A Pircture's Worth

Now that Christmas is over, I've had time to reflect on the couple of D&D sessions I've run with my group in these last weeks. In particular, last week's dungeon delving stands out.

To recap: I'm running an old-school influenced D&D campaign. Rules-light, dungeon-centric adventures, with crazy caravan owners and malicious innkeepers and 3rd level theives posing as guides to the ruined monestary to serve the role-playing aspects of the game.

So what I've found out is this: DON'T TELL THE PLAYERS WHAT MONSTERS THEY'RE FACING!
Last week my adventurers chose a path through the dungeon that lead them to an ochre jelly, the most powerful monster on the first level of the place (keep in mind that i told them, straight off, that this was not a balanced dungeon; some foes are weaker, some foes are stronger, and the only thing that may keep PCs alive is a survival instinct all but lost in modern RPGs). I didn't say, "You encounter an Ochre Jelly." Instead, because I was seriously stumped, asked my players what that Nickelodean slime substance that made the farting noise was.

For the record, it was Gak.

So here was this unknown entity assaulting my players, making prepubescent farting noises and "gallumphing" as it reared up to attack them. In an act of desperation (after his sword refused to penetrate the things rubbery hide), my fighter PC threw his torch at the thing. Now, anyone knows that an ochre jelly hates fire; it deals no additional damage, but prevents the bugger from splitting via lighting magic or whatever. SO! My players had no idea what they were dealing with (as they are all 1st level, this seems likely), only that fire seemed to stave it off for a bit. SO! The very next round the mage was burning hands the shit out of it while the fighter was lighting nearby bones on fire (with adquate wrapping, of course) and hurling them at the unknown monstrosity. The party's priest, after screaming and bleeding for a bit (cause she was the first to feel the jelly's wrath), retreated back to the doorway to heal her fire-throwing comrades as they assaulted the vile thing.

In the end, they destroyed it. I fudged nary a single dice roll; the encounter was won through ingenuity on my players' part. By not calling the thing an "ochre jelly," instead focusing on its characteristics and what it looked like (in the eyes of my players) created an organic encounter that had them on the edges of their seats because, in the final analysis, they had no goddamn clue what this thing was they were fighting, and somehow forced them to deal with it in a realistic and human way, instead of just stats dodging. Big Victory for the grognardia-inspired goings-on!

Good Gentile Boys and Girls

So for 7 Book Trilogy's Christmas show, we're playing The Night Santa Went Crazy by Weird Al Yankovic. That little riff at the beginning? Yeah, I can totally play that on guitar.

Why am I bragging about this? Cause it's harder than it looks. Seriously, that I was able to pick up this lick (the whole thing, not just the melodic notes) and play it comfortably after only 4 or 5 times through the song makes me think that, after all, I may know what I'm doing as far as this guitar-playing thing goes. So there. 

D&D With No Ability Scores

The 3-18 ability scores have been around since D&D's inception, but I believe their original purpose has become so distorted and, honestly, taken for granted, that I truly think an old-style game (not necessarily in rules, but in spirit) that uses the 3-18 system can never live up to its potential, simply because, as role-players in general and D&D players specifically, the 3-18 ability score range has become so ingrained in our minds that it is inseparable from all of the excess baggage that the game has accrued over the years.

So when I finally begin running my old-school game in a couple weeks, I'm ditching ability scores. Well, not entirely.

Characters still have six scores: Strength, Dexterity,Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.
Players roll d12+d8, in order, for each score, and then compare the results to a table to find the ability modifier:
2-3: Poor : -2
4-7: Below Average : -1
8-12: Average: +0
13-16: Above Average : +1
17-19: Exceptional : +2
20: Superhuman : +3

Players may swap any one pair of results. In situations where chance is involved, players add a given ability modifier to the die roll. Attack rolls and saving throws are functions of class, and thus not affected by these modifiers.

The table is weighted in favor of average and lower-modifier scores (+/-1). I'm getting rid of ability score prerequisites for character classes, but I still wanted that "feel" of the older editions, where high ability scores were still special. However, a character with low scores isn't hopeless, because the two most critical rolls in the game (attacks and saves) remain unaffected. A fighter with exceptional strength has the advantage in bending bars and opening gates. However, he is no better at attacking than a fighter with average strength of the same level. Although the fighter with superior strength will cause more damage (the mod is added to damage rolls), statistically he will hit an opponent no more often (magical equipment and other enhancements notwithstanding).

