Glitterdust

The Busted Game Theory

2012-01-24T21:22:00.001-08:00

I was having coffee with Friend Ian yesterday, and discussing the future of Dungeons & Dragons, and perhaps more importantly the history of Dungeons & Dragons and some of it’s queerer idiosyncrasies. In particular, we got onto the topic of the current development and the slight air of panic we’ve picked up on from the folks at Wizards of the Coast. Our conversation had turned from more general game design discussion to more focused questions about where we are in the development timeline. I know people have playtested the game. Is it done? Is the playtesting they’re doing to fix the niggly wiggly bits? Or do the folks at WotC really have no idea what their players want?

This brought us to an interesting point about Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, something that has been sitting in the back of my head for a long time: Fourth Edition solved every problem in 3.5, and people didn’t like it. I liked it, but I’m not the game’s core audience, really. I’m an aficionado, the sort of person who revels in GNS theory and Glass Bead Games. I deeply appreciate great design, and Fourth Edition – at its core – had that. And, y’know, it solved every problem that 3.5 had.

Admittedly, this came with its own stack of problems, but D&D Fourth Edition is easily the cleanest design in the game so far. It was basically… perfect. There was nothing mechanically wrong with it, really. Nothing about the game was dangerously exploitable, it was balanced and clearly written, there was some real thought put into how each part of the game was going to interact with every other part. It did what it did perfectly, but for some reason that made it feel “wrong.”

Maybe games don’t have to be perfect. Maybe they shouldn’t be.

RIFTS is an incredibly popular game, and it is – to be entirely fair – garbage. Really. Really really. It’s system is trash. Even the world, the world that is tossed around in the infamous RIFTS-only argument “I don’t like the system but I like the world” is a derivative hodge-podge of speculative fiction tropes taken from all over the nerd spectrum. Objectively, as a person who has had a lot of fun playing RIFTS, looking at the design of the thing is painful. The attributes have nothing to do with the rest of your abilities, how good you are at fighting is determined by a skill which is entirely different from how the rest of the skill system works in the game, the skill list is hyper-specific to the point of obtuseness, there is a type of damage that could kill one section of player characters with a single shot but barely scratch another set, armor has two different sets of rules depending on what sort of armor you’re wearing… It’s brutally bad.

Other great examples include Exalted, Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu. None of these games are particularly well designed, but they are incredibly popular with players all over the world. So… Why?

Games with design flaws, games that have large, glaring errors in their rules systems, provide certain psychographics of gamers a way to leverage those system problems to their advantage. These are the Johnny players of the role-playing game world, and they represent a fairly hefty chunk of our playerbase. And everyone has a bit of that in them. Even if you’re not looking to min-max your fighter to the Nth degree, everyone likes finding those synergies and occasionally getting to exploit them to do something that is particularly cool with the game’s crunchy bits.

And very well designed games don’t tend to offer a lot of exploits like that. The best designed games in the industry right now are likely Greg Stolze’s Reign and Steve Long’s HERO. Neither game really offers players a way to break the system in half. Which is sort of what you’re aiming at with your game. Neither game is as popular as RIFTS, either.

And maybe this is something we’re missing right now. Maybe it’s part of the Lonely Fun of a roleplaying game system, figuring out how to beat the rules into submission. Maybe, sometimes, you need to hack at bits of system until they scream. Maybe, sometimes, the fun of the game isn’t so much about the game, but about That Cool Thing you can do that shows off how clever you are. Maybe it’s about fixing a broken game and making it playable because you enjoy the challenge of making a bad system work (which is, I think, why most game designers get into the industry). Maybe, sometimes, the roleplaying games that are the most fun are the ones that aren’t very good at all, because you get a chance to make them good, and that’s what you’re really looking for. And maybe, sometimes, the old busted game is just more fun to fuck around with.

Flavor in Game Design

2012-01-21T12:50:00.001-08:00

I read an article talking about how Monte Cook is wrong to suggest that giving a dwarf with an axe a +1 bonus to hit because dwarves love axes. Story, the article said, is not tied to giving bonuses for stereotypical racial traits, and in fact make it more difficult to build characters outside of those stereotypes.

Except, the person who wrote the article didn’t even really bother to read what Mr. Cook was saying. Cook wasn’t at all talking about story. He was talking about flavor, and those are two very different things. Story is certainly a part of flavor, it is the thing that carries the weight of a game’s narrative, whether it’s a role-playing game, a board game or chess. The story of chess is very simple, and mostly implied, but it’s there. More important, though, the flavor of chess is has nothing to do with that implied story. Knight, pawn, bishop, queen. Each piece is named for a figure of medieval Europe.* This flavor is divorced from the story of “You are a commander. You meet an enemy on the field of battle.” The two are not one and the same. See, I could make a game with all of the pieces from chess with a totally different story, but it would still have chess-like flavor because of the nature of those pieces.

Flavor allows us to make assumptions about a game. If there are dwarves in your setting, there are some concessions you need to make to people who know what dwarves are. In some cases, you’ll need to strictly adhere to the tropes of the dwarven people. In other cases, you’ll run counter to those tropes. But in both situations, you need to be keenly aware of what those tropes are, what people are expecting from your inclusion of this flavor, and how to cater to or subvert those assumptions.

What Cook was suggesting was not that story should be dictated by +1 bonuses to hit with axes. What he was asking is “Should the fact that dwarves stereotypically like axes be reflected in a game’s mechanics? How closely should the tropes of the epic fantasy genre affect the design of a game with that genre’s tropes?” And it’s a fair question, one that begs to be answered by Ron Edwards. System matters, and how a system ties to the flavor of the game is an important point in how the game will be played. The systematic concessions made to setting determine the texture of the game, how it feels in your mouth while you’re chewing on it. This is one of the biggest reasons I’m worried that the Assumed Setting of Fifth Edition D&D will be the Forgotten Realms. I believe that any system designed to specifically cater to the Forgotten Realms as a setting will by necessity play more like Second Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

And while I love me some Second Edition D&D, I’m not really looking to play something that feels like it right now.

So, to answer Cook’s question: Should flavor determine mechanics? Yes. How much should it do so? As much as it makes sense in your design. I mean, I don’t know what you’re cooking up yet, so I can’t really speak to any given set of mechanical curiosities. I don’t even know if we’re looking at a top-down or a bottom-up design yet. In a top-down design, it makes a lot more sense to try and capture the flavor of the game mechanically. In a bottom-up design, you’ll be looking much more closely at how you can crow-bar the flavor to the kick-ass mechanics you’ve built.

Which actually makes me wonder how much thought has gone into the overall design philosophy this late in the game’s design. From what I understand, there is already a playtest-ready version of the game floating around. If we’re confused about fundamental design questions regarding the depth of flavor’s influence on the rules, color me slightly concerned.

*Yes, even pawn. Etymologically, it’s linked to the word pedonem, or foot soldier, in Anglo-French.

Con Merchandizing for Lyndsay

2012-01-19T21:10:00.001-08:00

One of my favorite stories about convention merchandising is about Robert Khoo. Whether or not it’s true, I have no idea, and I’m telling a half-remembered story that I read many, many months ago, but the general idea went like this:

Scott Kurtz has been to a lot of conventions, and when he’d show up at one, he’d arrange his books on the front table in chronological order. People would buy lots of the first book and lots of the most recent, but a lot of the stuff in the middle was skipped. He figured people just wanted to start the series from the beginning or pick up the new product, but fewer people wanted to jump in during the middle and just assumed that’s how his sales would always work at conventions.

One of the many years he was placed next to the Penny Arcade booth, Robert Khoo rearranged his books. He came over from his booth on the last day of the convention and set the books up chromatically. Suddenly, books started flying off the shelves that hadn’t sold more than a couple of units at a convention. When sales started to die wind down again, Khoo came over and arranged them based on the size of the piles, making a pyramid of books. Again, there was a surge in sales. The third time he came by, Kurtz asked him “What are you going to do when I’ve only got three books left?”

“Don’t worry,” Khoo said. “I have a plan.”

When people began to filter out of the con for the final time, Khoo came over to find a smattering of books left on the shelf. He propped them up in such a way as they were facing the direction of the people leaving. When the convention was over, Scott had sold all of his books for the first time ever.*

What’s the moral of this little merchandizing fable? The key to good table marketing is to try new things.

What spurred this little storytime? The lovely GeekyLyndsay** of Dragon Chow fame is going to a convention and doesn’t want to use a table to display her dice bags. Which makes all sorts of sense because, if you’ve ever tried to find an effective merchandizing solution for dice bags, you know that tables, display cases and shelves are basically the worst possible furniture in the world. The problem comes from the nature of bags, I think. They defy shelving units, their strange shape making it damned near impossible to display the full awesomness of the bag. If the bag is lying flat, it looks boring. If you have them propped up so you can see their tops, they lose any sort of clear identifiable qualities. Nothing about this is good. So to be able to display dice bags more effectively, you need to think outside the box some.

My most fervent suggestion is to have people carry them around the con and show them off. This comes with two really key components: product champions (those people who love your stuff and want to sell it for you) and mobility (because they don’t have to be at the table when they’re showing off the bags). It gives people the opportunity to touch the bags, to interact with them, and more importantly to interact with people who like them. Each individual carrying the product provides a testimonial to your product’s awesomeness, and they can go into more detail about what makes your bags more kick-ass than the bags getting sold by Random Steampunk Booth #7. Rather than let the bags speak for themselves on a personality-free shelf, you have someone there to sell, not only the product you’ve made, but the services you’re selling (I believe Lyndsay is still doing personalized bags, for instance). Product champions are incredible people, and I think Dragon Chow has enough fans that it would be easy to convince a number of them to run around with sacks of them.

Another option: Hang them from the ceiling. Get some very long twine and some clothes pins and make a display of dice bags that can be seen from across the convention hall because it’s the only display that has a billion colors and goes all the way to the top. Color-code them so that people look over and see a blast of colors that go from floor to ceiling, and make sure you’ve got multiples of each bag hanging around at the bottom of the display so that you can sell them without having to climb an enormous ladder to get them.

Even more option: Make designs out of them on the cubicle walls of your booth. Use clothes pins to make an attractive design or pattern that will have people stopping in to at least check out what the hell it’s made out of.

Yet more option: Have people wear the bags as hats. Give a free bag to any customer who wears their bag on their head for an hour for you acting as a de facto booth bunny.

One More Option: Get a bunch of spinning racks, like the ones they use at bad jewelry stores that are made of slat-wall on a spinner. Put hooks in, and hang your bags in an easy-to-navigate pattern on the floor. This option is quite a bit more expensive, obviously, but the spinning racks would belong to you, and you could use them at other conventions in the future.

There are a lot of ways to merchandise your dice bags without putting them on a table or arranging them on a shelf. The key, though, is to keep switching things up, keep giving people something new and interesting to look at. Rearrange by color, size, shape, number of items, popularity of items, difficulty in making the product, scent or taste, whatever. Just keep giving people a reason to come back to your booth every day (or make your booth come to them) and make sure that when they do, you pounce on them like a half-starved tiger on a helpless gazelle. Because customers love the attention.

*For the record, I have no idea whether or not this story is true. I also don’t know if it was actually about the people I think its about if it is true. But it seems like a very Khoo thing to do, and I don’t at all think he’d mind if it was added to his already expansive Legendary Character.

**This article was edited to reflect the fact that I am terrible at alternate name spellings. With a name like Kristoffer, you'd think I'd be more conscious of stuff like that.

SCP Foundation

2012-01-19T02:43:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, I get the idea in my head that I should do some monster research, that I should go trawling the internet looking for some inspiration for a really over-the-top creepy monster or something. Then I remember that the SCP Foundation exists, except that I can never remember what it's called because "The SCP Foundation" is a terrible fucking title for anything. I keep mixing up the letters. Or including letters that don't exist. Because it doesn't even stand for anything.

Today on Reddit, someone posted a link to it, and I decided to keep it here, on my blog, for the rest of forever. If you've never taken a look at the SCP Foundation before, it's very cool. Reading over a few of the entries now, I'm a bit taken aback at the amateurishness of the writing, but the idea behind the project is intensely awesome.

Basically: Catalogue a list of monsters from the point of view of the scientists tasked with keeping them safe and safely away from the public. Each entry has an item number, an object class, a list of special containment procedures, and a description of the thing and its abilities. It is written something like a field report, without embelishment or hyperbole. Just "This is the thing. This is what we've observed it doing. Don't touch it with your hand or it will wither your flesh to the shoulder and you'll die from necrosis a week later. Also, it's a five year old girl."

http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

For the Birds

2012-01-17T20:55:00.001-08:00

For over four years, I’ve kept a pair of lovebirds in my home, Merry and Pippen. Yes, I am aware of the spelling mistake, but that’s how I’ve always spelled his name in my head. I don’t write about my birds often.

Lovebirds, for the uninitiated, are not ideal pets. They are incredibly loud, quite messy, and they don’t take easily to training. Complicating matters was the fact that these two birds had a long precedent of not having been trained before I got them, and they were incredibly closely bonded to one another. See, a singular lovebird is a charming, personable friend. Two lovebirds form a clique, and if you happen to lack feathers, you are not invited to any of their best parties.

Still, they have filled my apartment with chirpings loud enough to occasionally wake the neighbors and a lot of strange, distant affection for a number of years, and I appreciate their company.

Today, Pippen died in my hands. Though I had only had him for four years, he was a pretty old lovebird. The previous owners had him for some seven years, and the average lifespan of a lovebird is between ten and fifteen years. So, to the best of my knowledge, he was eleven, and had a good run of things.

The event has made me understandably a lot upset. I was really fond of the little guy, and he was by far the friendlier and more intimate of the birds. He was a total sweetness and I really enjoyed having him around. I’ll miss him.

So… What does this have to do with games and gaming? Not too terribly much, actually. I considered making this an existential blog post about how death works in the current D&D cosmology, and while that would certainly be a decent article, I think it’s a bit much for me at the moment. I also considered writing a post about how the deaths of player characters are handled in role-playing games (a phenomenon categorized by “Oh, he or she is dead. Moving on to the next room”). Which also has some meat on it. Or I could talk about the deaths of animal companions in D&D, something we typically neglect as nothing more than a rules inconvenience. Any and all of these would be great articles. And maybe someday, when I’m not feeling like a sack of smashed assholes because my bird just died, I’ll get around to writing them.

Six-Page Dungeons & Dragons

2012-01-16T21:32:00.001-08:00

So, in the first iteration of this project, I made a one-page version of Dungeons & Dragons. It is a version of D&D that would fit on a single page in a novel, or roughly 250 words. This time, I wanted something a little more robust, something that could cover as much of the D&D game as I could while still restricting the amount of space in which I had to design. What I came up with was a version of the Dungeons & Dragons game that fits on a half-dozen novel-sized pages. You can find it below.

Interestingly, much of the space is taken up by character creation. I’m coming to believe that character creation is one of the most important aspects of the Dungeons & Dragons game, and that a great deal of that importance comes from customization, and a good deal of that customization comes from what the characters are able to do. Anyway, as per the last version, I’ll let the design speak for itself.

Creating a Character

Attributes: There are six attributes in this game. Each relates to a different sort of challenge that your character might come across during the course of a session. Those attributes are: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. The scores for these attributes are determined randomly by totaling the roll of three six-sided dice.

Attribute Modifiers: Each attribute has an “attribute modifier,” which is the number added to rolls when you are making a check. If your attribute is between the values listed in brackets, your attribute modifier is equal to the value listed to the left of the brackets.

(16-18) +2
(13-15) +1
(9-12) 0
(6-8) -1
(3-5) -2

Choose a Class: There are four classes in this game, Cleric, Fighter, Mage and Rogue. Each is good at different sorts of things. Pages 2-5 describe each class in depth.

Buy Gear: You have 100 gold with which to buy gear. There is a chart with sample equipment on it later.

Cleric

Clerics are priests and healers.

Hit Points:

· First Level: 1d6+Constitution Score

· Per Level: 1d6+Constitution Modifier

Bonuses: None

Armor and Weapons: A cleric can only use non-bladed weapons, and can wear any armor.

Turn Undead: With a prayer, a cleric can make undead creatures disintegrate. A cleric can destroy up to 1d4 of these creatures per every two levels.

Healing: With a prayer, a cleric can heal the wounds and illnesses of their allies. A cleric can heal 1d6 hit points, plus an additional hit point for every other level, starting with level 2.

Monastic Knowledge: Clerics know a lot about a lot. Ask a question to which you would like to know the answer and roll a d20 (+1 for every other level, starting at the second). If the result is 18 or higher, you have read something about your query, and can (sort of) remember it.

Fighter

Fighters excel at stabbing things to death. Their abilities and bonuses reflect this.

Hit Points

· First Level: 1d10+Constitution Score

· Per Level: 1d10+Constitution Modifier

Bonuses: +1 to hit every two levels, +1 to armor class every two levels, +1 to saving throws every two levels

Armor and Weapons: A fighter can use any sort of armor or weapons, including magical varieties.

Feats: Every second level, beginning at level 2, a fighter gains a “feat.” A feat is a once-time-use resource that allows the fighter to do something that would be impossible for a normal person. Spending a feat provides an automatic critical hit (double damage), and may have lasting effects in the battle at the Dungeon Master’s discretion.

Critical Hit: When a fighter rolls a natural 20 to hit, it automatically hits and deals double damage.

Mage

Mages use magic spells and call on the forces of darkness to defeat their foes. They are generally quite weak.

Hit Points

· First Level: 1d4+Constitution Score

· Per Level: 1d4+Constitution Modifier

Bonuses: +2 to saving throws every two levels

Armor and Weapons: Mages can only use staves or daggers, and cannot wear armor.

Spells: Mages get two spells at first level, and an additional spell every other level starting at level 2. A spell is a once-a-day resource that allows the mage to call on the forces of magic for aid. The effects of the spell are largely left up to the DM, but the more powerful the mage, the more powerful the effects of that mage’s spells should be. Spend some time fleshing out what your mage can and cannot do with your DM. Your spells should have descriptive names.

Rogue

Rogues are excellent at finding hidden things, disarming traps, and fighting dirty.

Hit Points:

· First Level: 1d6+Constitution Score

· Per Level: 1d6+Constitution Modifier

Bonuses: +2 to hit when the enemy has been hit by another ally. +2 to hit if you act before your enemy in the initiative order. +1 to hit for every third level starting at level 3.

