to conjure up. Just like in The Divine Comedy, you start out in a dark, lonely forest. Although there are no set encounters here, you are filled with a sense of dread and terror. Wandering down the trail, you will eventually find yourself at the gates of hell, and that is where the fun begins.

There is no great narrative, and the areas and encounters you have can be placed in front of the players in any order you choose. I always thought of it as more a sourcebook than an actual linear adventure. Besides various demon lords, you can meet a host of demon and devil servants, undead, and lost souls. Tiamet, Queen of evil dragons, has a cave lair in hell, and it is chock full of glorious treasures and artifacts. You can sail down the river Styx with the boatman, gazing with horror upon the polluted and foul water of the river, and the atrocities and suffering that goes on along it's putrid banks.

I never really had a place for this in my regular game world, but I did use it for a mini-campaign I was running in the City State of the Invincible Overlord (a rare series of sessions I ran with characters starting at 10th level). But a good indication of how much I loved a module in my teens and in my 20's was how long it stayed in my bathroom magazine rack. It was there for almost a decade!

I Ebayed this book several years ago during one of my game materials purges, and it is one of the game books I wish I had again to give it another read. Sure, like a lot of Judges Guild items any DM with decades of experience should be able to come up with a similar adventure setting off the top of their head that would suffice. Still, who needs to come up with an adventure they will never run? I just want to have another read of it to bring back some great old memories of an old school module I wish I had the chance to get more use from. It was really one of my faves.

“15 minute adventuring day”

Grognardia James blogged this week about the “15 minute adventuring day.” In a nutshell, it’s a term that refers to a party of dungeon delvers who leave the confines of the labyrinth very regularly (every day it seems in Dwimmermount) to purchase supplies, heal, and regain used spells.

James is running an old school style game, with a megadungeon as the focus, and a town and city somewhat close by for said supply runs. Dungeon, supply shop, temple, and tavern. There you have it. You don’t need much more than that for the characters world in this type of O.G. game. Not a knock at Grognardia, of course (my occasional attempts at humorous pokes at James usually fall flat). James is an important blogger of the old school, and he should be involved in running something similar to the ideas he writes about.

Personally, I abandoned frequent dungeon crawls in my decades-old game world sometime in the 80’s. Growing up on comics probably had a lot to do with my coming up with lots of outdoor and city situations. A fight in a crowded city street, or back alley of temple row, or even a rooftop just seems so much more fun and cool than a claw-sword-shield slugfest in a corridor underground.

I started my current campaign planning for the party to travel with a merchant caravan for awhile, until they reached a certain dungeon. I do want that old school dungeon experience again. But the players have found so much to do on the trip, and I had so many ideas for outdoor encounters and events, it has been around 16 games and they are still a couple of sesson away from the dungeon. I originally planned to have them at the dungeon doors in 3 or 4 games.

Micromanaging supplies has not really come up. The party is travelling with a merchant caravan through mostly populated areas. I just tell the players to throw some coin at meals and drinks here and there. The closest we have come to equipment management was a player asking me at the last game if he should be keeping track of arrows or not. I just told him he had about half a dozen left, and to buy a new quiver at the next town. There’s yer supply management right there. It’s also good to remind players that it is no fun getting money if you don’t track it and spend it. Small potatoes should be in the players hand. I’ll do some of the financial analysis when they want to buy a ship or a house or something.

Now the issue of regaining spells has come up in the last few games. A player important to the main quest has been missing for three games, so I just did a bunch of little outdoor/abandoned mine combat and exploration encounters to eat up those games until she came back. By the end of the second game, the spellcaster had used up all her good spells. The player complained a lot about needing to rest and regain, but the party was in a mine under an unstable hill (with an earth elemental going berserk in a cavern there) and had to keep moving. It was nice to have a game where the spellcaster (also a fighter) could do something besides cast the same three spells as she does every fight.