I'm looking forward to seeing how this system works.

Because I Think So

Right. I've been watching my DVD copies of the History Channel show Dogfights on DVD because my mother was awesome enough to order them for me.

I merely suggested that this new show was awesome the first time I saw it. Mom asked me what I was watching, and I told her, and I also mentioned how awesome it would be if History Channel ever released it.

Lo and behold, come next Christmas, I unwrapped an oddly rectangular package which contained: Dogfights: Season 1. So I was happy with this gift, watching the computer-recreated battles in the skies over germany and the pacific and north korea and vietnam.

So next Christmas, what do I unwrap?

Dogfights: Season 2.

I didn't ask for this, becuase I didn't even know it existed. But I got it as a christmas present, dutifuly labeled, "To Wolfie, From Santa" even though I was a quarter-century old when I got it.

The point is: I have an amazing mother, and there is no other way to describe it. I defy anyone on the web to say they have a better mother than me (not similar or equilataral, but dyed-in-the-wool BETTER). I shall slap- bet any such person, and will gladly pay for their air-fare, hotel accomidations, and hospital bills as I slap the everloving shit out of them.

Sheesh, it's been a month!

Right, this will not do. This will not do at all.  A month with no posts? How could I let my readers wait so long? But no more!

Over at grognardia the author just made a post about how to bring Blackmoor and Greyhawk back through a modern publication from WOtC. As much as I normally respect and agree with everything JM says about the old-school renaissance, in this case I disagree. The schools of old and new have fractured too much. The modern world has affected even RPGs, and if Wizards wants to stay competitive as a company, they'll have to adapt or die.

Wait, they already have. When 3rd edition first came out, my friends and I were enthralled at Wizard's business strategy. Sure, they made the game uncomfortably close to Magic: The Gathering (which even back then struck me as a sign that something was wrong with this new edition). But personal feelings aside, Wizards' approach to the business side of RPGs has been unquestionably successful. They realease new products and expansions and whatnot, and have a dedicated base of buyers that are absolutely convinced that in order to remain a viable participant in the hobby they must equip themselves with these new publications (an attitude partly created, and continually reinforced by the Company itself).

Unfortunately, the old school has nothing of the sort. Its products are cheap and from third-party publishers, who traditionally (at least in many fields) produce cheap knockoff crap. Whether or not that's actually the case with RPGs, these types of products have a public conception as being, well, crap. So there's one mark against them.

Instead of a single company with the force of a huge corporation behind them, modern old-school products are designed by individuals or small groups. And, unlike Gygax and Arneson, they're not inventing something new, they're trying to recreate something old, amid a consumer community already flooded with more fantasy games than you can shake a piercer at. So there's another mark against them.

There is no way an old-school product will ever be commercially viable. It will always be a niche in a hobby that itself is already a niche (just think of people that play WOW versus people that play D&D). The old-school movement will never die, because there will always be the occasional gamer that becomes fed up with the new and finds the old to be genius in its simplicity. But in the long run, the old-school will remain the old-school. IMHO, I think this is for the best. 

Only In Dreams

this is pretty much it

I've been having the weirdest dreams lately. I can't remeber exactly what happens, but the general theme that runs through them all is that I get pwned repeatedly, embarrasingly, over and over. And as much as it's unsettling, it's also terribly interesting.

Last night, the band put on a killer show at a bar down the street. Last night, I had a dream about that very show, except that this time, we ended up sucking, and it was all my fault. Everyone was pissed at me, and I woke up with a start, feeling pretty depressed and worthless.

Making it back to sleep, I then dreamed that me and my roommate and some other people I knew were producingsome sort of. . . I dunno, drunk game show. It was a cross between Hollywood Squares, people-sized version of Simon Says and QBert, and Cleveland Brown from Family Guy and The Cleveland Show was the host, and he began each show with a dance routine across the show's board, that lit up like a disco floor wherever he was dancing.