Find and Disarm: Rogues are very good at finding hidden objects. Declare that you are searching the room and roll a d20 (+1 for every other level, starting at the second). If the result is 18 or higher, you find any hidden compartments, doors or traps in the room. If you find a trap, you may roll again, and a successful roll disarms the trap.

Fighting Dirty: When you hit an enemy that has already been hit by one of your allies this turn, you deal an additional 2d6 damage.

Rules:

When making a check: Determine which attribute makes the most sense for the check you are attempting to make. Roll a d20, and add the appropriate modifier plus half your level. If the result is greater than or equal to the difficulty number set by the DM, you succeed. If it is lower, you fail.

Initiative: At the beginning of combat, all combatants roll a d20+Dexterity. Each participant acts in order of highest-to-lowest initiative score.

AC: Your AC is equal to 10+(Dexterity or Constitution, whichever is higher)+(armor).

Combat Turn: During your turn you may move up to six squares (or 30 feet) and either attack or use one of your class abilities.

Death: When you reach zero hit points you die.

Going up a Level: When you reach a number of experience points equal to your current level multiplied by one thousand, you go up a level. Your DM will tell you how much experience you’ve gained for any given session of play, but you should usually gain about 10% of the amount of experience you need to gain a level during a session.

Equipment

Armor

Type

Bonus

Cost

Heavy

AC +4

60gp

Medium

AC +3

30gp

Light

AC +2

15gp

None

AC +0

0gp

Weapons

Weapon

Damage

Cost

Longsword

1d8

10gp

Shortsword

1d6

5gp

Battle Axe

1d12

15gp

Hand Axe

1d4

3gp

Dagger

1d4

1gp

Bow & Arrows

1d6 (range 100ft)

10gp (arrows 1gp)

Spear

1d6 (range 50ft)

1gp

Misc. Gear

Gear

Price

Ten foot pole

1gp

Ten days iron rations

5gp

Caltrops

2gp

Hammer and pitons

3gp

Rope 50’

1gp

Sacks

2gp

Waterskin

1

Tinderbox

1

Mirror

1

Flask of Oil

2

Lantern

10

Torches (10)

1

Wine (1 liter)

10

Magic Items

There are two types of magic items: simple and wondrous. A simple magic item is simply a magically enhanced version of a typical item of the same type. So, a magic sword is just a sword, but better (typically providing a bonus to strike or damage). Magical armor is just armor, but better (providing a bonus to AC). For every bonus of +1 to either hit or AC, or +1d6 to damage, a magic item costs 1000gp above and beyond the price of the item itself.

Wondrous items are items that are incredible in some way, like a sack that is bigger on the inside than the outside, or a ring that makes you invisible (and then calls the ire of the Dark Lord of All Evil upon you). Those sorts of items are much more rare and generally priceless, the creation of magics far beyond the understanding of current mages. You will typically only find wondrous items in the treasure troves of monsters, and the DM will tell you what those sorts of items do.

Monsters

Monsters have stats something like those of a player character, but much more simplified. The only things you really need to know about a monster are its AC, hit points, its bonus to hit, and any sort of special abilities it might have. Below, you will find a few monsters you and your friends can fight.

Skeletons
AC 14
Hit: +1 (1d6+1 damage)
Hit Points: 10
Special Abilities: Unless pounded into dust, a defeated skeleton will rise again in 1d10 rounds with 2 fewer hit points each time. A skeleton can cause a character to fear it, making that character run away as fast as it can every round for 1d4 rounds unless the target makes a saving throw.

Goblins
AC 16
Hit: +2 (1d6+1 damage)
Hit Points: 5
Special Abilities: A goblin can make a saving throw as a reaction to being hit. If it makes the save, it is missed instead.

Orcs
AC 12
Hit: +2 (1d10+4 damage)
Hit Points: 15
Special Abilities: Orcs feed off of violence. If an orc kills a character, it may make an immediate attack against another creature beside it.

Kobolds
AC 18
Hit: -1 (1d4 damage)
Hit Points: 1
Special Abilities: Each round, if a kobold is still alive, it can call for help. 1d6 more kobolds come to its aid.

Ooze
AC 5
Hit: +1 (1d4 damage)
Hit Points: 10
Special Abilities: If the ooze is hit by a magical weapon, another ooze appears beside it.

The Simplest D&D I Could Make

2012-01-16T00:24:00.001-08:00

I made a one-page fantasy role-playing game.

Today I tried to do the impossible and got it mostly okay. I wanted to boil down Dungeons & Dragons to its most absolute basic. I wanted to design a version of the game that could be printed on a single page in a standard-sized novel, or 250 words. I think I did an okay job of it. I haven’t play-tested it, I haven’t even bothered to edit it, really. I just wanted to answer, for myself, what the essence of Dungeons & Dragons is. This is obviously super-simplified, and it would take at least a half-dozen pages of equal size to really sum up what Dungeons & Dragons should be, but this has helped me find my focus for what I think the game really is somewhat.

For instance, the game below doesn’t have any races in it. No elves, dwarves, halfings. Just the four core classes from the Basic Boxed Set. It also doesn’t have any feats, skills, backgrounds, themes, or other extraneous bits of crunch that make the game take up more space than it absolutely needs to. Are these things important to playing Dungeons & Dragons? I don’t think so, not really.

Still, I’ll let the game speak for itself some.

D&D in One Page (250 Words):

Roll 3d6 for each of: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Constitution. These are your attributes, or attribute scores.

Beside each write: (3-5) -2; (6-8) -1; (9-12) 0; (13-15) +1; (16-18) +2. These are your attribute modifier numbers. They are important.

Choose a Class: Fighter, Mage, Rogue, or Cleric.

Fighters have 1d10 plus their Constitution score hit points. They get to add half their level (and at least 1) to their rolls to hit enemies and their armor class.

Mages have 1d4 plus their constitution score hit points. Choose a number of spells (you or your DM decide their names and effects) equal to your intelligence modifier plus half your level.

Rogues have 1d6 plus their constitution score hit points. They get to roll a die to find traps or secret doors, or disarm traps. They add half their level to this roll.

Clerics have 1d8 plus their Constitution score hit points. They can heal an ally for 1d6 + half their level a number of times per day equal to their Wisdom modifier.

You have 100 gold with which to buy gear. The DM determines prices for gear, and what that gear does.

Rolling Dice: Determine which attribute makes most sense (DM chooses) and roll a d20 and add that attribute modifier. If the result is equal to or greater than ten (or in the case of combat, their AC), you succeed. If lower, you fail.

At 0 hit points, you die.

I don't own Dungeons & Dragons, and I’m making no claim to their rights, here. Obviously the game written above is only my interpretation of the simplest, most incredibly basic version of the game that can be distilled from thousands of pages of work by people far smarter and cooler than I am.

But if I were to build a modular game, it would be from a skeleton like this. It’s basically compatible with First Edition D&D, it has no mechanics that conflict with Third or Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons (with some tweaking for difficulty class and hit point total stuff), and it’s about as elegant as a system can get. Give me a few days and I’ll pound out a 6-page version of the same game, as modular and simple as I can.

The Essence of Dungeons & Dragons

2012-01-13T20:41:00.001-08:00

What makes D&D special?

Monte Cook’s job is not an easy one. While damned near any fan of Dungeons & Dragons could claim that designing the next iteration of the game is a dream job, what is currently expected of Mr. Cook and his team is nothing short of miracles. They need to design a game that goes to the very core of what the Dungeons & Dragons Experience is, and what makes that so difficult is that the D&D Experience is so many different things to so many different people. Boiling the various and sundry forms of D&D down to its basest essence is a practically impossible thing to do, but in order for Fifth Edition to deliver on its promises, the design team is going to need to.

So… What is the Essence of D&D? What makes Dungeons & Dragons the game it is? What is the thing that makes it distinct, different, amazing? Because honing in on that is going to be the thing that determines whether this next edition succeeds of fails.

Usually my blog is filled with piles of text pontificating on a point. Today, I’m asking for you to let me know what you think. What is the essence of D&D?

Let’s Talk About 5-E-X

2012-01-13T13:35:00.000-08:00

One of the things that seemed to stick out to people in my article regarding sexism, racism and ableism in the future art of Dungeons & Dragons was my mention of the Book of Erotic Fantasy. This was one of my favorite books during the 3.5 boom, because it offered something that no one else was doing with their products: it was offering a sex-positive look at the role of sex and sexuality in role-playing games, specifically in Dungeons & Dragons. It was, admittedly, campy, over-the-top, and deeply, deeply silly, but it was the sort of rare thing that doesn’t happen often enough in our hobby. It was a revolutionary book because it was an activist book.

Now, I’m sure the people who wrote it didn’t write it with activism in mind, but the fact of the matter remains it was a book about sex in a genre of books that never want to talk about sex. And that, to me, is a brilliant example of activism at its best. And it kicked up a hell of a fuss when it came out, enough so that the good folks at Wizards of the Coast had to include a provision against books like it from coming out ever again, effectively banning sexual content from Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. It was this ban that I was speaking to in my article, the fact that there are actually provisions in the GSL wording that preclude the inclusion of sexual content from Dungeons & Dragons books, but no such provision exists for hypersexualized depictions of women in those same books.

There are two solutions to this problem, and I think one of them is more workable than the other. The first solution is to insist that any inclusion of sexualized imagery for one gender must include equally sexualized imagery for all of the other genders. This is, sadly, impossible, on two fronts: there is no way you could make a sexualized image for every gender that exists, and there is no such thing as a hypersexualized male. Argue all you want that Conan the Barbarian is a sexy nearly-naked dude, but he’s not hypersexualized, he’s just a badass. Western culture doesn’t have hypersexualized images of men (with one possible exception, and it’s deeply debatable). They simply don’t exist, not in the same category that hypersexualized images of women do.

The other option is to strike down the rule and allow sex back into Dungeons & Dragons. Now, that may not seem like a solution at first glance, it certainly wouldn’t change the fact that depictions of women in role-playing games are disproportionately sexualized, but that change allows the designers, in-house, freelance and third party, to open the floor for discussion. It would allow designers to discuss the role sex and sexuality have in our games, and it would actually serve to point out some of these issues within the context of the game text itself.

With the rule as it currently stands, there is no way to address the subject of feminine objectification within the text of the game. That is left to people like Tracy Hurley and myself, who speak to a limited subsection of D&D players. My traffic on this blog maxes out at about 300 people a month. Even reaching the few thousand who read my Open Letter, even reaching the tens of thousands that Tracy reaches on a regular basis, barely scratches the surface of the D&D community, as there are literally millions of people who play this game. By being able to openly talk about sex from within the game itself, we have an opportunity to reach, y’know, all of them.

But then, that’s a part of the problem for the guys behind the desks at Hasbro. By talking about sex from the vantage of the game books themselves, we’re actually talking to a huge swath of players about a thing that Wizards of the Coast doesn’t really want to be associated with. Sex is one of the major American cultural taboos, and while that is certainly working to keep the patriarchal oppression of women’s bodies alive and well, it also means that challenging it comes with the potential for damage to your reputation. As the company that makes Monopoly, Hasbro can’t really have one of their imprints running off and talking about anal plugs and nipple clamps when there are kids reading. Moreover, the threat of speaking directly to the subject of sex in role-playing games is so great that Wizards of the Coast felt it necessary to keep other companies from doing it in association with their product. Which is how we got to where we are now.

The question, I guess, is why? Why is it so difficult to talk about sex in D&D? Why is this a discussion we can’t have openly and publically? The short answer is that it might make some people uncomfortable. There are people who just don’t like talking about sex and sexuality, and it’s those people that Wizards of the Coast is catering to by implementing rules that restrict companies from publishing works that include those topics. There are even more people who don’t want to include sex or sexuality in their games, and I understand that and empathize with it. But that’s no reason to keep that product from being published. I’ve never actually used anything in the Book of Erotic Fantasy. I read it, and I think it’s incredibly valuable to the culture of the hobby, but my games don’t tend to have a lot of sex in them, and the games that DO have a lot of sex in them usually Fade to Black before anything graphic happens. But that’s a choice players should be making on their own, as a group and individually.

Someone asked me on Twitter today what ESRB rating I would give Dungeons & Dragons. My response was that the ESRB is deeply flawed for vilifying sex over violence. Which is a rubbish answer, so I also said “PG-13 with options up to NC-17,” which has nothing at all to do with the ESRB, so it’s still a rubbish answer, if slightly more useful to the topic at hand. Dungeons & Dragons is a game chock full of fantasy violence, but there is rarely any graphic content. You never get to see the fountains of blood pouring out of your enemies, or have to hear the sickening crunch of their bones under your weapons, so most of the violence has a distinctly clean PG-13 feel to it. And while the women are generally clad to appeal to men, and are posed ridiculously to ensure that they are showing off their secondary sex characteristics, they’re never naked, the sexism is generally pretty tame, and there is never any talk about sex or sexuality at all.

And that’s what they’re going for. That’s what they want, because it’s the age range in which their game will sell the best. 12-40 year old men are Wizards of the Coast’s key demographic, and they need to keep that younger group in mind when putting their books together.

Third-party game designers don’t. They’re able to take risks. They’re able to say things that the people at Wizards of the Coast can’t. And while I’m certain WotC got some nasty feedback regarding things like the Book of Erotic Fantasy, I can’t see anyone blaming the company for that product existing, and I can’t think that having books like it is at all a detriment to the game itself. Talking about sex is something we need to be doing as a community, because doing so opens the door to talking about gender role issues at the game table. And that, I think, is a pursuit worth risking some reputation over.

Why WotC Shouldn’t Sell PDFs for Old Editions

2012-01-13T01:53:00.001-08:00

And if They’re Any Good at this Game, They Won’t

I’ve seen this bandied about pretty well all week as people are talking about D&D Next on the twitter- and blogosphere: there is a set of players who would like Wizards of the Coast to release PDFs of First, Second and Third Edition material because that material is basically unavailable through any other medium. The argument goes that by putting this material on the internet, Wizards of the Coast will be making money that they would not already be making, and that it doesn’t cost the company anything to have those books available for download, so… why not?

Those players are obviously not in the games industry.

Wizards of the Coast isn’t putting out PDF versions of older modules because, as a business, they want to make money. Now, you might think that putting PDF versions of an old game wouldn’t cost them anything, and in direct costs that’s probably almost true (you still have to pay for the space to hold them, the developers to make the store, the man hours to make the file transfers, more man hours if in-house PDFs of that product don’t already exist, maintenance, quality control, customer service…). It’s not a small undertaking, for certain, but it would be worth it because of all the money they’d make, right?

Except that they’ve already got a horse in this race, and that horse ain’t First Edition.

Every dollar spent on the PDF downloads is a dollar that effectively isn’t going to the books that Wizards of the Coast is paying a lot of money to print right now. By providing that material in the form of a downloadable book, they’re competing with themselves, which is about the worst thing you can do in business, especially if you’re competing with your own flagship product. It’s the same reason that WotC could never support both D&D Fourth Edition and D&D Third. If people were contentedly buying the edition with which they were most comfortable, they would be less likely to try the new edition, the edition that had just finished costing them many, many dollars. If they decided to cater to the OSR guys and put out First Edition books online, those players would be happy with that. And having happy customers is awesome, except when it means that those players are so happy they’re not buying your other, newer, more expensive products.

Now, obviously they’re not going to get all of the OSR guys to buy into Fourth Edition D&D, but if there were a readily available source of First Edition books on the market, the number of OSR guys they managed to convert to the new system would drop dramatically, and that’s really, really bad for their hot new game. In order to ensure that the new edition is going to get as much push as it can, Wizards of the Coast needs to do it’s best to eliminate the previous edition from shelves. This usually works by taking the game out of print, reducing the quantity of new books to zero while the demand for those books eats up all of the available copies. It’s a strategy that works, because once there are no 3.5 Player’s Handbooks kicking around, when it becomes obvious that you won’t be able to find the resources you need to play the game you’re most familiar with, the chances that you will try a new game (perhaps a game with the same name?) increase in a huge way.

Pathfinder sort of gummed up the works on this, though. One of the reasons Pathfinder has done as remarkably well as it has is that it continues to put our resources for a game that people are more comfortable and familiar with. It’s a strategy that’s been used successfully by Kevin Siembieda for decades, and it seems to be doing really well by Paizo. See, when someone is looking for a 3.5 Player’s Handbook, and there’s no such thing on the market, I can say “You’re not going to find one, and if you do, you’re not going to find one cheap. Maybe you can your crew should give Fourth Edition a try.” Except that, now, if someone is looking for a 3.5 Player’s Handbook, I can point to the much more familiar system in Pathfinder.

It’s interesting to note, though, that the name still matters. I have a lot of people come in looking for 3.5 Player’s Handbooks that won’t even consider Pathfinder because “It’s not D&D.” Obviously this comes down to a lack of understanding on the part of the customer, because Pathfinder IS D&D, but without that name recognition, selling the same product in a different wrapper loses something. For those players, it is still easier to sell them on the Fourth Edition of the game.

If there were 3.5 Player’s Handbooks kicking around, I wouldn’t be able to sell Pathfinder or Fourth Edition to anyone who wanted a 3.5 Player’s Handbook. Both games would sit on my shelf for a very, very long time because people are generally hesitant to try something new without being pushed.

The same general principle applies to putting D&D First Edition books on the internet. If that material is available to you, what is going to push you to try Fifth Edition D&D? Curiosity, maybe, but if there is anything about the game that you dislike, it is much more likely you’re going to go back to downloading the version of the game you play now, and Wizards of the Coast will have just spent a lot of money printing book-shaped paperweights.

Now, this isn’t meant to convert you. It won’t. If you’re a die-hard fan of one version of D&D over all others, knowing that there’s a damned fine business reason that Wizards of the Coast doesn’t want to sell you old editions isn’t going to get you to rush out and buy the next one. But it’s important to know that what you’re asking for is the business equivalent of self cannibalism. Sure, you stop the uncomfortable feeling of hunger for a while, but only at the cost of eating your right arm…

Expanding Thoughts on the Death of Fourth

2012-01-12T15:14:00.000-08:00

SKILLS
I think I might have caught some people a little off guard with my statements about skills in my breakdown of why I believe Fourth Edition failed as a commercial undertaking. I suggested that, while a unified skill system was a great idea for Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons, I felt that the implementation of that same system in Fourth Edition D&D was a huge mistake. Here’s why.

