Defining an age: “The Age of Dungeons”

When I first began my long running game world (that is, came up with a name for the land my first dungeon and nearby tavern were located in) that I still use for my ongoing AD&D campaigns, I was around 13 or 14. At that time I was still using White Box, plus had only recently acquired Greyhawk and Blackmoor. Dungeon crawling was still the focus of my games, just like everybody else.

Fast forward around 30 years or so, and I’m still running games in that world, “Acheron” (Yeah, Acheron is the type of name for a world that a kid would come up with alright). But the “time of dungeons” has long past. Some 120 years or so had passed in my game world since those first “tavern n’ a dungeon” games, and the types of adventures had changed.

As my main city, Tanmoor, become more detailed and more adventures took place there, it became the place where most things happened. The city was about to enter a time of Renaissance. Characters went up in level and became famous, hobnobbing with the royalty and other famous personages and NPC’s that were around. There were quests, errands, and sometimes even wars that characters took part in, almost all of it in one way or another connected to Tanmoor and the crown. I didn’t really mean to go the “high adventure” route that newer editions of D&D was shooting for. It’s just that characters being more heroic and epic in scope, beyond dungeon crawls, had become more appealing to me.

In many ways I was running these campaigns like superhero games, with characters swiftly going from 1st level noobs to major, world altering adventurers. As I’ve said before, I think that a combination of girls being in my games in the past, plus my comic book collecting background and love of superhero level antics, led away from the maiming and crippling death dungeons and into a world or more derring-do.

So, as it turns out I’m going to be running a bit of OD&D soon. Not just at the “Minicon” event next month, but it looks like I’ll be getting some practice with it tomorrow night. We need an alternate with Ben still out of town (and the 1st ed. game right now needs it’s resident MU), and Mutant Future is supposed to be for when Terry can’t make it on game night. At the last game Terry and Paul were interested in my tales of good ol’ White Box D&D, so I’m going to try out a session of nice simple “Elmer Fuddist” D&D on them.

Although I really only need a village and a nearby dungeon, I gave some thought to the world this would take place in, and decided to make it Acheron, my long running game world, but set about 200 years in the past of the current time period in games. That would put the new OD&D setting at about 70 years prior to my first Acheron sessions as a kid when I first got D&D. As it turns out, this is pretty perfect. As a kid all we did were dungeons. Nice, nonsensical “mythic underworlds” that PC’s trudged through Fudd-style. So I started to think of a time period when there were more weird dungeons in Acheron. A time when the lands were strewn with them. Money grubbing wannabe adventurers in the lands had their choice of deathtrap dungeons to delve into. That was D&Ding to us when we were kids, so what better time period than the period of my first games?

The current decades are known as a time of great heroes and epic adventures, and I have often described to my players a time period 500-600 years ago that was another epic time, when many of the current gods of my world were still mortal warriors and magic-users. So I decided that the time about 200 years ago was sandwiched in between these more heroic times, and itself was known as “The Age of Dungeons.” Rather than heroic figures, adventurers were more born of a time of greed and lust, when tales of great treasures and glorious magic seeped out of the mythic underworld places. The sons and daughters of farmers, blacksmiths, and even scholars set out with dreams of schlepping out cartloads of gold from the underplaces. Not all of them returned, but enough did to inspire others to delve.

Don’t get me wrong, every now and again in my games there have been and still are weirdo dungeons. They are just rare. Hell, when I started my current group and the current 1st ed Campaign almost two years ago, the whole plan was to get them up a level or two and get them to a dungeon. But, typically, things went to a more epic, politically relevant direction and they ended up in The Night Below setting. Still there. But there are a couple of other dungeons I have that are a permanent fixture In the city of Tanmoor, and will be encountered again no doubt. Both of these city dungeons are based on old Flying Buffalo Tunnels and Trolls solo adventures; Mirror World (a mirror with a dungeon in it), and Naked Doom – not so much a magical dungeon like Mirror World, but a sort of dungeon obstacle course (that you of course start out naked in). But like I said, visits to these places were rare.

Regardless of recent and distant past, I seem to be going through a “dungeon phase” like I haven’t since I was pretty much a kid. I’m gonna ride this pony while I can.

Next: The Economy of the Dungeon Age

Embracing my inner Elmer Fuddist

I recently posted about my views on old school “Elmer Fudd” D&D. You know, poor stated dillhole characters and meanie, sadistic dungeon masters. OK, I wasn’t really ranting or anything. But that kind of pre-1st ed. retro OD&D play just seemed like it was caveman stuff as a gamer, and wasn’t something I really wanted to revisit in any major way. My D&D had long since gone from low fantasy to high fantasy (although as far as reading fiction I still preferred Lankhmar and Cimmeria over Middle Earth). Characters in my ongoing game world became more like champions hanging tough in the face of dangers and horrors, rather than the pathetic, bumbling Fudd’s they were when I started with the little brown books as a kid.