Oh yeah, did I mention there was beer? Like, kegs and kegs of beer. And a series of hot women were in charge of each keg's pump. And there was a taco bell right across the street.

Anyway, eventually my roommate and I got back to our apartment with two of the hot keg women. It was great fun, and to paraphrase Michael Scott, my roommate did both of them. Rather, they just went to sleep on the couch. Three people. On a couch. It didn't even look comfortable, but still they preferred that to hanging out with me any more. To make matters worse, before they went to sleep they began demanding things like I fetch them the TV remote, get them glasses of water, etc. I eventually told them to basically fuck off and went to bed. I was in the bathroom, brushing teeth, washing face, etc., when one of those women came in and began straightening her hair with something that looked like it came from the Cthulhu School of Beauty. She then told me exactly why I was worthless and stupid and a waste of breath.

Then I woke up. Then I wrote all the above. I won't tell you what she said, nor who she was, because it's still to fresh in my mind. Of course, it was only just in my mind. But I don't feel any less crappy because of it. Weird.

Naming the Unnamable

So two weeks ago I started plotting out the basics for a new AD&D campaign. Two weeks later, I have: the first level of a dungeon populated with monsters, riddles, and traps, a small town named Whiteraven that features a handful of interesting NPCs with whom to be interacted; a complete cosmology of 19 deities and several patrons and saints.

Wait, what?

Yeah, on a total whim I was playing around with this name generator and suddenly, ideas began forming.

The idea of 9 philosophical gods (one for each alignment) isn't new to me; the idea has been kicking around my homebrews for years now. However, instead of fanciful names derived from foreign words that may or may not mean what I think they mean (fuck you Babelfish), I used that awesome name generator to generate a series of one- and two-syllable names that followed basic linguistic parameters. Thus, the Ninefold:

LG: Iyah
LN: Iwis
LE: Ixid
NG: Elie
TN: Ual
NE: Rhag
CG: Vai
CN: Wygnolef
CE: Kepk

The whole idea was that these beings were so powerful, they didn't need giant tongue-twisting names to be identified (and here some of my own religious background shows through; Christians follow a god named "I Am," which has always struck me as pretty damn awesome).

The most significant part of these nom de dieu is the final sound. A soft sound equals good, a plosive or sibilant sound denotes neutral, and a hard sound indicates evil.
The lawful deities all begin with the long I sound, because, you know, they're lawful. Pertaining to some code is inherent in their existence.
The neutral and chaotic deities don't follow any pattern within themselves. Personally I'm a fan of Wygnolef, the CN deity. It's the only god with three syllables because, well, fuck it, it's chaotic neutral.

The other 10 gods are the Materials, lesser deities created by the Ninefold to create and influence mortal existence. These have more specific spheres (like a fighter's god, a wizard's god, a dwarf's god, etc). I may detail them in a later post.

Beneath them are the Patrons and Saints, demi-gods similar to Catholic saints, in that they can hear and answer prayers. This list was inspired by and started with one man:

 So yeah, I always get carried away with stuff like this, but D&D has been making me its bitch ever since I've been playing. Hopefully I'm old and wise enough nowadays to realize when to leave well enough alone. Besides, I think 19 deities for 1 town and 1 dungeon is plenty.

Random NPC Traits to the Rescue!

It's been said before, but one of the greatest pleasures of DMing and world-building is taking a random set of numbers and making sense of them, making them fit into your milieu. I absolutely love AD&D's rules pertaining to random NPC characteristics, because it makes you come up with a personality that somehow meshes with the broad strokes you've already laid down.

By way of a for instance, in populating the town of Whiteraven (the main hamlet out of which my PCs will be operating), I created the Mayor, a one Lady Beryl, a 4th level human fighter whose alignment is Neutral Good (she puts the welfare of her town above precepts of Law or Chaos). So I rolled on the NPC trait table in the 2e Players Handbook. I don't know if this is how you're supposed to use this table. As a matter of fact, I can't find anywhere where it says exactly how to use it, but as the Grognards might say, it's that very insubstantial attitude that makes the older D&D editions great. But I digress.