Fourth Edition D&D plays a lot like First Edition D&D in that the focus of the game is on combat encounters. Fourth Edition departs from First Edition in its handling of non-combat aspects of the game. Where First Edition took a very hands-off approach to the less-than-fighty bits, Fourth has evolved the intricate skill system put in place during the Third iteration of the game, and I believe that’s problematic in how the game delivers on its focus. See, if you’re looking for the essence of First Edition D&D, if your goal is to build a game that feels more like First Edition than any edition since, you need to make the players’ decision-making count more than their skill checks.

See, when you’re playing a game of First Edition D&D, you don’t have skills to fall back on, and you’re forced to go through dungeons terrified of everything. You have to poke the pile of stones because it might be the home of a carrion crawler. You have to make sure you’ve explored every nook in the room, or you might miss out on some keen treasure, and that’s not as simple as rolling a perception check, that requires describing what it is you’re doing, and if you miss something, the DM has every right to just sit on his or her hands and giggle. This paranoia, this creativity, is part of what gave the First Edition game a lot of its oomph. Soon enough, you had a party decked out with ten foot poles and a bunch of critters to check the halls for you (we preferred gnomes, because we’re bastards).

The only character in a First Edition game with skills was a thief, and oftentimes those skill scores were so incredibly low you couldn’t depend on them. If you had the ability to try picking a lock two or three times, your DM wasn’t rolling often enough on the wandering monster tables.

Fourth Edition’s skill system, in particular the Skill Challenge system, allows players to bypass fun in favor of more dice rolls. I have had a few situations in which Skill Challenges were genuinely good, but the vast majority of the time, they’re just multiple-success skill checks with some extra description attached, and no one’s really having a good time because the real fun is the fightin’.

There is no compelling reason why the skill system as it currently exists in D&D Fourth Edition needs to be in the game at all. In Third Edition, it was solving a problem, and the multitude of skill checks in that system made sense and worked with everything else we knew about the game. In D&D Fourth Edition, it seems to be a dated holdover from a previous game, tacked on with little regard for why it’s even there.

The problem that was solved in Third Edition was that, in a system that could do absolutely anything, a system needed to exist that would accommodate non-combat issues as they cropped up. In Third Edition, they invariably would crop up and skill checks made for a solid tool to help deal with them. Third Edition was a game without borders, really, a game where you could move from world-spanning politics to dungeon crawling in the space of a half hour, and you’d need a diverse toolbox to be able to appropriately deal with that.

When D&D Fourth Edition shifted its focus to a more combat-centric model, it lost much of the need for an intricate and detailed skill system. What you did between fights was rarely as important as the fight itself and would often feel like unnecessary filler, the boring bits between stabbing and more stabbing. The thing that held the stabbing together. The skills that would have made for an interesting addition to D&D Fourth Edition were removed because of their seeming unimportance: profession and craft skills, things that would have given your characters something worth doing outside of their kill-stab-rest-kill-stab routine, were left off the skill list. Why? Because those skills didn’t really contribute to what the focus of the game was meant to be: skulking around dungeons, beating up monsters and taking their stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s room for skills to exist in D&D Fourth Edition in a meaningful way, I just don’t think that the system they used was the system that best fit the return to dungeon-crawly goodness. It felt like an afterthought, and while they certainly streamlined the system and fixed some glaring issues with it, they were still using the system in an environment in which it made very little sense.

FEATS

My problem with feats in Fourth Edition D&D is that, compared to powers, they are utterly and completely forgettable. There aren’t many feats that stand out and go “Hey, look at me, I’m something flavorful, interesting and complex that will help you define your character in a cool new direction,” which is a direction that would have made them far more playable, would have opened more design space, and would have made the system feel like a natural addition to Fourth Edition instead of a tacked on Third Edition afterthought.

Feats suffer from much the same problem as skills in that they were brought into Fourth Edition design with no real concept of where they were going to fit, how they were going to make the game better. In many ways, feats read like generic powers that are… well, bad. Some of them are so necessary you’d might as well not make a character without them (the expertise feats), while others are so distinctly bad that I sincerely believe they were included to pad the page count.

In Third Edition, feats were what powers are now. They were the cool tricks that made your character distinctive and awesome. In Fourth Edition, there’s really no need for them. Even necessary feats like the expertise feats can be fixed by adding a ubiquitous +1 to hit somewhere in character progression, and then we don’t need them anymore. There isn’t a problem in Fourth Edition that feats (as they exist) fix, and that makes them feel lame-duck and dated. If feats had been interesting, flamboyant expressions of character, they would fix a deep problem Fourth Edition has, but as they are, they’re flat, boring and entirely underwhelming compared to their big brother, powers.

A better system would have been a point-buy Merit and Flaw system built into the core of the game. These have existed in role-playing games for decades, and they provide an interesting direction for character personalization that D&D Fourth Edition was desperately hoping for. The problem comes, again, from the strange homogeny that Fourth Edition sought in its design strategy, the idea that nothing in the game can break the rules. Merit and Flaw systems are ripe for character optimization junkies, because they provide tools with which to fiddle for the best possible combination of Merits that Rock and Flaws that Don’t Matter. It would have been a difficult design to fit into the vision Wizards of the Coast apparently had for the game, but creating a homogenous merit and flaw system that added something different and interesting to the game would have been a far cry better than copying a watered down version of a system you’ve already obsoleted with other designs.

AUTOPSY

It seems people are confused as to why I believe Fourth Edition died. I thought I made it pretty clear, but I’m going to reiterate my point as clearly as possible for my readers, just in case:

Fourth Edition died because it stopped selling books. It stopped selling books because the designers of the game were no longer publishing anything that was at all interesting. I feel that this is a failing on the part of the designers to exploit the cavernous amounts of design space available in Fourth Edition D&D.

I Wear Black Robes Now. Black Robes are Cool.

2012-01-11T21:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I published a post about how I want some more equality in my D&D. Everyone was with me about the depiction of female characters and representing a greater spectrum of skin tones in the art. Where I seemed to lose people was in the idea that people with disabilities could be cool. Apparently, to be worth looking at in a piece of game art, you must be able-bodied, hale and healthy.

My buddy Raistlin here disagrees.

See, Raistlin isn’t exactly Mr. Healthypants. He was a sickly kid, got picked on a lot, and grew up to take a test that destroyed his body and made him a physical wreck of a man. He was weak, he was slow, he had a wracking cough for which he took foul-smelling medicines and which often had him spitting blood into a handkerchief.

Then – and this is important – he killed the Dragon Goddess of Evil. By himself.

Now, maybe that doesn’t mean a lot to you. Maybe, like my friend M, you think that Raistlin was a creepy wimp, undeserving of respect. Maybe, like my friend J, you think that Raistlin belongs in the written fluff of the game, the novels and the short stories, but people like him shouldn’t appear in the art. Personally, I think Raistlin is one of the most beloved characters from the early era of D&D fiction because he is a kid with disabilities, an underdog who came back and proved to be the most powerful of his companions despite his afflictions. He found ways around them, found strength in them, and in so doing became a total fucking badass.

I’m not saying that we should have rules for multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy in the game. I just see no reason why a character with one of those conditions couldn’t be a total badass in the context of the game’s art. I just see no reason why there shouldn’t be an image of a kick-ass wizard with Lou Gehrig’s (I think we can all agree that Stephen Hawking is the most badass wizard in the world right now).

The arguments brought forth so far are thus: people who are differently abled would be terrible player-characters in a role-playing game; it is already difficult to find cool pictures of player character options in the books and that the inclusion of differently abled individuals reduces the number of cool pictures available; D&D isn’t about the real world, it’s about idealized visions of yourself; and the effort would lead to trivialization and mockery. I’m going to address these things one at a time, but so far as I’m concerned, the only actual argument, the only thing on that list that is not veiled ableism, is the concern regarding trivialization.

There are two assumptions made in the first two arguments that are deeply disturbing to me: “the differently abled are entirely incompetent,” and “the differently abled cannot be cool.” These assumptions are, honestly, at the heart of ableism, and it makes my heart hurt to know that some folks’ knee-jerk reaction to inclusion of the differently abled is to assert their inability and apparent lack of awesome. It is deeply upsetting that these sorts of assertions normally go entirely unchallenged.

It is entirely possible for a differently abled individual to be entirely, 100% fucking incredible. It happens all the time, and you are well within your rights to punch anyone who says otherwise directly in their genitals.
The issue of trivialization is one that I’m sensitive to, though apparently not as keenly as I should be (I was taken to task for a few remarks that were trivializing, and I don’t mind admitting I’m feeling sheepish about that today), and it is an admittedly difficult thing to work through. The issue doesn’t really revolve around the post as it was written, as I was specifically speaking to the art of the game and purposefully avoiding talking about the game’s text, but on re-reading I can see how it could appear I was discussing adding differently abled characters to the game in a text/rules sense.

The path to addressing inclusion of the differently abled is a bit treacherous, as there’s disagreement within the communities of the differently abled about how the topic should be treated, and any action taken on it is probably to offend someone. That doesn’t at all mean that we shouldn’t make the effort, though, and it is imperative that we get incredible people working on it. While it is going to require some tricky public relations work, I think that including anyone and everyone in your game is always a worthwhile endeavor.

An Open Letter to D&D Next’s Art Department

2012-01-11T20:40:00.000-08:00

Everyone is talking about what features they want to see in the next version of Dungeons & Dragons. Personally, though, I understand that I will very likely not see my pet mechanics in the core of the game, or even in expansions, because I’m one of those crazy kids who grew up lurking on The Forge and has some pretty fucked up ideas about games, gaming, and game design. Also, I don’t think I have anything useful to add to the dialogue until I see the direction the design is going in. I can guess, and I can suggest a direction that I think would be beneficial to the game, but I can’t really improve a design I’ve never seen. I will be much more concerned with making D&DV the best it can be and much less concerned with pigeonholing it to fit whatever I think the essence of D&D is.

So instead, I’m going to talk to another very important part of the Dungeons & Dragons experience. I’m going to talk about art. Which is a pretty hefty step away from what I normally look at, because there are times when I write enormous posts (like this one) that don’t even have pictures. I’m very much a wall-of-text blogger, so it might seem a little unorthodox that I would be as worried about the direction of the art as I am. But I am very, very, deeply concerned about the direction of the art in this game, and I would like to invite the art department, particularly those in decision-making positions, to pay close attention to what I am about to say next:

Dungeons & Dragons is still seen as a sexist game, and you are the only people in the world who can fix that.

It’s not just sexist, though. It’s sexist, it’s racist, and it’s ableist in its artistic representation of people. Now, I’ve heard all the arguments against having people of color and women depicted in the art of a fabtasy role-playing game, and I think they’re all hooey. And to be fair, there has been headway made. I have seen progress, especially from the chainmail bikini era of game art.

And I’m not accusing anyone of purposefully excluding people of color, the differently abled or women from their depictions of heroic figures. Anyone who is actively trying to exclude or belittle people from their game is a dickbag, and it is very likely that will come through in the game itself (Byron Hall, I’m looking at you). What is happening is primarily blindness to the issue. So I am going to make a request, and it is my sincere hope that you, the art department responsible for the look and feel of D&D Next will take it under advisement.

First:

Women make up 52% of the world’s population. They can make up 50% of the people in your game’s art. Moreover, the exact number of pictures in which a woman is standing in an Impossible Position is 0. For every piece of art submitted, have the artist attempt to pose him or herself in the positions of the people depicted. If either person’s position is painful, that pose is very likely held by a female character whose breasts and buttocks are pressed out to increase her sexiness.

It has been very well established that sexiness is not something that Dungeons & Dragons needs. If there were room for sex in D&D, the Book of Erotic Fantasy would have been updated to Fourth Edition. You specifically precluded the possibility of that happening in your licensing for a reason. If sexiness is a factor in how D&D art is chosen, something has gone terribly wrong.

Second:

Human skin comes in a lot of colors from black to white to yellow to red to brown. Human features come in a huge range of styles and types. I understand that we’re playing in a fantasy world where the various skin tones in reality may not be as prevalent. But I also know that in said fantasy world all of the monks look Asian. Even the elves.

Have some fun drawing black dudes in mage robes or brown chicks in plate mail. Evenly distribute the skin tones across the whole of your books, and the problem of racism mostly disappears (except, y’know, the “Goblins are evil because they’re green,” issue). And this doesn’t just go for the humans, guys. Elves obviously have some skin tone variation going on (Oh, hey Drizzt.). Dwarves can go from chestnut brown to fair skinned. I love the idea of charcoal-skinned halflings and a range of skin-tones for half-orcs from phthalo green to honeydew. All this does is make the art more interesting, and add depth that might otherwise be missing from the depiction of the game world.

Third:

Ableism is a tough thing to address in a role-playing game. I get that. It’s tough to be a bad-ass knight if you can’t walk. Being an amputee isn’t cool… Wait a fucking minute, yeah it is! Ahab lost a leg to a whale and was a total badass. Bran Stark is paralyzed from the waist down and he’s one of the most interesting characters in A Song of Ice and Fire. Rick Grimes loses a hand and goes batfuck crazy, but he’s one of the toughest assholes to survive the zombie apocalypse.

Making the differently abled a part of your game world is easier than it sounds. Hell, one of my players built a character whose hand had been cut off and some asshole was out there wearing it around his neck. It didn’t come with any penalties or anything, it was just a flavor thing that made him a total badass, and it was all description. Characters that are Big Damn Heroes despite having challenges above and beyond the norm are awesome, and should be shown to be so in game art.

Fourth:

This is sort of a minor point, but it’s one I’d like to make anyway: having characters of various sizes and shapes is not at all unrealistic, nor does it reduce the heroic aspect of the fantasy. Look at any successful fantasy series ever, and you’re going to find a bunch of different body shapes, because different body shapes are something we understand, something we _get_. Moreover, it doesn’t hurt to reduce the impact of stereotypical, hyper-sexualized imagery in the media you’re creating. Give me some pudgy mages and some scrawny fighters, please.

All I’m looking for, what I’m really asking you for, is to look critically at the message your art sends to the people who will be looking at it. ALL of the people who will be looking at it. Ask yourself, if you were in the shoes of a feminist, what would you think of this illustration? If you lived in a wheelchair, how would you feel about seeing nothing but able-bodied folk?

And you can argue, if you like, that this is just the opinion of a privileged white guy. Because, y’know, it is. I’m not a woman, I’m not a minority, and my only disability is depression. But I’m just the voice for a silent riot, guys. There are others like me, and there are some who have made a great show of picking apart the inherent sexism, racism and ableism of your art. And we’re speaking for a much larger group of people you will never hear from, but who feel uncomfortable playing your game because it depicts women, minorities and the differently abled as something less than the able-bodied white dudes on page after page.

Sincerely,
Kristoffer Hansen
Games Manager
Warp One Comics and Games

Further Reading:
Go Make Me a Sandwich
Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor

Why Fourth Edition Died

2012-01-09T22:54:00.001-08:00

So, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition has been announced, and the news has struck the sort of reaction I expected it to. People are hoping for this feature or that. Others are expressing their dismay at the fact that a new edition is coming so soon on the heels of D&D: Essentials. Yet others are suggesting that this heralds the end of Dungeons & Dragons, that a new edition will make the already split RPG community even more fractious. There are yet others that have met the news with incredible, soul-crushing apathy. So, there’s that.

To be honest, I’m not even really sure what to say about the development. I could talk about how much 4E and Essentials stuff I have on my shelves right now. Or I could talk about what I want to see from the new D&D. Or I could talk about what I think would be the best possible direction for the game to take (which is quite different from what I want to see, truth be told). I could talk about a lot of things, but I think what I’m going to talk about today is design space, design philosophy, and why Fourth Edition failed.

See, we wouldn’t need a Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons if Fourth Edition was given the sort of design team it deserves. And by that, I don’t mean folks like Monte Cook. Mr. Cook is an incredible designer and makes good game, and for that I think he deserves a stalwart salute and as many dollars as the industry can throw at him. Under his guidance, Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons revitalized the industry, but his is not the sort of hand a design like Fourth Edition needs. Fourth Edition needs someone like Mark Rosewater. Fourth Edition needs someone like Keith Baker. Fourth Edition needs someone like Kenneth Nagle.

You will note that all three of those names are attached to people who design cards. Two of the, Rosewater and Nagle, are Magic: The Gathering designers. Baker is responsible for Gloom, which is incredible and does something no other card game did before he came up with it. This isn’t to say that I think Fourth Edition needs to be treated like a card game, far from it. It needs to be treated in a way that only men of this design tack can treat a game.

The problem with Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, arguably the biggest problem that any edition of D&D has ever faced, is that the people who were designing it didn’t know a goddamned thing about Design Space. I’m not talking about James Wyatt or Mike Mearls. I’m talking about the Matt Sernett’s of the world, the Rob Heinsoo’s. The guys who make Power books and the guys who put out new campaign settings. The people who are the life’s blood of a role-playing game production.

See, Wyatt and Mearls put together a hell of a game. Say what you will about it, it is impossible to deny that the thing was well designed. There are hundreds of moving pieces, thousands of possible combinations, just in the first book, and those things come together beautifully. In many ways, the core Fourth Edition was like the first Magic: The Gathering set, or Gloom. It did things no one had ever done in role-playing games before, and it made an incredible show of it. What’s more, the framework left behind by that first book was amazing. There was design space all over the game, and it was waiting to be plumbed by talented designers. The first showing we had of that was the second Player’s Handbook, where we started to play around with how powers fit together, and how classes were built. There was an incredible and untouched plaza of design waiting to happen around races, with racial feats and racial powers barely touched. There was room left open for the creation and invention of magic items, and the powers framework lent itself to customization beautifully. There was a ton of space in the way monsters were put together (so much so that I found myself drawn to concepts like the Fourthcore Bestiary because of innovative aura designs – understand that for a moment… AURA designs; one tiny little speck in the whole of the game). Seriously, though, let’s take a look at some of the things that weren’t properly explored in Fourth Edition’s brief history:

POWERS

We saw a lot of books filled with powers, and one book that actually did something neat with them. Having loads of powers doesn’t make for customization, having powers that work in strange ways makes for customization. Understand that the only interesting powers in the whole of the game were those in the Player’s Handbook and those in the Player’s Handbook 3. The originals and the _only_ set of powers that were at all different or strange. One could argue for the powers from Essentials, but seriously, fuck one. The powers presented in those books were half-assed concessions to the players lost in the Pathfinder Exodus, and nothing more. If you wanted to make powers interesting, here’s a one-sentence answer to the problem: Magic cards are still interesting.