Sometime last fall I had signed up to do an OD&D session, the “White Box” plus Greyhawk, at a monthly game day thing. I don’t really know why I did, but maybe I just wanted to see who would show up for that at an event that more current Pathfinder type games were going on. And hell, I usually practically phone-in my 1st edition games for my ongoing group, so why not try a session of something really easy? Anyway, those plans fell through due to other obligations, and who knows if anybody would have shown interest anyway.

Well, some Southern California dudes in the online gamer community have been putting on a small yearly game day gathering in Anaheim that they are calling “Minicon,” and I threw my hat in the ring to do some OD&D next month. Why not my beloved 1st ed? Well, maybe mostly because I have house ruled the hell out of my AD&D, and I just have a fear of seasoned gamers not being down with my changes for one reason or another. These would be guys who know the game by the book much better than me, and I find that intimidating. I haven’t exactly made a lifelong study of the DM’s Guide or anything. Hell, I probably started most of my house rules long ago because I was too lazy to look some things up.

Anyhoo, my player list for that evening session in August filled up almost right away, so there is no real turning back now. But never fear, despite the irritating lack of any real cohesive combat/movement rules in the White box and Greyhawk, everything else about it is so easy peasy, so I can focus on making the dungeon crawl interesting. I’ll get three times as much actual gaming in with OD&D compared to a typical 1st edition session where so much character crap comes into it, some nights you barely get a combat in. More often than not I try to run it like some weird, greek psycho-drama.

I’m really starting to look forward to a barebones, truly old school session just to see how it turns out.

And I may even get a practice session in. Last night while waiting on Andy’s patio who was running a bit late, I talked to Paul and Terry about the White Box and Greyhaw that I happened to have on me at the time, and spoke on the differences between it and 1st ed. They didn’t know much about those brown books (Terry had some youthful experience with one of the basic box sets from the 80’s, and Paul is pretty new to tabletop altogether), and seemed enchanted by the idea of taking simple, hubris-free characters right into a dungeon grind with little set-up and fanfare. So, with a couple players possibly missing the next couple of weeks, next session may just have to be a quick dungeon delve using the notes I’ve prepared so far for the session next month.

And I’m going to approach it in a Fuddist fashion. OK, I’m not huge on deathtraps (and exploding cigars). That’s for Edgar Allen Poe stories and episodes of the old cheesy Batman TV series. But I’m going to make the characters be rolled with 3d6 in order (mostly), and I’m going to take an “odds are against them” attitude with the other stuff in the dungeon. I’m going to have a humiliating surprise or two in store at the lower levels. Who knows, maybe after decades of coddling the character who enter my world like precious little children, I’ll teach myself a lesson and become a jerk DM again like all of us old schoolers started out. As you may have gathered from some of my previous posts about my ongoing AD&D, I obviously need to give my players a serious bitch-smack. This may be the venue to get back on that road. “Be vewy vewy quite, I’m hunting pwayer characters. - hnn heh heh heh heh heh.”

Vasen: The best Music for your game

Last week some friends of my put on a big folk music camp, Golden Toad Music Camp. Several days in the beautiful hills and woods outside of the town of Occidental in northern California (not far from famous Bodega Bay, where they filmed Hitchcock’s The Birds). Lots of my best friends from two decades of California Ren Faires were there as teachers, organizers, and kitchen staff. I worked an easy gig 4 hours a day at the middle eastern themed teahouse in the main lodge.

It was my first such camp, and I loved it. Warms days and cool nights, excellent meals in the huge main lodge, and drinking keg after keg of Sierra Nevada Ale with my buddies and lots of very hot hippy girls.

Teaching some workshops, and doing a Saturday night concert under the stars among the trees, was the popular Swedish folk group Vasen. They were three very funny dudes (think of them as slightly less talky, Swedish versions of the guys from Flight of the Conchords). How my friends got them to do this (I think they are touring the West Coast anyway right now) I’ll never know, but I’m glad they did.

They did a concert on the front lawn in front of the main lodge (area shown in photo above), right there among the tall, dark trees and beneath a bright and swiftly rising full moon. It blew me away. The setting was just incredible – majestic yet still very intimate, with around 150 people in attendance on the lawn and crowding on the balconies of the lodge. It was like being in some faraway place.