Getting low on spells and resources should not be a bad thing. Parties running off every few hours of game time and travelling two or three days to get a bed to heal and pray in is just tedious and monotonous to me. I don’t want that for my precious game time.

If it is a “mega-dungeon,” why not have some resources in there? Empty rooms to rest in, a nearby water source (the most important of resources, but probably the least kept track of or worried about), and maybe a non-hostile mini-temple with a cleric for healing (for a modest fee, of course). Anything but this constant cycle of dungeon – town – dungeon – repeat. To me that just seems to either have a weird flow, or no flow at all.

In a campaign I ran years ago, I had the party shipwrecked on the Isle of Dread. Talk about supply management challenges! Sure, there were natives to trade with, but the guys with non-magical armor and weapons had to face the fact that arms maintenance was a no-go. A couple of fights with some unfriendly cat-people and the odd T. Rex, and the paladin had his plate mail hanging in parts. Chainmail and leather quickly got tore up, and in a matter of weeks characters were starting to look like they had “gone native.” I loved that so much I want to do it again.

I don’t want to say how somebody should run their game, but I just don’t think any game should rely too much on players constantly having to retreat to a safe zone. Some great games have players at the end of their resources, and at their wits end. That is one way dramatic, memorable adventures can be mademade.

Basing NPC villains on characters from other media

Comments in one of Grognardia James posts this week had me pondering my “rip-offs” of personalities for use in my own games. Having grown up as a comic freak, it was only natural that colorful villains would be an important part of many of my D&D games. Characters who gained arch-enemies would often get the rare treat of battling it out with bad guys in a tavern, back alley, temple, or city street instead of the usual forest or dungeon chamber.

I created a multitude of unique NPC’s, but for bad guys I would occasionally base them around other personalities from other media.

In the 80’s I based an entire group of baddies on an 80’s X-Men assassin group called “The Marauders.” The Marauders in the comic had attacked NYC’s sewer mutants, pretty much wiping them out. So my homage to this was “The Children of Trouble,” a group of powerful high level, magic-item wielding bad guys who were created by an evil rival kingdom in response to the good kingdom’s access to the services of the player character party and to generally be engines of chaos in foreign lands. There was a high level monk, assassin, gladiator, and cleric in the “Children,” and most memorably also a +5 iron spear-wielding ogre who wore gauntlets of giant strength. When the ogre fought characters in the crowded streets, his weapon would slay bystanders and knock bricks from buildings when it missed the players. The player party and the bad guy group had several memorable combat encounters over that campaign, including one on the city streets when The Children of Trouble were instructed to massacre elves that lived in the city.

One of my regular players, Alan, had read those X-Men comics and was fairly snarky about the fact that I had based something on it (even though, in fact, it was the idea of the group more than the characters that I used). But what the hell, the other players loved having combats that came off like something out of a comic book, rather than the usual sword and shield dungeon slug fests.

One of my favorite baddy groups, also of the 80s’ got based on the three villains from Superman 2. I turned general Zod and his two cronies into a small party of evil adventurer’s who were hired to steal a magical portrait, headquartering in a dungeon that the party had to go into to fight them. “Zod” was a high level thief, a kinky lady sorceress with a magical, mind-controlled length of rope that could attack, and a big dumb, mute fighter with a 18/00 strength. All had variations of black leather armor. The female, Desmadonna, actually managed to escape getting killed and showed up for many years from time to time. Eventually she even became queen (in a memorable early 90’s game) of a small, evil-controlled pleasure town known as the “Pleasure Dome” out in the desert. I still have the great, sexy figure I used for her, and hope to have her show up again some day soon.

This evil bad guy homage was actually very well received by the players, and they especially loved Desmadonna (maybe that was how she escaped alive).

I can’t think of any such homages from the later 90’s, or from my recent return to gaming, but you never know what I might have subconsciously done. I think it is just fine to base ideas on the ideas of others (The American Way?), as long as it makes for colorful, memorable characters and fun gaming, why the hell not?