Seriously, and this is incredibly important, Magic design is where the D&D crew should have looked for more interesting power designs. Not the cards themselves, mind, but the philosophy behind those cards. Magic cards constantly break the rules of the game they’re played in. That’s the whole point of the game. What the designers of D&D tried to do was create a homogenized environment in which none of the powers effectively broke the rules, and that’s really the wrong way to build a game that’s made out of a bunch of crazy powers. You need each power to break the rules of the game in an interesting way that helps you win that game. Then you need to do the same thing to the monsters they’re fighting.

Moreover, there is an element of randomness in Magic: The Gathering that D&D really could have used sometimes. It had this when wizards were forced to memorize their spells each day, because the wizard would try to guess at which spells were going to be needed and prepare those ones in advance. Magic solves this by randomizing your hand. D&D4E solves it by not solving it at all. There was no need to pore over your powers, because after a short nap, you’d have them all back again, right as rain. This isn’t the way to go into this territory at all. There is nothing about this that’s suspenseful or fun. Sure, players like getting all their powers back at once, but what the players want and what is good for the game is seldom the same thing.

The design space here is mind-boggling. Off the top of my head: a whole list of Encounter Powers that could be made better by giving up a Daily; Encounter Powers that take two full rounds to use; Daily Powers that change when in certain circumstances (underground, flying, in the sunlight, whatever); a list of At-Will powers you can give up using for the rest of the encounter to make way better; a list of At-Will powers that are as strong as Daily powers, but use up the character’s healing surges as a cost; Lifetime powers, powers that can only ever be used once, ever; uncontrollable powers that go off in certain circumstances, but the player has no control over them; come-back powers that allow you to do incredible things for the cost of an action point; counter-powers that allow a player to stop another player or NPC’s powers from going off as an immediate interrupt; mind-drain powers that steal another character’s powers for a turn, or treat that power as spent; dramatic powers that allow you to influence story events in subtle (or, for dailies, not-so-subtle ways)… Seriously, this is just what I came up with in the time it took me to write this list… I’m sure some of them have been done, or variations on them, but I know a bunch of others have never been touched, and that’s a damned shame.

RACES

One of the things I was most looking forward to in the creation of D&D4E was the promise that races were going to get a lot more attention than they had gotten previously. Elves could be wicked-cool at being rangers, sure, but they could also be wicked-cool at being, y’know, Elves. And I rather liked that idea, being one of those strange kids that enjoyed playing D&D when Elf was a class. We were promised feats, Paragon Paths (which is sort of a suck concept, but I’ll get onto that in a bit), epic destinies, and I thought this was going to be a big deal when they were talking about it.

Turns out, it was just one more path towards optimization, when it could have been so much more. Again, the amount of design space left open by more focus on races and their interactions is staggering. One very simple answer is to make race-specific classes using some of the design space we have available in the POWERS section, but that’s hardly where the buck stops on racial design space.

I mean, design isn’t just a matter of rules, however much that may be unapparent from the way Wizards of the Coast has handled it. A lot of it comes from flavor, and rather than focus on any given flavorful concept (even their own Points of Light flavor, the thing they’ve touted around for so long without actually exploring it at all), the Fourth Edition answer has been Add More Races. Which is problematic, because there are only so many places one can go in that direction, and this trip has ended with People Made of Crystals, which is fucking stupid. And no, the right answer doesn’t lie in making subraces, because the gods alone know I can’t put up with another Kender. No, the answer lies in making interesting and powerful cultures for the people of already established races, and building off of that.

Eberron proved this in Three Point Five. You take elves, just normal everyday, boring fucking elves, and you give them a continent that they rule, and suddenly we have the Undying Court and crazy Inca-inspired magic, and weird-ass traditions and rules that affect elves still living in Khorvair. And we haven’t changed elves at all. They’re still elves, they still have the same bonuses and flaws, they’re still the same elves we know and love and/or hate, nothing has changed about them, but they are entirely, completely different. Same goes for Baker’s treatment of the Drow. Same goes for Weis and Hickman’s decision to put dwarves on horseback and have them ride around nomadically. Same is true of every human culture in every fantasy setting ever written.

And it sort of looked like backgrounds were going to be how this worked itself out, but they backgrounds were generally pretty lame unless they were overpowered schlock from a single campaign that wormed its way into the Character Builder. And then themes looked like they were going to get this figured out, but themes never took off the way they should have. To be perfectly honest, themes are the sorts of things you want in a core book, not a campaign setting, and they’ve never really gotten the spotlight time they deserve.

CLASSES

This is one of the most prominent complaints about Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons in my store: it’s not as customizable as players want it to be. Your fighter has a type, and deviating from that type usually means that you are going to be crippled in combat. There are a few good generic powers for each class, but the best usually focus around the template’s specific niche abilities. And that’s just bad game design, guys.

I’m going to, again, look at Magic: The Gathering as a good example of how to do much the same thing. See, the point isn’t to make certain abilities work better with certain templates, the point is to make a bunch of abilities that work on their own, and have a level of synergy that make it desirable to play those things together. I can build a green deck out of whatever the hell I want, but if I’m trying to ramp into a host of big beaters, I’d best be looking for some Llanowar Elves and some Birds of Paradise, ne? There is nothing saying I can’t play Birds of Paradise in any other deck, I certainly can, but if I’m looking to ramp mana, I put birds in my deck.

The same is true of powers in D&D. Every power should work well on its own and do something valuable that the rest of the party can build on, but if you build synergies into your powers, your players will find those things on their own, and they will build their characters according to whatever build they want to make.

The funny thing about this is that it changes exactly nothing. You’re still making templates for your fighters, you’re just not making the powers exclusive to those templates and letting the players suss them out for themselves.

Moreover, there are a lot of things you can do with the class system that simply were not done. Again, I point to racial classes. Again, I point to the way powers were never filled out the way they should have been. And I also point to the fact that there has never been a martial controller. And I also point to the fact that there is a nearly endless number of possible combinations of power-types and class archetypes. They’ve covered the basics, sure, and having an endless number of classes isn’t really all that important, but having a lot more customizability in your classes and having those class combinations rotate around the niche system you’ve established would go a long way towards building a much more playable, designable game.

And with themes, paragon paths, and epic destinies at your disposal, you have a lot of room to build in extra customization as you build your game. Paragon paths in particular were an unplumbed font of design space that could have really changed the history of the game. Prestige Classes defined Third Edition D&D, and the amount of effort that went into creating a whole bloody host of them is evident in the fact that there’s a whole bloody host of them. The number of prestige classes available to a player of 3.5 D&D is “too many to choose from.” Paragon paths, not so much.

And Epic Destinies… Oh man, would I have done the Epic Destiny entirely differently. That may actually require a different post, so let’s not talk about that just yet. Let’s just say “FATE,” and move on.

SKILLS

One of the biggest advances Third Edition D&D made to the game was the introduction of a universal skill system. It wasn’t pretty, and it definitely had its problems, but it made the game flow in a totally different way than any edition previous. And while I don’t think that the introduction of the skill system made Fourth Edition any better (I actually think it made it quite a bit worse), it was a damned fine piece of gaming tech, and I understand why they kept it around.

Having played a bunch of First Edition D&D this year, I think they made a rather incredibly horrible mistake by including skills in the game at all. I often tell people that I think Fourth Edition D&D plays more like First Edition D&D than any edition between them, and I still think that’s very true. The difference, the place where I find Fourth boring, is between battles. In First Edition D&D, you had to be on your toes, you had to be thinking, you had to move carefully from room to room and solve all sorts of insane problems just to survive. And that doesn’t involve much in the way of skill rolls from anyone but the thief, and most of the time your thief isn’t good enough to make any of his or her checks anyway. Skills, as they are presented in Fourth Edition D&D, are a crutch used to hand-wave away problems solving and role-playing. In Third Edition, they absolutely made sense, and they added something great to the game. In Fourth Edition, all they did was make it dull.

And the designers couldn’t have possibly known that going in, and I don’t at all blame them for the choice of including a skill system, but I don’t think I will ever play with skills as they are written in Fourth Edition ever again.

Again, this idea might require an entire post to talk about in any sort of comprehensive way, so I think I’m going to move on to…

FEATS

When I first wrote this, I actually completely forgot about feats, which should give you an idea of how important I think they are to the Fourth Edition of D&D. Like skills, feats were a defining feature of Third Edition D&D. They were, in a word, incredible. In many ways, they allowed you to do things that were, in Fourth Edition, performed via powers. Cleave and Great Cleave were powerhouses of efficient fighting. The meta-magic feats gave magic-users a powerful advantage. Feats meant something to Third Edition.

In Fourth Edition, they’re basically an afterthought, which is a damnable shame, because the amount of design space opened up by feats is insane. I mean, when you break feats down, they’re just a talent tree, with feats building off of other feats to create more powerful combinations down the line. The only feats worth taking half the time, though, were Toughness and the Wintertouched/Lasting Frost combo.

And that is really, deeply stupid.

Like much of what I’ve been talking about today, feats are a layer of character creation that provides a powerful range of customization tools that can be used to make your game better. It’s these layers that add to the fun of building a character, and they’re the sort of thing from which an entire path of feats can be built. When utilized properly (providing actual, wicked-ass bonuses to the people who take them) bonus/flaw systems can be incredible.

What I guess I’m getting at here is that every layer of the D&D game has a bunch of really wicked design space that is laying open for us to tinker with. Class, race, skills, feats, themes, backgrounds, whatever. And the fact that it hasn’t been tinkered with in any meaningful way is really deeply disappointing.

COMBAT

Combat in Fourth Edition D&D is a fucking mess.

I say this with all the love in the world for the designers and the game itself: it is a fucking mess and needs heavy reworking to make it marginally playable. This is especially true of any level over 12, which is entirely disappointing because much of the system was designed to solve the Sweet Spot problem. Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition’s sweet spot is levels 1-10.

Combat takes too long. Characters, both the NPCs and the Player Characters, have too many hit points. Figuring out tactics and powers is a time consuming and mind-numbingly dull process. After twelve rounds, even interesting bad guys become a slog and I have players checking their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

There are a few problems with combat in Fourth Edition, but none of those problems are problems of Design Space. Still, they are worth mentioning in the context of “this is what killed Fourth Edition D&D,” so I’ll be taking a brief look at them.

I’m going to make this as simple as I can: when you make a game, include all of the things you need to play in the box. If your game needs dice, include dice. If you game needs miniatures, include miniatures. If your game requires a grid map, you’d best include a grid map. The creeping reliance of Dungeons & Dragons on miniatures is perverse, commercialistic and sad. You didn’t need miniatures to play D&D1E, and you could certainly get away without them in D&D2. It was in D&D3, with the invention of “flanking,” that the miniatures stopped being a good tool and started being a necessary element of play, and Fourth Edition continued this trend with a gusto that bordered on sinister. As a games retailer, I often found that this increased my sales, but not of Dungeons & Dragons product. Chessex got a lot of money from the lack of production inclusion in D&D, and Reaper made most of the rest, especially after Wizards pulled the plug on their miniature lines.

Moreover, miniatures do not make the game more fun.

Maybe I’m in a minority here, but I have always found my imagination is plenty capable of determining what is happening with a crew of wererats, and I find that putting them on a board in front of me dulls the imaginative blitz of combat. Also, fiddling with toys takes time, and the largest factor against D&D combat is that it takes entirely too much time already. Give me a sheet of graph paper and my imagination any day.

Of course, this does reduce one of the branches of power design that was horribly abused while making Fourth Edition: movement and combat advantage (which are, in reality, the same fucking thing). I’m okay losing that space for the sake of a cleaner, faster D&D experience.

Changing gears: we don’t need this many hit points. Killing player characters is very difficult in Fourth Edition, which is okay. I get it, we’re supposed to be heroic adventurers, not meat for a grinder. Except that without a threat of player character death, combat becomes dull, an exercise in whittling a monster down to zero. Killing player characters more often is not a bad thing. Your players will thank you for combat encounters that take less than an hour.

And one more time: DO YOUR MATH!!! Paragon tier is a mess. Epic gets even worse. And the Monster Vaults only helped marginally. Do your fucking math, guys, figure out how much time it’s going to take for a level 12-14 party to kill a level 13 solo, because I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that it’s longer than your ideal play flow.

SMALLER GRIPES

Item creation is stupid. The economy is wrecked. Character Builder software is basically necessary. And the alignment system is stupid.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

This seems pretty obvious to me, but I’m going to spell it out anyway.

We need a very simple, very basic version of Dungeons & Dragons. Abilities, race, class, basic combat powers, hit points, armor class, non-armor defenses… go! I want to see a core Dungeons & Dragons that is so incredibly simple I could teach it to an eight year old in under a half hour. These will be the core and most basic rules of the game, the rules everything else is designed to break.

Then we start in on the options. Hundreds of powers. New races, new classes, new racial classes. Themes, integrated from the beginning of the game. Backgrounds that are good for more than a +2 skill bonus. Feats that actually matter. A skill system. An expanded skill system for things like “profession” and “craft” skills. Magic items that are interesting and strange and setting-defining. A variety of spell/attack/power systems. A couple of interesting morality systems. Fill your boots with optional content, but leave the core of the game as simple, pristine and clean as possible.

Then explore the optional design space ad infinitum.

And I think this is maybe the most important thing in the world: invite your players to do the same. One of the shining achievements of Third Edition D&D was that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people working on the game at any given time, and that meant that there was an enormous glut of product available to anyone who wanted to find it. I have a book about African adventuring that is both brilliant and terrible (and Eurocentric and insensitive and empowering and informed). That would not have existed, that _could not_ have existed without the framework that the OGL provided for creating new and interesting content. I want to see that sort of exploration go into the newest version of Dungeons & Dragons, and without a specific invitation from the Guys Upstairs, we aren’t going to have it.

Mini Anger

2012-01-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

It's like Hors D'oeuvre Rage

So, we got in our order of Pathfinder Battles miniaturestoday. We don’t get to sell them until the 11^th, but I got to take alook at them and I have to say, I’m not particularly impressed. It seems thatthe good folks at Paizo haven’t learned much from the mistakes Wizards of theCoast made in their own miniatures lines, and in fact are moving further from amodel that would actually be useful to the consumer.

The product is a single random miniature per box, at $5 apop, or a larger miniature for $7. The paint job is mediocre, the sculpts are passable,and the price point isn’t terrible. What rankles is that they’re a singlerandom miniature per box.

Game Masters, the people who are known to buy the mostrole-playing game product, do not want random miniature packs, guys. As aperson who stands behind the counter at a game store, I hear this refrainconstantly. As a Game Master myself, I understand their lament. Game Mastersdon’t want random anything, they want a sack full of painted goblins. They wanta sack of Generic Evil Dudes. They want a sack of zombies.

That last is great, because it’s a product that actuallyexists, one that was rather popular. It wasn’t for role-playing games, though,it was (unsurprisingly) for the board game Zombies. And they had their shitfigured out, guys. They made a sack of zombies, and they sold a bunch of them.Then they made zombie cheerleaders and zombie dogs and zombie clowns, and allof those sets sold really, really well. They weren’t even painted, and theyflew off the shelves.

And it’s not all that difficult to understand why. A sack ofthemed dudes is invaluable in a role-playing game. It means you can buy asingle product and be ready to sit down and play. It means that you can throwdown with a bunch of similar baddies. If you’re going to randomize yourminiatures, why not make it like Chessex’ Pound o’ Dice? Throw a bunch ofrandom dudes in a sack and sell it as a separate product.

Players don’t want randomized miniatures, either. A playerwants to find that One True Miniature that perfectly captures his or hercharacter, that one miniature that says “Olgreth.” And buying a crapload ofrandomized boxes is frustrating, expensive and generally futile. He or she endsup with a bunch of miniatures he or she is never going to use.

So the product we actually need, the product we would actuallyuse, is three different products.

The first is a quarterly-released Sack o’ Dudes, a 100-pc. bagof plastic miniatures around a theme. You only need about 5 different types ofmonsters to make that worth it. Here’s your list for the first three years:Sack o’ Goblins, Sack o’ Orcs, Sack o’ Elves, Sack o’ Dwarves, Sack o’ Warriors,Sack o’ Mages, Sack o’ Cultists, Sack o’ Victims, Sack o’ Zombies, Sack o’Kobolds (dragon-type), Sack o’ Oozes, Sack o’ Generic Evil Humans. You’rewelcome.

The second is a painted miniature with Pathfinder brandingthat has a single miniature in it packaged like the pewter miniatures currentlyproduced by Reaper. Those miniatures will be the player character miniatures,the Big Bad miniatures, the I-will-only-need-one-or-two-of-these miniatures.Clear plastic in the front, cardboard in the back, pre-painted plasticminiature in the bubble. Put out two or three of these every month. I alreadybring in the Reaper Pathfinder miniatures, and I would happily put apre-painted, plastic alternative right next to them. And people would gladlybuy both. Some people like painting, and others want something they can use out ofthe box. Providing both of those groups with good options is just goodbusiness.

Finally, the third product is something akin to the D&DBeholders and Dragons sets. A single-purchase item for a miniature or set ofminiatures that is fucking incredible. I want Colossal Red Dragons again. Or aJabberwock. Or a Bandersnatch.

This isn’t rocket science, and I’m really dismayed that thisproduct went all the way from design through to my storefront without someone pointingout that randomized miniatures for role-playing games had been tried, andfailed. And when someone puts out a miniature line thatactually makes sense, you can bet that’s where my money will be going.

Game Stuff

2011-12-08T00:32:00.001-08:00

I feel like I need to remind everyone that this is ostensibly a game blog. I talk a lot about my travels, and people seem to be generally interested in those things, but I started this blog to talk about games and gaming, and I’ve been pretty lax on that for a long time. This entire vacation I’ve avoided talking about anything game-related, with the exception of how Alcatraz is wicked-cool from a dungeon perspective.

So today I’m going to go over every day of this vacation and talk about how that day’s events can translate into an in-game event. Good? Excellent.

Chapter Eight: Fighting the Ocean

The following stat block is for the the Ocean. As a bad guy. Because everyone should have an epic slapping match with the wild blue, yeah? Yeah.