Although not on my mind at all times, it was hard not to think of gaming in this setting at certain moments. It’s not like when I was in my 20’s and seeing pathways to dungeons in every hiking area or natural setting I visited. Sure, there was some of that. But among the trees and under the moon in that beautiful setting, hearing that great music, was just so damn inspiring.

Vasen is going to be my main game music of choice. Not for dungeons and caverns of course, but for town, tavern, and green this is what I will DJ for my D&D. Very much the vibe of the Irish tunes you know from stuff, but with an added layer of ancient sophistication. That Nickleharpa that Olov plays is amazing, and lends a sort of special old time Euro flavor to the tunes. Sometimes there are some contemporary sounds, but almost all of it will set the perfect mood for your scenarios when players are above ground in the game.

You might find some CD’s on Ebay, but here are links to their Myspace and personal website where you can sample and buy music. “Vasen Street” is my bottom line favorite by the boys, but they have so much music out there there is plenty to enjoy. Check them out and let me know what you think.

Getting out into the woods for a week was an amazing feeling for me. Never taking more than a long weekend for vacation in the last few years, it did my heart some good. I feel like the Grinch, you know, when his heart got all big and shit? The presence of these three Swedish, dorky Vasen guys really helped me with that. When tall Olov came looking for beer one night, I fell all over myself like I was in the presence of some huge celebrity. I felt so generous of spirit that I actually started referring to my buddies out there as “hippies” instead of “dirty hippies.”

cut n' paste some of these Youtube clips.

The first is my favorite tune “Vasen Street”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWorsJwzycw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq-d2CXZH_s&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-3rWIQS4yw&feature=related

Game Immersion is not a thespian exercise

After a week of vacation at a big hippy music camp in Northern California, I had some game related things based on that I wanted to talk about this week. I’ll get to that later this week, but I want to comment on a weekend post James made over at Grognardia that kind of got my goat when I was relaxing last night with a couple of ales after my long 8-hour drive back to LA.

In a post about dungeon blocks, James makes mention of how he doesn’t really go for “immersive” game play, and that it is somehow some kind of thespian stunt. He claims to have a middle ground, but to me it sounds in this post (and others that he has made) that his players don’t come to really play D&D. It sounds like something James wants to be going on while they socialize. I guess it’s not wrong, but it sure is great D&D when the players come with passion for the game.

I personally don’t consider acting as being a part of immersion. Sure, I happen to have a certain degree of stage improv experience, and it has served me well when presenting an important or interesting NPC. Do I do voices? Hell no, but I do try to have a growly voice for things like orcs, and a calm voice for elf types. I try to do a soft voice for women. But shit, that ain’t acting. Not all (maybe not many) DM’s are even comfortable presenting a character in this way, but I can do it, and having a little charisma doesn’t hurt.

But that is not immersion. Immersion is the DM being in touch with his game world, NPC’s, and the players characters. The DM must be a part of the world and it’s presentation, otherwise he is just the banker in Monopoly. And what helps me is that I use the power of my imagination to get in a mind set where all this stuff is real.

Yeah, I know it’s a damn game and we have to break character constantly. But to feel it and pretend to believe in the world and the characters is a great skill to have. In a little place in my mind and my heart this world is really happening. That is the power of imagination. Do you read a good fictional story constantly reminding yourself that the story never happened? No, you let yourself believe it in it’s own context. The same with a good game that you can feel in your heart, and not just in your head at what is basically just a snacking and shooting the shit session.

All games have some outside chatter and joking, but ultimately that takes away from the game. You don’t have to sit there and act in character or anything, but I think focusing on a game is the best way to get the most out of it. Too much and my players complain. So I kind of make it my job to help “flow” by getting as much focus on the action at hand. We play for three hours on a weeknight twice month, so I do my best to give as much of the game as I can for my players. That is what they are there for. If I can immerse them a bit, all the better.

100 Posts, ya'll!

Holy cow, I only noticed this weekend that I hit 100 posts! Hurray for me!

Really, no big deal. Anybody can do a bunch of posts. But in the last several months or so I have tried only to post when I actually had something to say or get off my chest (besides a little bragging here and there about fun sessions). When I started the blog, I was just aping James at Grognardia and others, writing about old game products I liked and such, and I have to admit it wasn’t very inspiring for me or anybody else. So I got a bit more real. I posted about some old bad game experiences of my childhood and my teens and onward. It was a bit cathartic really, so before long I decided that I would continue letting off some steam by bitching about my games, my players, and my own possible short comings when it came to my gaming. Oh, and mentioning the fun here and there as well.