I roll a d20 for a general trait, and d100 for a specific trait. So for Lady Beryl, I got arrogant and avaricious. Not exactly the kind of personality one would associate with a Neutral Good fighter! So instead of re-rolling, I thought of how to make these traits fit with an NG mayor-fighter type. This is what I came up with:

"She knows she's good at her job, even better than her lord. She cares about her subjects but sees making their lives better mostly as a means to make her own better. She takes small cuts of tax money which she hoards away; she doesn't spend it on lavish living, but tells herself it's an "emergency fund" for the town. In truth, she's loath to ever spend any of it."

So because of this random roll, I have an NPC that is three-dimensional and believable as a real person. She's someone with her own motives and desires, not just a "friendly mayor" for the PCs to interact with. She's a good person, but one with flaws and shortcomings (of course, she would simply say she's being pragmatic and practical!). The point is: I love making sense of random statistics. It encourages creativity and forces me to think outside my own little box. I can already think of a half-dozen adventure hooks that could spring from Lady Beryl's position and personality, and I can't wait to see those ideas come to fruition.

The Art of Creating A World Part 2

So here's the 2nd evolution of my new map. There aren't any place-names yet and I don't really like the way the river looks, but I'll come up with something.

Music Post I

Just finished watching The Fast And the Furious, which despite being a terrible movie, holds some sort of mystical sway over me. Maybe it's because I first saw it in high school, and its simplistic plot and fast cars held the same appeal that American Graffiti held for generations previous. Whatever the reason, I cannot help but connect the characters' feelings in the movie when they get a new, faster, more masculine car, to when I got my new guitar and multi-effect pedal.

The reason is this: all of a sudden, I found myself capable of sounds that heretofore were only dreams. No matter how technical my skills, having a new guitar, with lowered frets and a polished mahogany fretboard, and an effects pedal that could just as easily simulate The Police or Metallica, or some awesome combination of the two that was completely (in my own mind at least) wholly original, makes me a more versatile musician.

I reckon the point is this: no matter your hobby, whether it's street racing or RPGing or musicing or whatever, not only are there movies that invigorate that hobby (for devoting some time on the silver screen to said hobby makes it legitimate, for better or for worse), but more importantly there are those small moments where you obtain a rare set of dice, or a sought-after engine part, or a legendary guitar, where you say to yourself, "This piece of equipment will undoubtedly make me more respected in my hobby, more renowned, more proficient, and ultimately more attractive to the ladies."
Don't lie. You're in it for the ladies.

The Art of Creating A World

So I'm almost on the cusp of getting back into table-top RPGing after a break of several years, and decided yesterday, almost on a whim, to put together a new map for my players to start out in. I'm not sure what system I'll be using, athough it'll probably be some combination of 1e and 2e AD&D. In any case, I had the crazy idea to post the development of this "new world" on my new blog for all my new readers to see (just wait, they'll be here any minute).

It begins with thinking about how to facilitate the start of play. I needed: a rather large town and a rather small town, each with something to offer the other to facilitate basic trade. It also gives the PC's two distinct town-areas to explore (and myself two distinct town areas to develop). Since I'm going for a sandbox style of play, at least in wilderness exploration, I wanted to leave most of the map uncivilized, so both towns are located near the southern edge of the map.

I also needed places for the PCs to explore. On a map this small, one mountain range is plenty, and for some reason I thought of "Horseshoe Mountains," so that curved line up there represents what will eventually become mountains. Inside the "shoe" formed, those wavy lines represent a marsh-like area that will be home to all sorts of ruins and things.

The circles will be forests. I wanted two: a smaller, "friendlier" one, and a larger, Mirkwood-esque "dangerous" one.

The empty area in the middle of the map represents plains, which will have an American west "badlands" feel to them; I'm inspired by the scenes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they're running from LaForge (the guy with the hat). 


In this world, there are no elves or dwarves (both races having died out mysteriously in some forgotten ago). So the mountains and forests will be rife with ruins, remnants of those vanished civilizations, which hopefully will generate dungeons and other adventures.

The next step will be clarifying the image of the world in my head, as well as what purposes I want it to serve. Once that happens I'll be able to redraw the map in greater detail.

Welcome?

This first post is a test to see how things are running so far.