The Ocean			Level 40 Solo
Gargantuan natural animate (aquatic, swarm)			XP 555,000
HP 1893; Bloodied 947 Regeneration 20 (if the Ocean takes cold damage, its regeneration deactivates until the end of its next turn.) AC 51; Fortitude 58; Reflex 48; Will 55 Speed 6 Immune fire, acid, disease, sleep; Resist 20 primal; Vulnerability 25 cold Saving Throws +5; Action Points 2			Initiative +25 Perception +30
Traits
O Wave Aura • Aura 1000
Creatures that start their turn within the aura take 20 force damage and ongoing 15 drowning damage (save ends).
Standard Actions
C Battering Waves (force) • At-Will
Attack: Close Burst 50 (Targets: creatures in burst); +43 vs. Fortitude
Hit: 2d10 + 17 force damage.
C Tsunami (force) • Recharge 5 6
Attack: Close Burst 100 (Targets creatures in burst); +43 vs. Reflex
Hit: 2d10 + 17 force damage and the Ocean shifts 20 squares.
C Sea of Blood (force, necrotic) • Encounter
Attack: Close Burst 100 (targets creatures in burst); +45 vs. AC
Hit: 2d10 + 17 force and necrotic damage and the target takes 20 ongoing necrotic damage (save ends).
First Failed Saving Throw: The target takes 25 ongoing necrotic damage (save ends).
Second Failed Saving Throw: The target takes 30 ongoing necrotic damage and is slowed (save ends).
Third Failed Saving Throw: The target takes 40 ongoing necrotic damage and is helpless (save ends).
Move Actions
Shifting Tides • Recharge when bloodied.
Effect: The Ocean shifts 20 squares and makes a Battering Waves attack at any point during the move. .
Minor Actions
To the Horizon and Beyond • Encounter
Effect: The Ocean spends an action point and gains 600 hit points and shifts 20 squares.
Skills Endurance +38, Intimidate +38, Nature +35
Str 33 (+31)	Dex 27 (+28)	Wis 30 (+30)
Con 36 (+33)	Int 27 (+28)	Cha 36 (+33)
Alignment Languages —
© 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This formatted statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

Chapter Seven: City Parks

Parks as we currently understand them are a relatively new thing. Originally, rich nobles would own large plots of green space for game hunting. It wasn’t until the late 1800’s that landscapers were commissioned to build public parks in the interest of creating areas for relaxation and exercise. Philanthropic industrialists and landowners often gave parks as gifts to the public, though many were also built through public subscription. The best parks, and those with the most innovative designs, have proven very robust and have continued to adapt to meet the needs of those who use them today.

Most of the societies we use as backdrops for games have technology roughly on par with that of medieval Europe. Parks during this time would be game parks primarily, though the high levels of magic and industry would certainly make parks a realistic inclusion in those games. In a medieval fantasy game, you might find your party asked to aid in the building or designing of a park with particular needs (we want to preserve the local indigenous Flargbargle population, but not have them interact with visitors, you see…), or using a park as a location for adventure. Parks are, in many ways, quite like classic dungeons. There are branched paths, awesome conflict locations, and lots of places to hide. They could also be an area near the party’s home base, and a constant source of trouble, should those Flargbargles decide to get out and light things on fire.

For more modern games, from the Victorian-style leanings of steampunk-inspired worlds to the 1920’s Cthulhu weird horror games, parks are an awesome way to shake up the scenery some without leaving the urban textures of the setting. Some parks may even serve as a source of inspiration for adventures in these milieus. As an example:

This is Birkenhead Park. It is one of the more impressive parks created by Mr. Joseph Paxton in 1847. It is, according to the good folks at Wikipedia, the first publically funded civic park in Britain. It inspired landscape architect Frederick Olmstead to incorporate many of its elements in New York’s Central Park and Sefton Park in Liverpool.

It is not well known for its links to the paranormal, other areas Paxton created are. The Crystal Palace has been the home to a number of strange goings on, the Conservative Wall is likely haunted, and the Emperor Fountain’s charm is the site of at least a dozen cult rituals.

Birkenhead Park is no different, except that it is perhaps more subtle. Locked away in a secret crypt somewhere in this park is an amulet that, when combined with its counterparts in Central Park and Sefton Park, will release the Demon Azzulat from its prison beneath the Conservative Wall. Paxton knew this, and made sure to incorporate keys to recapture the demon hidden in his various works. Now a cult has begun searching for the amulets, and one has already been found. It’s up to you and yours to stop them.

Chapter Six: Cultures Within Cities

I think one of the greatest problems with role-playing game descriptions of places is that we tend to lump things together in a strange way. This country is where the evil-bad sorcerers live. This kingdom is like Iowa, but with more wizards. Everyone in this duchy has a pet that is also their soul that is also their source of Power. It’s not unlike the Star Wars planet problem. Hoth is the icy winter planet. Dagoba is the swamp planet. Coruscant is the city planet. It’s all rather silly, because for a planet to bear human-like life, that planet needs to have diversity, but for the sake of easy storytelling, it’s just a lot simpler to have your whole planet made up of a single thing. So instead of journeying to the swamp, you journey to the swamp planet, and that makes enough sense to us as far as internal consistency is concerned that we don’t really think about it.

But planets have a lot of things going on in them, and as gamers we have a lot more opportunity to check those things out. I mean, we have hours and hours to explore the various aspects of a planet or, in a fantasy setting, a city or country.

San Francisco is a city made up of a bunch of smaller cities. Chinatown, for instance, boasts the world’s largest ethnic Chinese population currently living outside of China. The Castro has a totally different feel to it than Market street, and Nob Hill is a very different place from Fisherman’s Wharf. Each of these neighborhoods is tied together by proximity, language (mostly), government and the like, but hanging out on Castro street eating lunch is a very different experience than hanging out on Sutter street having lunch.

I hope this chart helps.

The Neighborhood…

Is filthy mess
Is clean as a whistle
Is entirely vegetarian
Is incredibly conservative
Is incredibly liberal
Is owned by thieves
Is owned by industrialists/wizards
Is owned by noblewomen
Believes in a local religion very strongly
Believes in a local religion more than usual
Dislikes a local religion more than usual
Dislikes a local religion very strongly
Likes a minority group more than usual
Dislikes a minority group more than usual
Will riot at the slightest provocation
Will riot with the right motivation
Is incredibly peaceful
Requires incredible motivation to riot
Is paved with local rock that is hard to find elsewhere
Is paved with rock that is hard to find here
Has more shops than usual
Has less shops than a community of this size requires
Has a strong police presence
Has no police presence
Has unique architecture
Speaks a strange dialect
Speaks a language different from the surrounding neighborhoods
Eats a food different from the surrounding neighborhoods
Includes a group of people normally outcast in this society (goblins, elves, the Amish)
Produces a specific food better than anyone else in the world
Produces a specific food that no one else really likes, but is very popular here (onion cakes)
Hates a group of people normally included in this society
Has a horrible pest problem
Has a horrible disease problem
Is more hilly than the surrounding area
Is less hilly than the surrounding area
Is more swampy than the surrounding area
Is completely barren of vegetation
Is completely overgrown with vegetation
Is composed of a racial group that is a very tight-knit community
Is composed of a racial group that is warring within itself
Is mostly vampires
Has a lot more children than adults
Has a lot more old people than young people
Has a lot more young adults than old people or children
Is artistic
Is Spartan
Is Sparta
Requires a strange mode of transportation to reach it
Requires a resource that is difficult to find in the local area
Has a local group of heroes and disdains outsiders
Is actively recruiting a group of heroes to represent and protect it
Has a local group of monsters and disdains outsiders
Is actively recruiting a group of monsters to harrass and bother it
Eats a sentient humanoid race as a delicacy
Eats a sentient humanoid race as a staple
Has a school for wizards at its heart
Has a school for fighters at its heart
Has a school for bards at its heart
Is the university district
Is the college district
Is the theatre district
Is the financial core
Centers around a dock, port or gate
Is home to a bird sanctuary
Is the most commercial district and thus attracts the most vagrants
Has a ridiculous number of magic item shops, some legit and others fake
Has a horrible reputation but is actually a nice place
Has a great reputation but is actually where a lot of murders happen
Has a great reputation and is a really nice place, but a lot of murders happen there
Is a great sea-serpent/gryphon/unicorn watching spot
Is controlled by a local cult
Is controlled by a local comedian
Is controlled by a local chef
Is controlled by a player character’s mother
Is a gambling district, full of well-run casinos
Is a gambling district, full of run down cheat-houses
Is a gambling district where the gambling isn’t for money
Is the best place in the country to buy work pants
Is the best place in the country to buy magic weapons or armor
Is the worst place in the country
Has the best public education in the city
Has a public education system that is terrible, but one plucky teacher is making a difference
Has a public education system that is misinforming its students
Has no public education system at all and is proud of that thank you very much
Has a taboo about shoes
Has a taboo about kangaroos
Has a taboo about sloughs
Has a taboo about schools
Has a taboo about imperfect rhymes
Is more sexually open-minded
Is more sexually closed-minded
Is incredibly boring
Is known for its hair styles
Is known for its unique fashion sense
Has a unique power source
Has its own mayor, town council and bylaws
Has an alderman that is an animal (not anthropomorphic, just a bear in a fez)
Is missing
Is a lie

Chapter Five: Expanding the Dungeon Epiphany

Dungeons in medieval Europe usually happened in towers, and for good reason. A tower is hard to escape, easy to guard, and manages to make a lot of concerns like ventilation and sunlight (needed to keep prisoners relatively healthy) from becoming actual problems.

In the modern era, we have perfected dungeons. There are no dungeons ever created that are more horrible than the prisons currently occupied by Cuban criminals. It has taken centuries of dedicated work and design to create conditions as horrible as those we expect modern convicts to live in, and that is a pretty terrifying thing.

As I’m sure you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m one of those bleeding heart liberal types that believes we should be aiming at rehabilitation and lowering the instances of reoffending rather than punishing criminals for their immoral deeds. I don’t believe that punishment at all helps us as a society. I believe that the system as it stands creates better criminals, not people ready to re-enter the work-a-day world.

But if you want a truly terrifying dungeon (and who doesn’t?), one that is built to house people and not Precious Stuff, here’s how you do it:

The cells have to be small. Very small. Claustrophobically small. A 5’x7’ cell leaves room for exactly nothing. You have a bed, a metal table and chair that are built into the wall, a toilet and a small shelf for personal effects above that toilet. You keep your clothes in a trunk under your bed.

The regimen has to be brutal. Shower twice per week. Go outside twice per week for recreation and exercise. Work your ass off six days per week at whatever shit job the prison has been commissioned to do. Fifteen minutes to pray on Sunday. Not Christian? Not my problem.

The punishments have to be severe. And when I say severe, I don’t mean “Beat you with sticks,” severe, I mean “Damage you psychologically for the rest of your life,” severe. The Hole is bigger than your average cell, but it doesn’t get any light, it doesn’t get any fresh air, it gets just enough to keep you alive, and you stay in it 24-hours a day. That may not seem like much, but it fucking gets to you. I stood in the Hole for a minute, maybe two, with the door wide open. It scared the shit out of me.

The prisoners are not people. They are prisoners. They get no rights. They get three meals a day, they get to be clean and healthy. Everything else is a privilege.

Also, if you wanted to run a prison scenario in your game, I would highly suggest adapting Vampire’s morality system and applying it to behavior. If you’re on your best behavior, you gain Privilege. When you break the rules, you get punished, and that punishment slowly breaks you, turning you into a monster.

Morality	Crime
10	Thinking about breaking a rule
9	Minor, unnoticed rule break
8	Injury to another (accidental or otherwise)
7	Minor smuggling (cigarettes, food)
6	Major smuggling (utensils, weapons)
5	Intentional damage to prison property or the property of another inmate
4	Impassioned crime (manslaughter)
3	Planned crime (escape attempt, murder)
2	Casual, callous crime (serial murder, torture for a purpose)
1	Perversion or heinous act (mass murder, torture for entertainment)

Punishments depend mostly on the sort of crime committed and whether or not the inmate is caught doing it. They could range from having to do an extra bout of cleaning duty to a week in the Hole. Most of those at 5 or below end up with extended sentences, from a few more years to a couple of decades.

Chapter Four: What Makes a Good Game vs. A Good Genre Game?

I think my scale of “What Makes a Good Comic Book Movie” works for games, too. There are games that are just really good, solid examples of gaming. And there are good Fantasy Heartbreakers. And good Space Opera games. But they aren’t necessarily the same thing; a fantasy game can be a good game without being a good Fantasy Game. Take Mouse Guard, for instance. It’s a fantasy game, for sure. You play mice with technology roughly equal to that found in the middle ages. It’s a really good game, one of the best role-playing games I’ve ever played. But it isn’t a very good fantasy game. There are no spells or orcs or trolls; just a bunch of animals. It’s not very tactically deep, which good fantasy games have at their core. It’s got a really solid narrativist slant towards character advancement that I like quite a bit, which puts it more into the realm of Good Indie Game than Good Fantasy Game. In short, it’s a really good game, but it’s not a very good fantasy game.

On the opposite end of that spectrum, I’d put D&D 3.5. It’s not a very good game, really. The rules are clunky and fit together in strange ways. There are things that make exactly no sense at all (grapple rules, anyone? item creation?) but nothing about the game really shines, except maybe how easy it is to put a new skin on it and call it something else. But no matter what sort of flavor you put on it, Type III D&D is a fantasy game at its core, and it’s a damned good one.

So what’s the difference?

Good Games are games that push the envelope, do things that games haven’t really done before, or find new and interesting ways to do things we’ve just sort of taken for granted. Nobilis does things with diceless play that exemplify what role-playing games without randomizers can do. Mouse Guard does new and interesting things with turn structure and conflict resolution. The Dramatic Unisystem rocked a really solid dramatic editing system. The Gumshoe system solved a really simple, but pervasive, problem in investigative role-playing. These are things that are revolutionary and powerful, and they’re the sort of innovations that shape the direction of gaming for many years.

Good Genre Games don’t need to be good games. They don’t need to innovate, they don’t need to do things differently or break new ground. They have to instead typify the genre they are attempting to emulate. RIFTS is not a good game, but it is a good genre game, and that is part of why it is as pervasively popular as it has been. Don’t Rest Your Head is a really good horror game, but it doesn’t really do anything innovative or definitive for gaming. It’s just a fun game about getting sleepy, then getting scared, then going crazy. I think perhaps the best example of a Good Genre Game is Exalted. The game itself is shit. The system is just a bastardization of what White Wolf has been doing for decades, the mechanical side of the game is entirely busted and the writing is poorly at best. But it captures the genre of over-the-top Shonen anime better than any game I’ve ever seen. Better, even, than Big Eyes, Small Mouth, which fits in the Good Game category.

And there are certainly games that fall into both categories. Dread, for instance, does something for horror games I’ve never seen before (actually instilling some sense of fear in a game) through a mechanic that I’d never seen used before (a Jenga tower), while perfectly capturing the essence of horror fiction. It is both a Good Game and a Good Genre Game.

If only there were more of those.

Chapter Three: Mixing it Up – Travel Wise

The intrepid heroes must travel many days by horse to reach the dungeon of Kazaakh’Thuul wherein lies the evil lich Bastaard the Badguy.

Or.

The intrepid heroes travel a day by horse, trading in their mounts for coin to pay for the ferry to the next village and hopefully enough for passage by airship or railcar across the mountains before renting camels to cross the sandy desert for six days to reach the pyramid of Kazaakh’Thuul wherein lies the evil lich Bastaard the Badguy.

Travel is boring. We tend to gloss over it because sitting in one spot for three hours mostly sucks, and we don’t want to describe the incredible ennui we experience while moving from point A to point B via sitting around doing nothing. It’s a lot more exciting when travel involves kicking the crap out of stuff while you’re moving, right?

Except that travel offers some interesting opportunities in role-playing games that we don’t often think about. As an example, take my first ride on a ferry. While it certainly doesn’t compare to the experience of walking on a castle’s battlements, it was cool to be able to finally ride on one. For some people, this isn’t a big deal at all; they take ferries every day. But living in landlocked Northern Alberta, riding a ferry was pretty awesome for me. Moreover, it gave me a chance to interact with my travelling companion in a meaningful way (and in a less meaningful media-in-my-eyeballs way), and to have a few interesting experiences regarding ferry coffee and bad café food. It was pretty great.

And most real travel doesn’t happen in one travel mode. You can’t get to most places by plane, you have to get close and then take a ferry, boat, or train and then drive or walk the rest of the way. People didn’t take wagons from one side of the continent to the other while settling Canada and the USA; they took trains, rode horses, took wagons, walked, climbed, forded rivers the hard way… There are very few occasions when one form of travel will get you where you’re going, and you’re going to need to mix and match.

How this interacts with your game is sort of up to you. You could easily just pass your players an itinerary that shows them how they get from one place to another and ask what they do during each stage. You could provide a few options, and have some interesting features plotted out for various points during various journeys. Provide situations in which the player characters have to interact with one another, because nothing else is going to happen for a while. Give the player characters an opportunity to find the magic in a form of travel they’ve never experienced before. I mean, riding a ferry isn’t a fantastic experience, but for me, it was a big deal, because it was my first time. Has your half-orc barbarian ever ridden an airship before? Probably not, so what is he or she feeling?

Chapter Two: When the Students Come to Visit – On the Topic of Mentors

We went to visit N’s school while we were in Comox, and that gave me a bit of a strange nostalgic feeling about visiting my old teachers whenever I came back to the town I graduated in. Every once in a great while, I’d stop by the school to visit Mr. D or Mr. F or Ms. W, and it was always sort of a strange experience. I mean, they’d done their job, right? They taught me enough to get me through finals, and now I had passed my finals, and was arguably an adult.

The trip got me thinking about a player character’s mentors. I’m coming at this from a very D&D-oriented viewpoint, because in D&D one of the big blanks in character creation is social areas. Every D&D character’s parents are dead so that you never, ever have to interact with them. No one was ever taught how to do their jobs, they just know, or they went to faceless schools and never had any favorite teachers or instructors. No one has ever served under a commanding officer, they were just in the army.