Thanks to all of you smart and creative gamers who have taken a look at my crazy posts, and for commenting in the positive and the negative. We are all a part of this semi-underground creative culture of imagining, and we enjoy this collective experience.

I’m off for a week’s vacation starting tomorrow, going north of San Francisco to work at a big world music camp some friends of mine are putting on. A lot of my best friends are even teachers at this thing. It’s gonna be a blast, and I’m going to work on some other types of instruments besides my Highland Bagpipes (irish bodhran drum, bongos, and middle-eastern belly dancer music ensemble). Take a peek at the website for the camp if you are interested in such things. Maybe see you there next year!

Have a great start to your summer!

Elmer Fuddism in Dungeons and Dragons

Yep, it’s a term I have proudly invented for a certain kind of D&D. It’s the kind a whole passel of us somewhat older folk experienced when we first got into the game. Characters rolled up with 3D6 in order, an early form of gameplay that was about exploding chests, worms that lived in doors who ate your brain if you put your ear up to it (in a game that practically demand you put your head up the parasite infested wood), and screwjob rust monsters, and a dungeon master who delighted in your characters pain made real by your own personal humiliation when you realize the DM thinks he’s smarter than you because you just didn’t check that section of wall thoroughly enough.

The characters, often made subpar physically compared to even local farmers and shopkeepers because of the unyielding numbers brought up by 3D6, where like some dark ages Elmer Fudd (“kill the wabbit!”). Your character stumbled into the dungeon, with the DM playing Bugs Bunny with an exploding cigar in hand.

Concepts like resurrection, reincarnation, and wishes just implied that characters should die early and often in the game, and if the person being DM had any asshole qualities at all, those would surely come out in their style. DM’ing was a great way for even the most dorky 70’s/80’s version of Napoleon Dynamite to live out his God complex.

Although I tired of that type of gameplay not too late into my teens, I’m sure “push the button and die horribly” gaming was still going on (and many other non-D&D genre games that were coming out, like Paranoia, seemed to have come out of that classic D&D mode.). I stopped hanging out at Aero Hobbies because of the older creeps and the sucky gaming, and I really wasn’t somebody who would go to conventions (if anything to avoid the smell – they were pretty bad in the 80’s) anymore than for a few hours once in a very blue moon. As I said in my last post, my style in the 80’s and beyond evolved mostly because of the presence of girls and newbies to gaming into a softer, gentler DM.

Poking around the online game community in the last couple of years, I have noticed that there are still a lot of gamers who prefer “Fuddism.” Yep, do up your character with 3D6, laugh at how retarded or weak or in ill - health they are, and march him into the labyrinth and laugh at how easily he dies. Some even suggest that having shitty stats promotes good role-play!

Look, we all love Conan or Tarzan or John Carter of Mars or whoever, but we all know that these aren’t the powerhouses we are going to get with any system of stat rolling. But if you are anything like me, when/if you sit down as a player, your hope is to have a couple of stats above average and nothing under a 9. Do lower stats happen in my game? Sure, even 4D6 pick best 3 can lead to unhappy results. But generally you get a guy who even at 1st level can best the local stable hand in either physical prowess or the brains department. Hey, to have a paladin or a monk or whatever you still need to get some lucky rolls, but the chances at getting anything but the base 4 classes using 3D6 in order is actually pretty damn seriously low. Like 1 in a 100 low. Yeah, you should come in prepared to run a cleric or fighter or whatever, but if a paladin is in your heart for a long campaign, a slightly more generous method like 4D6 is going to serve you well.

As a DM (which is what I do as opposed to being player 99.9999% of the time), I don’t want to be Bugs Bunny and I don’t want the characters to be a bunch of Elmer Fudd’s or Damien Dipshits or whatever you want to call them. I want to run great, challenging adventures for characters who may have a fault here and there physically, and may not always make the right decisions, but are generally exceptional physical specimens born to adventure, and not some kind of normal schlub who has to hire on some even less normal schleps just for a chance at survival in the depths below. Not Robert E. Howard heroes necessarily, but jeez, at least they should be on the physical level of the wife beater- wearing “Guido” at the gym doing arm curls while smoking a ciggy.

I had recently planned on doing an OD&D game at an Orange County gameday event a couple of months ago, but the main thing that had me drop the whole thing was I was too conflicted over the stats. I wanted to do it by the book (that was going to be the whole point, D&D as museum piece), but 3D6 in order was just something I didn’t want to deal with. Poor little Billy with his Strength 13 fighter with a 6 constitution. Screw that.