Bomb, Will Ferrell, bomb...

The other week I posted about my remorse at a joke remake of the beloved childhood show that introduced me to my first pocket universe, and to a little blonde, knife-wielding dolly named "Holly" (who was my age when the show was on air and was maybe my first crush).

Written by some modern Sci Fi greats (and even Mr. Chekov got a writing cred), the show was years ahead of it's time (despite the cheesy FX).

Well, revenge is sweet. Unlike most of his mindless drek (I found Will funny on SNL, but not really anywhere else) movies, LOTL bombed big time. As of today, it has yet to scrape the 40 million mark. It cost 120 million to make. What can I say but "Ha ha ha ho ho ho hee hee hee."

The sad part is that now I am maybe not going to see a true homage to the great show in my lifetime. But who knows? After Ang Lee Hulk film bombed, they did another (somewhat better)one a few years later. So I will hold out hope. Maybe Dreamworks can come along and save this classic property.

My Gross Introduction to D&D

At around 14 years old I was introduced to D&D by a school mate who lived on the Venice Canals, a neighborhood I was born and grew up in. This kid, Rod Seagal, was a gangly, long-haired geek with a love of spitting, and using a long piece of bamboo to kill butterflies in the empty lot next to his apartment. Rod didn’t use rules, and he probably didn’t really know them. I’m sure he played once or twice in somebody’s game, and just used memories of that to run games. He had dice and a handful of badly painted figures, and just made up what you needed to hit, and how much damage things did. The gaming sucked. Characters usually died according to his perverted whims. The first sexual thing that I recall in any game was when I had a character look at a portrait of a Type 5 demon (the lady snake with 6 arms), and the demon came out of the painting and raped me before killing me. “She got some pleasure from you before you die” I think was the exact quote. Jeez. At 14 years old, this guy would most likely end up as a serial killer.

Rod was a really obnoxious person to the degree that I think I was his only friend at the time. He did have some sort of fat, mongoloid dude as a lackey, a boy who seemed to have the same fascination with loogies as Rod did. These guys actually had spit fights in the back alley after eating chocolate. I made it clear that if anything got on me both would get the shit kicked out of them, and as a big athletic kid I was prepared to unleash hell. Rod sometimes threatened me with a spit ball, but I think what kept him from doing it outside of the fear of a beating, was that he liked to run the games for me instead of his gross henchman because I had a certain degree of intelligence and imagination.

Rod’s mom was a single lady who was a secretary or something, and she was tall and blond. I remember catching glimpses of her and wondering how such a pretty lady could give birth to a weird goblin like Rod. At some point Rod had a battery powered water pick, and came into his room and shot me with it. It wasn’t a loogie, but I was still pissed, and after knocking him down and trashing his room a bit mom banned me from the house.

That was it for hanging out with Rod, but that was good for my gaming. Not long later I discovered the three booklets at Chess and Games in West L.A. I was so excited when I saw them. They were already mythical to me. I knew of them when I was hanging out with Rod, but had yet to see them. There they were, right there on a back shelf. Thus, my true D&D education had begun. Soon I would be a regular amongst the sarcastic dorks at Aero Hobbies (an epic tale for another post) in Santa Monica, really learning how to play this game.

Some years later, I ran into Rod after school on the Venice High campus. He didn’t go to Venice, he went to a “special” high school somewhere and was just hanging out there with a couple of other losers. I think they were having a spit fight (I guess you never lose your love for that activity). The DM’s guide had come out, and I had one stashed in my pack. I went up to him and said something to the affect of “hey you fucking dork, look! There are actual rules! You made that shit up as you went along.” Rod said something snarky, and I threatened to beat his ass and he took off. I never saw him again.

So my introduction to the game was shaky and a little weird, but it did set me on the road to a life time of gaming fun. Rod, wherever you are, thanks for introducing me to the game. You weird freak.