Mouse Guard rocks mentors in a very real way. There is, in fact, an entire chapter in character creation devoted to the mouse that taught you what you know, and there are plot hooks deep in the concept. When we were making our first round of characters for Mouse Guard, one of my players found that he liked his character’s mentor more than he liked his own character, which is, in my opinion, the definition of a great supporting character. It reminds me Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Anthony Stewart Head is easily the best actor in the series, and his character is incredibly believable, fun, scary, amusing and just a little sexy. He is, in nearly every way, more interesting than the titular character, which makes him a great background character, and adds a lot of depth to the series.

So what happens when you go back and visit a mentor who has taught you everything you know? What sort of relationship is that? There’s a pretty solid relationship gradient, from “still trying to teach you things,” to “why are you bothering me? figure it out on your own…” But trying to figure that relationship out before you ever have to go back and meet your mentor is going to add a lot to the interactions you have with him or her.

Also, mentors serve as great plot hooks. Roll a d10

Your mentor is in trouble. Some horrible bad thing is trying to get to the player character by doing naughtybad things to people that character cares about. Go save!
Your mentor is in trobule. Some horrible bad thing from the mentor’s past is coming back to haunt her, and she cannot deal with it alone. She needs your help!
Your mentor is in trouble. Whatever nasty badness your party is already dealing with has decided to make him a focus for whatever evil plot they’re trying to pull off.
Your mentor has hired you. She needs you to find a dingus of great power from the nastiest dungeon in the area, and can’t do it herself because of that back injury from a few years ago.
Your mentor has hired you. He has a rival in town that is likely doing naughty things, and he would like you to look into it.
Your mentor has hired you. She’s double booked herself with jobs and needs you to take one of her obligations off her hands.
Your mentor has become a villain. He has holed up in a castle in the middle of nowhere and is sending minions out to do bad things on his behalf.
Your mentor has become a villain. She has obtained a mystical artifact of some power and is using it to wreck havoc on everyone and everything around her.
Your mentor has become a villain. He has begun building an army to take down the current reigning whoever of the whereplace.
Your mentor is in trouble for becoming a villain and is hiring you to deal with her public relations problem.

Chapter One: Family Ties

Most characters in a role-playing games don’t value family at all. Chances are your character is a single child of deceased parents who raised him or herself on the mean streets of disconnection and neglect. Which is, honestly, very lazy of you. Most people don’t bother fleshing out their character’s family life at all. I know I sure don’t, but I’ve come to terms with my laziness. When I do, it’s usually as an aside, or a cute character quirk, but most of my characters don’t have attachments to people, because those really seem to get in the way of adventure.

Which I guess is sort of the point of this section. Family is just going to get in your way, and that’s a good thing. Knowing how your parents are and what they do for a living, knowing where you have brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, and cousins is going to make adventuring a little tough. I mean, look at all those potential Bad Guy Targets. Moreover, what happens if you don’t really like most of your family?

I grew up pretty privileged in that I actually get along with my mom and dad pretty well. My brothers are both wicked people. I don’t really have a lot of contact with my extended family, but I know who they are and what they’re about, generally. Most of them are Mormon (I am not), with the exception of J, who converted to Catholicism when she married her beau. Most have big families, with the exception of T, who came out of the closet a few years ago and whose son is still dealing. Most are well adjusted, with the exception of DL, who held his children hostage in a motel with a vacuum attachment, once.

See, and this is the sort of thing your character can bring to the table if you have a chance to broaden out the family history beyond whatever is on your character sheet. Who is your Aunt Betty? What’s she about? What does she do? What’s one story you could tell about her that would make the rest of the table go “Wha?”

As an example, I’m going to flesh out a character’s uncle, and then leave you a blank template to copy/paste and use at your leisure.

Name: Uncle Bartlebus
Occupation: Thatcher
Hobby: Music. Bart’s had a lute in his attic for years and every once in a while he’ll bust it out and play a few songs from when he had longer hair and a grudge.
Physically: Bart’s a huge guy, and strong. Thatch is heavy, and it goes on roofs. Age is starting to show around the temples, though, and some wrinkles have begun to show up around the eyes.
Mentally: Insecure and a little attention-grabby. Immature. Wishes he’d gone along with a travelling musician’s troupe when he was younger but has a wife and kids to look after now.
One Story: That time he drove the wagon too fast and lamed the horse two days out of town, and we all had to hitch a ride with some strangers who we were convinced were going to kill and eat us.

Name:
Occupation:
Hobby:
Physically:
Mentally:
One Story:

Fill this out five times, and you have a rough skeleton of a family going.

Chapter Eight: Come at me Brocean

2011-12-04T18:36:00.001-08:00

I got in a fight with the Pacific Ocean today, and it whooped my ass fairly handily.

Yesterday, we went to the wicked-huge Golden Gate Park. At the end of the park is a beach, and on the beach, the offending ocean. It and I got into something of a disagreement last night, as it was convinced that my shoes would be a good place to live, and I was of the opinion that the ocean belongs damned near anywhere but my shoes. So our relationship was off to something of a rocky start, but I was wiling to give it a second chance.

The next day, the ocean decided that being really, really cold was a good way to get back at me for not letting it live in my shoes, so we started an all-out brawl. I tried to walk into it, facing the horrible cold and wetness, while it would throw waves at me. It was not the most effective way to fight the Pacific ocean, perhaps, but I enjoyed myself, and that’s all that really counts. After watching me flail, my ally came in from building a fortress to aid me in battle. She lost pretty good too. There are pictures to document our shame.

The surfers seemed to think we were crazy like crazy people, and I don’t blame them for that, but I think we had way, way more fun than anyone ever should playing in a cold-ass ocean. I just learned on wikipedia that the folk at Ocean Beach don’t take kindly to out-of-towners stealing waves. I suppose that’s sort of what we were doing, but to be fair, we were two assholes from Canada doing our best impersonation of polar bears. I understand your plight, guys, but we were only there for a couple of hours.

Next time I’m in San Francisco, I go surfing. I meant to this time around, but we ran out of money before we got around to it, and it’s pretty expensive to do.

Next, we went to the corner of Haight and Ashbury, mostly because Dave told us we should. Mostly, it was like a more commercialized Whyte Ave, which would have been sweet if we had more than $20 at our disposal. Even then, there have been some four areas of town N and I have identified as Whyte-Ave-Except-X. We didn’t do a whole lot there, but we did buy some bread, cheese and meat, and sat on the street eating our lunch, much to the chagrin of rich and high-class shoppers that kept going into the store we were sitting in front of.

Being homeless is interesting. Being seen as homeless is also interesting, and is worse in the States than it is in Canada. I was wearing a hoodie and jeans, with a backpack on my lap. I looked like a homeless dude, and people let me know through stares and by rearranging their stuff so that I couldn’t steal it. I sort of wanted to get a sign that said “I’m not homeless, I’m Canadian.” Makes me feel bad for the people who are actually homeless in this country.

Tomorrow we go home. We have to get up, eat pancakes, pack, and be on a plane. Either later tonight or tomorrow, I’ll be writing up entries for how each of these chapters can be used in role-playing games. Then I’ll be posting it as a separate post, as well as editing each chapter. It will be very awesome.

Chapter Seven: Follow Those Lesbians

2011-12-03T20:46:00.001-08:00

I find it slightly difficult to believe that I wake up at nine thirty on a regular basis when I’m on vacation. When I was at GenCon, I would wake up at seven or eight, pick the girls up at nine, and be at the con for nine thirty. Normally, if I’m doing that, I’m a fucking wreck, and it’s definitely taking its toll on me in San Francisco. I keep putting it off until later and later, and this morning that meant a dearth of pancake goodness. We weren’t really accounting for the weekend influx of people, so I ended up eating a half a pancake, making sure N got at least one solid pancake first. I’m a sweetness like that.

A fellow in the common outdoor dining area had his computer and camera stolen today, and was pretty upset about it, understandably. I’m not sure what it is I don’t like about him, but the few times I’ve spoken to him, he’s seemed a little off somehow. He gives me shivery-bad feelings and I don’t like his moustache.

Our day today was not as jam-packed as our days have been. Having already seen and done damned near everything we wanted to do, we spent some of today going through lists of “Things to do in San Francisco” and trying to find something we haven’t already done that doesn’t cost any money (as we’ve basically run out of anything more than ramen cash). We didn’t find much, but there were a couple of neat-looking parks, and we hadn’t seen the ocean since we’d arrived, so we decided to make both of those things happen.

First things first, though: the hot dog stand.

I like to try something I’ve never done every time I go on a vacation somewhere. Eating a hot dog from a hot dog stand is one of the most incredibly American things you can do. It’s like going to a baseball game without the boredom. Or shooting the skin off of people we don’t like, without the mess or the questionable racial connotations. Eating a hot dog at a hot dog stand is an American thing to do, and by the gods I meant to do it this time. I’ve been to the United States a lot of times in the past five years, and I had never once eaten at a hot dog stand. So, today I did, and I am happy to say, the experience was pretty great.

I mean, it wasn’t the best hot dog I’ve ever eaten. That title goes to the incredible Fat Frank’s on Whyte Ave. But it was certainly a passable wiener. Moreover, it was exactly what my body wanted at that moment. Some meat of undisclosed components, some bread that was a little too sweet, some stuff that was trying valiantly to be vegetables in the form of a red-pepper chutney. It was tasty, and it made me feel, for a moment, like America might be the greatest place on earth.

But the Obama-is-Hitler people were out again, so the feeling didn’t last long. M commented on my Facebook status when Chapter Six came out that the Obama-is-Hitler folk had a good point about the Glass Steagal banking restrictions and that Obama isn’t exactly an amazing president. And I’m willing to grant that some solid banking restrictions are in order, here. But both Glass and Steagal were Democrats. Republicans aren’t about to start throwing down restrictions on banks, and the Democrats aren’t exactly running someone against their own incumbent president. Short of a civil war, there aren’t a lot of other options.

After hot dogs, we decided to take a bus down to Golden Gate Park, which is a huge-crazy-awesome park that takes up a huge chunk on the west side of the city. The bus ride was a lot of fun, but I’m starting to think that San Francisco is trying to hide something from me. I have yet to find a place in the city that isn’t gorgeous, which makes me wonder where the poor people go. I have been told “Oakland,” but it’s a little hard to believe they made a whole other city in which to keep the poor people. The bus was pretty full, but we managed to find a seat in the back and check out the awesome architecture that is this beautiful place. If I was going to live in a place in the states, it would probably be here.*

The park is gorgeous. Much later in our walk, I read a little plaque talking about how the guy who founded it wanted to make sure that it was wild and strange and twisty and wonderful. They went out of their way to make sure there was nothing of the city of San Francisco in the park, and they wanted it to be a safe haven from the grind of the city. There are spectacular trees and beds of flowers, there are small ponds where ducks and seagulls live, there are windmills that used to carry irrigation water to the plants further up the hills. There were many hot dog stands and many, many dogs, most of which were adorable.

We decided at one point that we were going to walk to the beach, and that became something of a driving goal for the trip. We determined which way was west, and made most of our travel choices based on what would get us as far in that direction as quickly as possible. Occasionally, we would have to take a detour. Golden Gate Park was designed with twists and turns on all of the roads through the forest to keep the place from becoming a wind tunnel, so there was never a path that ran directly from where we were standing to the place with the sand and all the waves. At least once, we would find a group of people and follow them, trust them to guide us in the direction we were supposed to go. At least twice, I decided the beach was very close because I could hear it or smell it or both, and then it turned out to be farther away than I had thought. I am not good at finding the ocean.

There was a buffalo. He rolled around in the dirt for a while, and it was adorable.

When we finally found the beach, the waves were incredible. I hadn’t come with swim trunks or anything, and I loathe walking with sand in my shoes, but we decided to take a stroll down the beach anyway. N took off her shoes and went wading a little way in. Apparently, the water was quite cold, but it was still a lot of fun to run away from the waves and watch people surfing in the distance. The waves were huge, thrashing things that gave some warning as to their reach on the beach, and because I was still wearing my not-at-all-waterproof shoes, I played a game of tag with the sea foam and looked like a total idiot. It was a blast, and we’re going back tomorrow if it’s nice.

Then we came home and I typed a blog.

*So far. I mean, I’ve only seen a few cities in the country. Also, I never, ever want to live in the United States, except when eating hot dogs there.

Chapter Six: A Bad Case of Crabs

2011-12-03T00:20:00.001-08:00

We woke up at nine thirty for pancakes. This is still a big deal for me, but I’ve got the stove downstairs figured out and can make a pretty damned fine pancake, now. I over-cooked the batch yesterday.

Francis was eating in the common kitchen area outside, so we sat with him for a while and munched our breakfast. Then we decided that today was a good day for a nap. We’ve been doing that thing that people do when they’re travelling. We’ve been focusing on the What Do We Do Today problem rather than relaxing and enjoying ourselves, so today was the day we decided to stay in bed until four in the afternoon and then do leisurely things rather than force ourselves into doing something in specific.

To be fair, there’s only one thing left on our list of things to do. We have been to Alcatraz, visited the Castro, eaten on Fisherman’s Wharf, seen the Golden Gate Bridge, ridden one of those cute rail cars that you see people using to escape from spies in movies, seen the Occupy San Francisco camp, and attended an AIDS rally. For three days, that’s a solid event tally. So there’s nothing wrong with taking a day to just nap and chill out, yeah?

So we did. We slept. And I’m defending this choice to the end.

When we finally woke up we decided that today was the day we’d eat at Joe’s Crab Shack. I’d never heard of the place, but N was pretty excited when she saw it. I guess it had been featured on a TV show, and given that I don’t actually watch television, I probably missed that… series… Still, I like me some crustacean, and if the lady says “I want you to eat crab,” I go “OKAY!” and then eat myself to death on crab.

We didn’t have an easy time finding a trolley this time around, mostly because they weren’t running. We waited for three different trollies to not come before we decided to find another way, which took three or four misfires before we finally found a way to get to where we were going. While we were looking, though, we actually got to see some of these characters that equate President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler. We actually stood there stunned. We had no idea what to think about that. I mean, it’s one of those weird things you see on television sometimes, you read about it in the news, but its so strange, so out there, that you have to think no reasonable person would ever go there. But go there they did, and they did it to us. An African American lady asked us if we were going to do our part to get him out of office. We tried to calmly explain that we were from Canada, and thus incapable of voting either for or against the man. In the interest of not having our faces bitten, we didn’t mention that we’re liberal-leaning Canadians, or that, given the chance, we’d be voting for him. She said that “Even Canadians have a chance to change the world for once,” and suggested that we should “Say something about him to the Queen, eh?”

We had no choice. We had to walk away laughing.

The place was not at all what we were expecting at first. We walked up a flight of stairs into a hokey 1960’s style diner with a host in a tie die shirt and and a flourish. The view was sort of meh, looking out over Tarantino’s and San Francisco’s Pier 39. Our waiter was friendly and easygoing, and explained the whole of the process to us: bucket in the middle is for shells, weird-ass fork thing is for breaking the little bastards open, here have a bib.

N was a little disappointed, and the place was definitely out of our price range, but we decided to stick it out. When N was convinced it actually was the right place, we settled into a huge steamed crab meal with shrimp, sausage, and corn on the cob. Then they let us know why the place receives 5-star reviews. This song came on, and all of the servers, the host, and a few of the kitchen staff started dancing.

The dance wasn’t anything incredible, it was a six-step line dance, but it was a lot of fun, and our server was one of the better dancers in the group. The host in tie dye was obviously helping one of the newer guys learn the steps, but all in all it was a lot of fun to see, and a few of the staff really got into it. Mostly, I’m a sucker for kitschy things like this. I think they add charm to what would otherwise be a joyless cracking of crabs for consumption. Not that you could ever convince me that eating crab is a joyless experience, but the kitsch and the fun and the weird added a lot to the evening for me.

There was a birthday party, followed by a guy yelling and a bunch of people screaming and laughing. We later found out that this was a special sort of drink they serve with little shark-shaped shot glasses full of some red stuff. The guy serving the show would yell “OH MY GOD THERE’S A SHARK IN THE WATER!” and they’d pour in the shot while screaming. It looked like a lot of fun.

The whole meal was pretty great.

Next we decided to grab some cookies from Fisherman’s Wharf just down the street and wander the shops there. There was a sword-shop that had some really neat gear in it I’d love to get for the store (two replica’s of the Master Sword from the Legend of Zelda and sharpened batarangs, for example). Apparently getting that stuff into Canada can be a bit tricky. There was a silver shop we stopped in where the lady didn’t pay any attention to us until we were leaving, and a horrible magic shop pretending it had anything to do with Harry Houdini. The tricks they sold looked pretty bad, but I give them a few points for effort. The fake-ass Houdini offering to tell my fortune in the corner was especially bad.

We spent some time kicking out over the bay and followed some kids smoking weed to a part of the wharf where some sea lions were hanging out. We could only barely see the lions, but they were really loud and barking like cuteness. The weed kids were looking at us like we were going to suddenly bust out some badges and guns as we were walking past them, which we found hilarious. We resolved to come back and check out the sea lions during the day time.

We decided to head back to the Castro and see what was going on down that way. Friday is supposedly a party night or something (I’ve forgotten, it’s been so long), and we wanted to be where the coolest people watching would be had. We were not at all disappointed:

That dude was, according to N, wearing a Santa Hat over his junk. Fellow’s got swagger. I can appreciate that.

Chapter Five: Dungeons & Demonstrations

2011-12-02T01:50:00.001-08:00

I've done time in Alcatraz.

When I first learned that this trip would take the shape of a Vancouver stop-off and a San Francisco stay, the first thing on my list of things to do was a tour of North America's most notorious dungeon. I'm a nerd. I like places that are tough to get into and places that are tough to get out of. For nerds like me, Alcatraz is something of a holy place; it's a place where real things happened that could have happened in my games.

The place is run down and falling apart and I wouldn't have it any other way. The buildings are slowly deteriorating, and the paint is coming off of everything, but there is a strange sort of beauty in the way the island fortress is put together. When I think about prisons I think austere, cold, simple, concrete. I don't think about Spanish arches or stone scrollwork. I don't think about flowers or gardens or school houses. I certainly don't think about the spectacular view of the city of San Francisco.