So 4D6 is the way for me, and I think it is the most popular. I’ll even allow an elimination roll for anything under 9. Whatever it takes to get you a decent, survivable character you can be happy with and get the game under way.
And…I hope this does not conflict too much with my last post ranting about being too soft a DM…

Dungeon Master as Civil Servant

Am I too easy as a DM? Is this really a low paying (read: non-paying) job that forgoes my fun or frivolity for the service to others?

I started as much an adversarial DM as anybody from my time. That’s how D&D games were generally approached back then, especially by young boys. Characters were a bunch of Elmer Fudd’s with sub-par physical characteristics, walking unwittingly into the torture and humiliation chambers of the DM as Bugs Bunny. It was a very sadomasochistic relationship. You go into a dungeon, you press a button, and *kablooey* you were more often than not dead, as the DM laughed and snickered as if you are some dumbass he has gotten one over on.

The main thing that got me out of that mind set by the early 80’s was having girls at the game. Especially in the case of a girlfriend, it was hard to have them setting off traps and falling into pits. So it was girls that started my softening, I think. Had me go more in a high adventure frame of mind. Twas Beauty killed the Beast.

Then from the mid-80’s on I went through a certain phase of causing characters more emotional anguish than actually pain and death from traps or unbeatable monsters. Most of my players in the late 80’s and the 90’s were newbies to gaming, and lots of death and carnage heaped upon them can turn these new players off. But kill their family or pit them against the other players and you’ve lit a fire under their ass. They love the drama, and it has much more emotional weight than tricky dungeons and screwjob traps.

Death among characters has become a rare thing in my games, and even in my long Cthulhu campaigns of the 90’s, there was some insanity brought on but not much death (although more than in most genres I run). And in my Champions games, forget about it. You aren’t supposed to die there.

But I think my softening over all those years that worked pretty well with newbies in the 90’s is not serving me that well as DM in my latest group. For this new group I had one old player from the 90’s, Terry, along for the ride. Terry was always a good player. Although she internalized a lot of her characters stuff, she was consistent and not at all a power gamer, meta-gamer, or complainer. She just played.

But everybody else who started in this new group had experience with the game (one version or another of it), and at least a couple of them came in with power gaming backgrounds and desires. I especially think Andy and big Dan, like sharks, sensing my softness when it comes to characters, were a bit too obvious in their power-gamery at first. Andy pressed me a lot for things, and because he is our host I often cracked and gave him what he wanted early on. He sort of softened on that, but Dan still hits me with “player entitlement” attitudes that chap my ass. He wants more more more, and the more you give the more he wants. He is a good guy, but Dan more than anybody is getting me more in the mindset of my youth “Fuck the characters, I am God here. Bend to my will and die in my goddamn dungeon.” Dan even seems to want my rolls made out in the open (I think any time I have an NPC make a saving throw against his charm person or whatever, he assumes I’m fudging). I let this guy run a female drow, a race I am sure he is running just because it is so powerful in Unearthed Arcana, and he has made me (and some of the others players) regret it all the way.

What am I, a civil servant? This is my world! I call the shots! I don’t work for you, you are here to play in my game not be served.

I was especially hardened recently when I ran some sessions of Star Wars Saga: Knights of the Old Republic for a group of middle-age Star Wars fans who had played together for years, but were complete strangers to me. A couple of them were actually quite cool at first, but it was apparent by the second game or so that I was looked upon as somebody coming and serving them up a game like it was a job or something. When the session was over, they didn’t even want to socialize with me. They waited until I left (as it turned out) to talk about the game and how I was doing. Can you believe that shit? Especially the host, Joyce, seemed to have had an idea of how the game should be run (like one of the lame-o movies I guess). If things didn’t go her characters way, she would even get pissy and go sit in a corner (this lady is well into her 50’s, by the way, so she was no kid). She seemed to have paranoia about NPC’s, and the fact that I had a really interesting NPC be a catalyst for the adventure drove her nuts, even though he was very much in the background. The slag even had the balls to tell me “you can’t run the game like that, we are used to it like this and that…”. I went home that night after the fourth session and wrote them an email telling them I was done with the game probably as they were still standing around the table discussing my “Performance”. Didn’t even get a “thanks for trying.”

So the last year or so of experience has me starting to rethink my “player friendly DM” attitude of the 90’s. I’m kind of tired of being soft. I don’t want to be a dick DM, but I really think at least a couple of my players need a less kind hand and some hard truth that I am not from a soft DM background. Some hard lessons need to be learned. Some damn characters need to die!

I’m not your D&D civil servant or underling. I’m your damn Game master! The next few games…watch out!

“Hell is coming for breakfast!” – from The Outlaw Josie Wales