But those things are all there, and they are so tied in with the way the island prison is put together that you can't really tell where one stops and the other begins. But they are very different places, Alcatraz the island and Alcatraz the prison. The latter is a cold, dark, horrible place filled with a long history of violence and despair. The prison cells are small, barely big enough to fit the necessities of life. A bed, a steel chair and table that are built into the wall, a toilet. And that is it. Five feet wide, six feet long and seven feet tall. The width isn't enough for me to spread my arms side to side without touching the walls.

That's nothing compared to the Hole, though. There is nothing in this world that I can compare to the feeling of going into the solitary confinement cells. They are dark, blank rooms that seem to suck the life from you at the door. They are actually terrifying to walk into even now, and they haven't been used since well before I was born. There is the normal cage, and beyond the cage a steel door. The door has a grate designed to keep out the light, keep you from seeing anything. These places were a horror to behold, truly, and I cannot do the feeling of stepping into one justice through the written word.

There are a lot of individual things I could talk about regarding my trip to The Rock, but I'll mostly cover the salient points:

The treaty given to the white folk during the Native American occupation of the island is awesome and everyone should read it.
The place is gorgeous and old and powerful to visit. If you're ever in San Francisco, you should go.
I'm actually sort of sad that I didn't get one of the steel cups. They're pretty great.
Al Capone looks smug as shit in his mug shot. Also, went crazy from syphilis.
Three people may have escaped from Alcatraz, and the escape would make for an epic fucking adventure in a game.
I stood on a place where people were killed by grenades.
The families of the corrections officers actually lived on the island and had a sort of small town up and running near the prison.

So, this post is all out of order because I wanted a punchy opening. Also, there are a bunch of pictures at the end that I took of the prison.

We got up in the single digits again and ate pancakes. We met up with my coworker Ida and he husband Francis, and we all ate together and decided we'd hit the Rock as a group. We finished off breakfast, I found us a route, we bought transit passes at Walgreens - which is fucking everywhere - and then visited a kickass spy shop that sold all sorts of shit to women who think their husbands are cheating on them. There was a knife that went into a bigger knife and a camera in the spine of a Get Shorty DVD. I assume it's in that one because no one will ever watch that movie.

Then we went to Alcatraz, which seems pretty silly to say like that, and then we were sort of at a loss for what to do with the afternoon. Ida and Francis caught some food, and we decided to use our newfound freedom (whatup, bus pass?) to explore the city some and see the famous Castro.

The bus ride took a while and we got to see a lot of the city that we missed on the BART. Market street is gorgeous, and there was a lot of fun to be had just watching people go about their days and do their things. The Castro itself is amazing and we could not have picked a better day to visit. Turns out, it's National AIDS Day and there was going to be a candle light vigil and fundraiser thing. Sweet! Wait, no, AIDS is bad. Boo AIDS!

We decided to have a quick bite to eat in the shadow of the Castro theatre itself, in a little place called Mystique. I had the chicken sandwich, N had the burger, both were delightful. The service was amazing. The venue could not have been more perfect. It was a really good meal.

Except, we ate at the wrong restaurant. A bunch of places along the Castro were going to be giving ten percent of their days earnings to various AIDS charities, and Mystique was nor one of them. We were made aware of this by the gent who let us know the vigil was going on, and felt appropriately remorseful. Because boo AIDS.

The vigil wasn't going to be for another hour, so we tooled around some and stopped into a couple of stores. We stopped in at a comic shop that was a miserable little thing compared to Warp. I've been good and spoiled by games stores living in Alberta. There was a cute sex toy store that Brenda at The Travelling Tickle Trunk puts to shame. I'm actually more impressed by Edmonton's Whyte Ave the more I travel.

We walked past a gentleman who told us that we look marvelous and that he loves our colors. I assume he was talking about N's hair, which is currently an adorable shade of pink. That pretty much made my day.

The vigil itself happened in the same spot Harvey Milk made a number of speeches, and was pretty special in its own right. There were candles and speeches by the lovely Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and a number of folk from various AIDS research groups and organizations. It was really cool to be a part of, especially considering a long discussion N and I had on the Vancouver train regarding big chasing not two days before.

Then we packed it in and started the journey home. Turns out our timing sucked, as the good folks at the Occupy San Fransisco camp were getting raided and so the trolly was only going to get us about halfway home. We considered going to see what all the fuss was about, but we figured by the time we got there, the adventure would be over.

Turns out it wasn't all that crazy anyhow, but we'll be keeping an ear out for trouble.

Alright. Now that that’s out of the way, more pictures of Alcatraz!

Chapter Four: Gayest City on Earth

2011-12-02T01:35:00.001-08:00

We woke up at six in the morning. Now, for some folk, that is a reasonable time to be up. There are nights I stay up late and go to sleep at six in the morning. So this was about as pleasant as nailing my eyelids to a desk. We rushed downstairs, hopped the complimentary bus to the airport and, once at the airport, got lost.

Vancouver International, for those not in the know, is a goddamn maze of horribleness. Did you know that the United States isn't considered an international flight? Me either. Moreover, did you know that Air Canada has some three different check-in stations at the airport? I sure didn't. So, we were happy we got there with two hours of lead-in, because a process that normally only takes about a half hour took us just over 45 minutes this time around.

Then our plane was an hour late.

Still, miracle of human flight and all that. We boarded, tired as all get out. I watched most of Captain America, which was about as good a comic book movie as one can ask for. Maybe I've written about this already and maybe I haven't. If you've heard it before, feel free to skip to page xx. I have a few different scales for movies. I have a scale to see if a movie is just a good movie. Jurassic Park? Good movie. BioDome? Not a good movie. I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, but it was not at all an amazing cinematic masterpiece.

I have a different scale for comic book movies, and another for fantasy or science fiction flicks. These scales don't need the movie to be a good movie at all, just that they meet my requirements for entertainment, fun, and truth to the source. A good comic book movie would be the second Hulk flick, the one with Edward Norton. Iron Man is the rare movie that is both a good movie and a good comic book movie. Not a lot of movies do that. In fact, most movies don't.

Captain America is a damned fine example of a good comic book movie. It is too cheesy, too contrived, too over-the-top to be a good movie, but it is entertaining and sticks to the character of Steve Rogers pretty damn well. Personally, I would have taken it in a bit of a different direction, especially with the Red Skull and Hydra, but that's why they don't give me millions of dollars to make movies.

I didn't get to finish it. I will likely watch the rest on the way home.

We arrived in San Fransisco on a beautiful sunny day and immediately spent the next hour underground on the Bay Area Rail Transit system, or BART. This brought us to within spitting distance of our hostel, but because I'm not great with directions, we got lost a few times along the way. The hostel is cozy and quiet compared to those I stayed at in Europe, though I suppose that makes sense with it being winter and all.

We went for something of a stroll after taking a well-deserved nap, and wandered China Town and the financial district. San Fransisco is a city of many, many hills, and I am a man of much fat, and those two things are not meant for one another in the strictest sense. My body does not like me very much right now. Not very much at all.

We did manage to see some pretty wicked stuff, though. There were theaters in which the gayest of gay porn were featured, and a tree with so many lights it looked like someone had lit it on fire to watch Christmas burn. There was a large rock.

Oh, right, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Chapter Three: Travel Days

2011-12-02T01:29:00.001-08:00

We woke up in the single digits am again, and this has become something of a pattern that I am less than thrilled with. The day was spent almost entirely in transit, the first leg involving a Greyhound bus, then a ferry, then more bussing, then a hotel room.

The Greyhound is a pretty simple affair in Courtney. There really aren't a ton of places on the island, and most of them can be reached within a few hours. C. Drove us to the bus depot, we picked up our tickets and got on the bus. Within an hour and a half, we were in Nanaimo and taking a cab to the ferry terminal.

The ferry was definitely better this time around. For those who have never been on a ferry between Nanaimo and Vancouver (bring something of a ferry virgin, I can't much speak for others) they're a lot like a cruise ship in miniature, minus the free ice cream and casino. The one we rode back to Van rocked three decks of seating arranged all over the place, and had a cafeteria that served up some damn fine burgers and sweet potato fries. There was an adorable Greek child just learning English who spoke to us for a while, and then we watched more Buffy.

Once we reached the dock, we took city transit to the Travellodge we would be staying at that night. That took something akin to an hour and a half, but the lodge was a very quick train ride away from the airport, and the plane we were catching was pretty early. We got settled in a bit, and went swimming, which was great. The lodge had a pool that included a hot tub that didn't suck. There was an adorable fat kid swimming with his dad, and we had a lot of fun just sort of swimming around. Then we decided to tool around the city some, and got back on the train towards China town.

Admission Time! I had never been to the west coast prior to this trip. Not the Canadian West Coast, anyway, and so whenever anyone would tell me how great the seafood is out that way, I'd mostly be like, "Yeah, whatever." I'm a pretty big fan of eating anything that swims, so I've always wanted to try it, but my jaunts to Vancouver had been mostly stopovers on the way to somewhere that is else. So we decided to eat sushi in Vancouver and put the city's money where its mouth is.

The verdict: negligibly better seafood. We ate at this cute little sushi place in China Town towards the end of the day, and the ramen was mostly amazing, the sashimi decent, and the dynamite rolls - N's pick - were better than average by a long shot. The quality of the ingredients was undoubtedly better, but I didn't notice a significant difference in flavor. The texture was very much improved, I will give it that.

After that, there was another train ride back to the Travellodge and then sleep.

Chapter Two: Your Teacher is Porn

2011-12-02T01:21:00.001-08:00

I started today earlier than I like to start anything, a trend I see continuing thought the full ten days. Though they tried to be quiet, I'm something of a light sleeper and the children even being in the same room as me was enough to wake me up and keep me up for just long enough to make it impossible to get back to sleep. So I tossed and turned some, and made the most of the rest that I got before N and C woke up.

My day started with a brief breakfast of a smoothie and some coffee before roaming around Courtney some in search of real breakfast and a slurpee, something I had been without for a couple of days. That mission completed, we came back to C's house and talked a bit about the night before and the things that had transpired with N's father, talked a bit about the rest of the trip and some money issues. Those things accomplished, C drove us down to N's old high school so that we could meet with some of her old teachers and catch up.

Mr. S was every bit the high school art teacher, with an artistic and creative bit of fluff on his face for Movember and the sort of airy personableness I've come to expect from the artistically inclined. We chatted about the school and his work some, about N's art and her line of work, about our plans for the coming year or so. Then we wandered, talked to Mrs. E, who was primarily concerned with C's love life and Mr. K, who was the charismatic sort of history teacher that everyone loves to study under.

He made at least one joke that involved making the universal hand sign for eating pussy. I like the fellow. He is porn waiting to happen.

We spent a lot of the day talking to N's old roommate and "mom," the lady that took her in after her father had kicked her out. She's an eccentric older lady with a love for jewelry, travel, gossip and human rights. She was instantly likable, and the two of them chatted for a long time, with occasional interjections and asides from me. It was an entirely enjoyable way to spend an afternoon, though the lack of sleep from the night before started to catch up with me around halfway through. The experience reminded me some of hanging out with Alice-Mae Abbott in Stettler, a spunky older lady with a story about everything and a powerful view of the world that sort of sucks you in and makes you take notice. I miss that lady.
We came back to C's house after picking her up at work (or, rather, meeting her at her work so that she could pick us up), and I immediately took one of the best naps any man has ever had anywhere. I was woken up by a pretty girl with an offer of supper and promises of parties to come, so through the haze of sleepy time, I ate and got my shot together to head over to A's place.

We played a lot of Tetris: The Board Game and chatted about either things I knew nothing about, or whatever lude topics I could come up with. I predrink harder than these kids party. Amateurs. ^_^
Also, N kicked my butt at Tetris twice. My status as Guy Who is Great at Games is in grave peril, methinks.

Chapter One: Comox

2011-12-02T01:15:00.001-08:00

I woke up far earlier than I needed to in order to get into contact with Dave. In most of my travels, Dave has been my wingman, getting things set up and ready to go before I leave. He's got a sort of older-brother vibe to these things, working diligently to make sure everything goes okay. I've always been something of an independent soul about things like this, but I have to admit that there have been a lot of occasions in which the man is a godsend. Today his services were mostly needed as a wheel man, which he did with his normal ten minute lecture on the sites to see and things to do.

We got to the airport with tons of time to spare, and were ushered through the process of checking in with relative ease. Because I'm an idiot more often than not, I forgot to take my phone out of my pocket before I went through the metal detector. The kindly gent with the wand gave me a brief foot massage - I let the fellow know he'd missed his calling - and then went though the RadiationTron9000. I've never had a problem with these machines. Are they going to result in my babies having three heads and bat wings? Good gods I hope so. That would be fucking wicked.

We went the wrong way to get to our terminal, and then went the correct way. There are some renovations going on at YEG, and they will probably help the folks there serve me better, but at the moment they're just a touch confusing. Then we sat and watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer until we almost missed the announcement to get onto the plane.

I love flying. For real. Even still. I've been on a lot of airplanes the past few years, you'd think the magic would have worn off on me by now, but maybe you haven't noticed: planes make people FLY!!! Like, through the air. With nothing but air holding them up. That's fucking incredible. Also, it's a lot like riding an elevator that never stops going up. Also, turbulence is like the most kickass roller coaster that exists. So, there's that. We watched more Buffy once we were high enough that looking out was just clouds. It was a good episode, the one where Vampire Willow comes back and mucks about in the nicer Sunnydale. Lolling was had.

Getting into Vancouver was the normal getting-off a plane bullshit, we got our bags with zero difficulty and made our way to the bus station to get to the ferry to Nanaimo. I've never been on a ferry before. This is sort of a new and novel experience for me, though in a lot of ways it reminded me of my first cruise. The feeling of the ferry rocking under me was pretty familiar, and I found myself waxing nostalgic about it. We again watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer while we crossed the channel, mostly because it was so dark outside we couldn't actually see anything.

We arrived and got picked up by N.'s older brother who was taciturn and sort of quiet about the whole endeavor. My thanks, once more, for getting us from the terminal to our destination. He's a sweetness. The trip to N's father's house was tense. We didn't actually have any intention of spending any time with the man. He has been a douche about a few things lately, and that has made her feel pretty sad and me feel pretty reluctant to get to know him. The douchebaggery didn't stop on the meeting of him, and we proceeded to eat a tense and difficult meal in which no one wanted to participate, really. The family had already eaten, we had already eaten, and eating more was merely a courtesy to give nod tot the courtesy of making us food. It was wholly unnecessary, and the whole thing had an air of pageantry and chore to it.

Maybe some background is in order. N lived with her mother for some time after the divorce and believed her mom to be evil, as teenage girls are wont to do. When she was sixteen, she moved to BC to live with her father instead, believing him to be a goddamn hero. What she got when she arrived was rejection and neglect in favor of her father's new family, which left some pretty solid emotional scars on her and created a weird sort of rift in their family when she was asked to move out. At thirteen.

Understand of course that I have only second hand information about the whole thing and that I don't have all of the details. I can't really fill in any blanks here. I can't tell you what sort of motivation her father had. I can't tell you why N went along with it, if indeed she did. I have a pretty vague notion of what is going on. So I'm sure you can guess how weird having a civil discourse with this group of people could be.

See, I don't like N's father. I've only met the man once, but he infuriates me. Some of that, certainly, has to do with the way he has hurt a person I care about. I went through much of the same fury with H's mother. But this takes the abuse to a level that I've never personally witnessed before. He is manipulative, conniving, and evil. He is the sort of man who stresses the importance of family before forbidding his daughter to see her aunt because of the mean things the aunt has said about him. He is the sort of man who will blackmail you emotionally until he sees how that won't work; then he manipulates someone you need to get what he wants instead. I wish the man great harms. I hope that his veins run with vinegar and his bones turn to ash. I will not hurt him myself - the universe has pains for that sort of person that I could neither conceive nor enact, and I trust it will provide - but were his house to burn and his body be wracked by nigh constant torment, I would take that news as a sweetener for my day.

We then met up with Courtnea, who is both lovely and confusing. I will talk more on her later. Some coffee was had and a game played. Now, I'm typing up blog posts on my iPad in her living room, where I have been shackled for the evening. We will see how things progress when I am freed.

Prelude

2011-12-02T01:05:00.001-08:00

I can't sleep.I'm too excited. It's strange, because I've been on some eight trips in thelast five years - Indianapolis, Mexico, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Cuba,Indianapolis again, and now Vancouver and San Diego. I should be used to thisshit by now, right? But I still get excited about flying. I still get excitedby being in a place I don't recognize. I am an adventurous soul, and being inone place for too long gives me a nasty case of wanderlust.

Strangely, rightnow I don't feel wanderlust. I feel sort of... Bored. I'm tired with my life inEdmonton. I want to do things that I've never done before and be places I'venever been, but not for the sake of doing those things, simply for the sake ofducking out of my normal work-a-day life. If this were the middle ages, I'dhave died of polio by now. If it were fantasy middle ages, I'd have alreadybecome a traveling merchant or perhaps a sailor. But this is modern-day NorthAmerica, and ain't nothing what comes that simple.

I'm starting anew company that I can, hopefully, be as hands-off as possible with that willmake me a boatload of dollars. If that happens, cool times. I will travelbasically non-stop, living in strange places more often than I don't. In themeantime, I will make due with a few vacations a year and hope its enough tostave off the urge to join the gypsies.

An Open Letter to Organized Play Programs

2011-11-08T11:48:00.001-08:00

Dear Organized Play Programs,

Stop letting unpaid interns design and program your software.

Sincerely,
Tournament Organizers and Judges Everywhere

Normally, I talk about cool role-playing game topics or travel or whatever. Sometimes I’ll talk about weird ass events we’re hosting. I don’t really go into how the sausage is made, because it’s sort of complicated and I’m not sure many people care. Today, though, I’m going to go into something I think is of dire, vital importance to the games industry as a whole: game design doesn’t stop when the game is shipped.

Pretty packaging sells games. A well-run tournament does the same, and it’s a lot easier to run a good tournament with good software. Except that there isn’t a single piece of “good” software being used by either Wizards of the Coast or Konami. Wizards Event Reporter (WER) is arcane, difficult to learn and often laggy to the point of uselessness. The Konami Tournament Software (KTS) doesn’t even upload tournament results. There is no option for that; you have to upload the tournament results to COSSY yourself. A close cousin to KTS is MANTIS, which is what was used for Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments under the Upper Deck, and it had a few features that I wish KTS had. COSSY, the third (and worst) Yu-Gi-Oh software platform is an entirely-online experience in frustration and pain.

So what the hell is going on? Why don’t these big players in the gaming sphere have better software for running their tournaments? If I had to take a guess (which I’m going to do), I’d say it’s a money problem, and that the problem is multifaceted. If you don’t have effective software to run your tournaments, people don’t run tournaments. And if you spend too much money making that software, you need to sell a lot of product to get that money back before it’s worth it. These are valid concerns, for sure. The problem, though, is that it doesn’t take a lot of money to solve some pretty basic problems with the way these programs work.

Let’s take a quick look at the things I love and hate about each of the above pieces of software.

Wizards Event Reporter

What I love: It’s probably the most intuitive of the tournament software engines currently available. That doesn’t mean that it’s actually intuitive, mind. It’s no iPad. But if you tool around with it for an hour or so, or if you have some experience using software like this, it’s pretty easy to figure out. It’s also the only software that lets me sanction events and report events from the same UI, which is something I rarely do, but it’s handy. A lot of the tournament management stuff that I would have to do online two years ago has been integrated here. I can sanction, report and cancel tournaments all in the same place. There are timers built into the software. The local player’s database is easy enough to use, though it’s quirky.

What I hate: It takes up a lot more resources than any program for this sort of thing should. My tournament computer isn’t crap, but it’s not exactly top of the line anymore. WER slows it to a crawl, lagging out and occasionally just not working. In the middle of a 25 person tournament, this is a pain in the ass. In the middle of a 40 person tournament, it’s a critical flaw. Also, it takes a fair bit of time to train yourself to use it effectively. You can use it poorly right out of the box, if you are already familiar with things like the old DCI Reporter (which was something like seven hundred times harder to use).

COSSY

What I love: Not much. The fact that it pretty seamlessly saves my tournament to the cloud as we’re playing doesn’t even out the horrendous list of horrible problems with the system. It runs out of a browser, which is a plus. I guess.

What I hate: Pretty much everything else. It runs on Java and is session-based, which means that a lot of the time you’re going to end up losing your connection to it if your rounds go to time (which they often do). It’s ugly and poorly designed, it doesn’t print well, it can’t change results without some serious tomfoolery, you can’t register players late, it’s been poorly translated from the Japanese version of the same software with some very, very confusing buttons. It is easily the most frustrating piece-of-shit program I have ever been forced to use, and I hope that whatever servers it currently lives on go up in flames and we never see it again.

Konami Tournament Software

What I love: It’s lightweight. Like its predecessor, MANTIS, the KTS software is small and compact, and runs with no difficulty on the worst computers in the world. It’s also damned near impossible to use if you don’t have a pretty good idea of how these sorts of systems work. It has some pretty solid buttons along the top of the interface that don’t do exactly what you think they’d do, but once you have them down, they make your life a lot simpler.

What I hate: It doesn’t have any cloud support at all. Like, when I’m done my tournament, I have to manually upload it to the COSSY website, because Konami can’t be arsed to pay people a hundred bucks to program a file transfer protocol into the program. It is the furthest thing from intuitive, with complex menus, dialogues that mean nothing to me, and one of the ugliest UIs to grace the tournament scene.

MANTIS

What I love: What it lacks in pretty it more than makes up for in utility. Mantis is easily one of the most straight-forward user interfaces around, with helpful menus, a tabbed interface, a perfectly integrated local player database, and an easy-to-understand upload interface. Also, the fact that there’s a function for temporary

What I hate: It’s really fucking ugly, and it doesn’t actually work for any sanctioned tournaments. It was the program that Upper Deck used for their Yu-Gi-Oh and World of Warcraft tournaments back when they were still a respected force in the collectible card game world. You can see that they put some thought and effort into making this program not completely suck, but it is showing its age, and the fact that I can’t use it for sanctioned tourneys puts a stake in it. I still use this one for non-sanctioned tourneys because it does a lot of the things I need it to do for that sort of thing.

Searching for Perfection

So what would the perfect tournament software look like? What features would it need to have for me to be able to sign off on it? First of all, it needs to be user-friendly. Like, Apple computers user-friendly. Designed to account for how human beings interact with things, and with a powerful suite of problem-solving tools related to how people actually run tournaments. See, the big problem with KTS or COSSY or WER is that they don’t account for human nature.

So let’s account for that. The way I run my tournaments is that I show up, set up my computer and open whatever software I’m supposed to be using. I pick a tournament to run, or I create a new one. I enroll players, most often from a local player database, but occasionally having to look up player names or input new players’ identification numbers by hand. Then I pair the round and print the pairings to a digital file, which I present to the players on a big TV screen we have in the tournament center. The players play, they bring me results, telling me what table they were on and who won the match. Rinse, repeat until the tournament is over, then we distribute our prize packs based on the players’ standings. Then I upload the tournament.

What this means to me is that I need to be looking at things in a specific order. The first thing I need to be looking at is a tournament selection/creation wizard. I need to answer some basic questions and arrive at the tournament I want to be playing. This could be set up like the Wizards Event Reporter, in list form, or it could be a question-and-answer wizard that determines which tournament we need to be playing based on choices made in the wizard itself.

Then I need to see my local player’s database and a method for inputting new players. These should be on the same interface, much like how MANTIS handles it. I like the check-box-equals-enrolled functionality of the MANTIS system. The database needs to be searchable so that larger tournament stores can find people efficiently, and there needs to be a way to locate the player number of a person who has forgotten their number at home. If the numbers are scanned by a barcode scanner, all the better.

Pairing is more important than any other aspect of tournament software. The pairings are shown to players, they are where I put results in, and they determine the outcome of the tourney as a whole. The interface here has to be clean, easy to use and easy to edit. Results need to be easily editable, and should automatically adjust current pairings when mistakes in reporting are discovered (because mistakes in reporting happen a LOT, there needs to be a cleaner system for handling these mistakes).

Pairings and standings should be visually grokkable. You should be able to look at a print-out of pairings and see a color difference between each line. I reference the tables used in Dungeons & Dragons as a good example of this. The tables have light rows and dark rows, alternating, to make it easier for you to reference at a glance.

This makes it really easy to tell what it is you’re looking at. If a round’s pairings were displayed like this, it would make it a lot easier to see who the hell you’re about to go sling cards against. Moreover, it’s prettier to look at, and you can fit a LOT of information in a chart like this. Who you’re playing, what your record is, what your opponent’s record is, table number, seating arrangement, where they were in the draft pod, whatever. It’s a really simple, small change that would add a lot to the functionality of the software for your average tournament organizer.

There should be timers, and those timers should set automatically depending on what you’re doing. You should be able to tell the computer “I am doing this,” and it should figure out how to time that thing. For Magic: The Gathering drafts, draft timings should be an audio file that counts down for you (I’ve already created an audio file at my store that does exactly that). For every game, when a round starts, the clock should start with a three minute delay to give everyone time to get to their seats and prepare to play.

Putting in results should be a foolproof endeavor. I really like the way Konami handles this. It’s just a check box for who won, and another set of check boxes for anyone who drops. That’s it. It’s simple. I rarely screw up Yu-Gi-Oh results. I screw up Magic results all the fucking time.

An aside to players: There are some things you should be doing to make this process easier. Know what table you were assigned to. If you don’t know, look it up. If you are the winner of the round, report the result. Don’t let the loser report. Don’t let your friend report. Do it yourself, because your TO is going to see you, and that fucks around with how we report. I’m serious; most of my screw-ups happen because someone comes up and tells me they lost, but I report them as winning because they are the person standing in front of me. Also, don’t be a dick.

Standings are how most tournaments determine who has won. Swiss round tourneys live and die by their ability to determine clear ranks of players. As per the pairings, there should be a clear, easy-to-read chart. Standings should update as you play. I shouldn’t need to pair a new round to see what the standings look like.

And finally, uploading should be fucking seamless. It should require zero effort. When the tournament is done, I should be able to click a button and have it handled. It is not difficult to build this into a system. I shouldn’t be stopping my tournament waiting for the program to sync. I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops. I should be able to click a button and then never think about that tournament again. Is that so much to ask?

Conclusions!

There are a lot of ways you can run tournaments right now. I haven’t even covered all of the software available, just the ones I use most often. And I haven’t covered all of the features that would make a piece of tourney software better than everything else currently on the market, just the ones that are most relevant to the needs of a tournament organizer. I haven’t even touched on warnings, penalties, format rules, time extensions, tabling and seating considerations, pod crossing, costing, prizing considerations, tournament math (how many players are going to go X-2? The equation is to the right), pre-registration, and a million other details. These are all important considerations and how they’re handled will drastically change the flavor of organized play. The fact that even the biggest, most glaring of tournament organizational factors have been given so little attention, though, is annoying at best and hobbling tournament organizers at the worst. This is especially true of the people who haven’t been doing this for years. People who are just getting into the world of tournament organization have a pretty steep learning curve ahead of them, and that should not be the case for an endeavor meant to bring market and support a product you mean to sell.

If you want to sell this product, and you want organized play to be a large part of the marketing for that, you need to make running tournaments as simple and approachable as possible. Get more people running tourneys, and you have more people buying your stuff. While organized play has done wonders for my store, not every games manager in the world has my tech savvy or determination, and I have seen stores that have been crippled by a lack of ease and approachability. That is something we need to fix.

A Collection of Wee Little Games

2011-09-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

One Page Role-playing Games
These are the one-page RPGs I've been linked to so far. As I get more, the list will be updated to include them.

Kristoffer Hansen - Wee Little People
Zak Selman-Palmer - Internville

One Page Role-playing Games

2011-09-14T10:44:00.000-07:00

My friends and I like to come up with crazy game ideas all the time. Once in a great while, I'll throw down the gauntlet and challenge people to actually write a goddamn game. Not like, a seven hundred page monstrosity, just a wee little one-page or 24-hour game design. It doesn't have to be great, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a role-playing game, and you have to finish it.

So now I'm issuing the challenge to the rest of you: write a role-playing game in less than a thousand words and put it up on your blog. The Rules are only this: It has to be less than 1000 words, it has to have a mechanic I've never seen before (or a kick-ass variation of a mechanic I have seen before), and you have to send me a link, either in the comments here or to my e-mail at friggert@hotmail.com or to my twitter at @warpgames. Go create!

Wee Little People

A Role-playing Game in One Page

The Point: You and your friends play the tiny people that live inside your house. Your characters are roughly mouse-sized and must overcome many challenges to simply survive. Also, you must never reveal the existence of your people to the humans, as they will kill you or eat you or something. Humans are terrible.

Tell a Story: One of the players is the Storyteller. He or she describes the situation in which your Wee Little People find themselves. The rest of you play Wee Little People and try to do stuff while the Big People in the house are clumsy and oblivious. Doing Stuff can include collecting food, thiefing things, fighting with the cat, disposing of garbage discretely, pilfering Tim’s weed stash, moving dice to where they will be most likely to be underfoot, building shelters under cupboards, finding water, defending your home against cockroach attacks, invading mouse holes for their supplies… You’ve got options. Alternatively, you could try and tell an epic tale of adventure on a tiny scale. But you already know how to do those.

Character Creation: Choose a thing you are good at, a thing you are bad at, a skill you have learned, and an item you possess. None of these may be the same thing (for instance, you cannot be good at climbing and have that also listed as your skill). When you attempt an action that relates to the thing you’re good at, get a +1 bonus to the roll. When you attempt a thing that relates to the thing you’re bad at, take a -1 from the roll. When you attempt to do a thing that relates to your skill, once per session you can succeed on the roll automatically. When you attempt a thing that relates to the item you possess, you ignore any penalties on that roll unless that penalty comes from the attempt relating to a thing you are bad at.

Rolling Dice: Whenever someone attempts something and the outcome is in doubt, roll a six-sided die. If you roll five or higher (counting all bonuses and penalties), you succeed. If the result is four or less, you fail.

Failing is Bad: Whenever you fail at a thing, mark it off on your character sheet. You are only allowed to fail at something six times over the course of a single session. If you fail more often than that, Bad Things Happen. The Bad Thing is decided by the player to your left, and you are out of the game until the next session.

This is Your House: Wee Little People is set in whatever place you happen to be. The setting is whatever is already around you. If you’re in your living room, for instance, that might include your couch, coffee table, TV stand, bookshelf, and the half-eaten pizza in the box on the floor. The antagonists are you. The Wee Little People cannot make their existence known to you, so whatever it is they’re going about doing, they have to try and sneak around you and your friends to do it. When Jim gets up to grab a soda, the kitchen is no longer a safe place. Scatter!

Discovery: If Bad Stuff happens to all of you, you’re discovered. If you are discovered, it can be safely assumed that you and your friends have cashed in on the existence of the Wee Little People and have left them to be tortured by scientists forever. You sick fucks. Or, you could spend the rest of the evening arguing about what you and your group would ACTUALLY do if you found leprechauns in your underwear drawer. Up to you, really.

Ten Things About Indianapolis

2011-08-08T10:08:00.001-07:00

This has become something of a tradition in my various travels around the world with Warp One. When I'm done a vacation, I write up a ten-point list of the wicked stuff about the place I went. Most of my blog posts have been about how awesome GenCon has been, but less about the vacation part of the trip, so now you get some of that, hopefully with a bit of a gaming edge to it.

1) It is really fucking hot.
The high temperature in Indianapolis, never dropped below 30 degrees centigrade. Now, that might seem heavenly to some, but I'm a bigger dude. I'm from CANADA, where having a solid layer of fat on you is generally a good thing because it gets so cold you can't breathe without it, so having to deal with the hottest our weather gets all year for a seven day stretch has been a big deal. I've learned to cope. There are systems I have in place now that help me deal with the weather. But if you're not prepared for August in Indiana, it will blindside you and blindside you good.

2) The people here are really, really friendly. Just walking down the street, you'll get people nodding their heads and asking "How y'all doin' today?" You can almost sort of tell the outsiders from the folk who live here based on how friendly they are to you. If they ask "How y'all doin' today?" they're probably local. If they look at you like you've just crawled out of their navel and seek to cause mischief, they're probably from out of town. Also, everyone sounds like Hank Hill.

3) The food is cheap. Deceptively cheap, even. There's a place down the street from the convention center called Steak & Shake that sells very decent burgers, milkshakes and the like. It's a pretty classic American diner. For two people to eat a burger, fries and a shake, it's $15, which is about how much it costs for a single meal at Subway back home. So we ate there a lot. We shouldn't have, because there was a Marsh's grocery store two blocks from the B&B, but we did. They have so much of my money... And given that they were line-up-out-the-door busy for most of the con, it wouldn't surprise me to learn they busted a million dollars in sales this weekend.

4) The city is falling apart. Maybe it's just my Canadian-tax-payer-social-service-loving-communist side, but it seems a lot like Indiana could use some fixing up. Buildings are old and crumbling, the sidewalks are busted and slowly degrading into gravel, the bridges seem rickety and unstable, the whole city just seems to be coming apart at the seams. It's pretty enough, for sure. The old brick buildings are beautiful and people here have some spectacular gardens, the park we walked through while we were lost was gorgeous. But other parts of the city are obviously crumbling and could use some love.

5) The US build some awesome monuments. We saw the Indiana State World War Memorial, and the obelisk here is awesome. The state building is impressive and reminds me of a bigger-scale Alberta Legislature. These places were pristine, well kept, awesome memorials. I was quite impressed.

6) The gentleman who runs a bed and breakfast is pleasant and sweet; the lady of the house is a witch. This is entirely anecdotal, but at both of the Bed & Breakfasts we stayed at, this was the case. In the first, we were sternly reminded of the two-persons-per-room rule, and glared at disapprovingly, while the gentleman of the house was smiles and pleasantries. At the second, the lady seemed shocked that I had arrived with someone and was quite displeased at my inability to make it to breakfast (which starts at nine; I was picking Holly and Natalie up at eight each morning). She demanded I leave a note letting her know which days she could serve me breakfast, which I did in as polite a tone as I could muster: none of them. I have eaten a single breakfast with a Bed & Breakfast since I arrived. It was this morning, at a different B&B.

7) Indianapolis is smaller than it seems. It's population is only about twice that of Edmonton's, but the metropolitan area of the city is actually smaller (if you count things like Sherwood Park). The downtown core is not as large as Edmonton's, and getting around it seems like it would be relatively easy without the huge road construction that's going on in that part of town (and, seemingly, nowhere else). The convention center is huge. The hotel chains that surround it are legion. Next time, I hope to have a hotel room connected to the ICC or a house in the nearby area just for convenience's sake, but the half hour walk from my B&B to pick up the girls and get to the Convention was hardly a challenge.

8) Massachusetts Ave. is no Whyte Ave. The cultural avenue of Indianapolis is pretty awesome, I'll give it that. The fact that you can buy booze at the convenience store means there are fewer liquor depots kicking around, but the lack of party on Mass Ave was actually a bit disappointing. I didn't party at all this time around, which is a pretty huge departure from my 2008 trip.

9) I will travel with Holly and I will travel with Natalie, but not both. I realize that this is more a personal note and less about the vacation itself. You can deal. I had a lovely time with each of them, and occasionally I had a lovely time with both of them, but there was some drama. I'm not going to get into it (I've decided to focus on the positive from the trip, and there was a lot of awesome positive about this trip), but it did bog things down and got everyone into a rough spirit, which is not what vacationing should be. If I can, I would like to take one vacation per year with each of them, alternating between a Big Vacation like GenCon and a smaller, local vacation, and who gets which vacation. This is stuff we'll work out over the next few months (hopefully well before December/January).

10) GenCon is fucking amazing. I learned so much on this trip. I got to talk to so many people and try so many products to which I don't typically have access. I got to make some solid business contacts, and build some relationships with folks that are usually outside of my sphere of influence. The show was bigger and better this year than last, and I got to take part in a few of the things that I had missed out on the year before (the Cardhalla takedown, Trade Day). It was an awesome time, and I had a lot of fun. I hope to do it again next year and maybe take y'all with me this time.

GenCon Day Five

2011-08-08T09:58:00.001-07:00

Or, Things I Bought and People I Want to Buy From

I spent most of today gathering together business cards from the various companies that interested me. I didn't go to any events (Sunday is a half-day, and I was more interested in finding deals in the Exhibit Hall anyway). The cards I gathered together are these:

Gamescience: These are the guys I was most interested in getting business information from. They make dice that I haven't seen from any other manufacturer, and their "normal" dice are precision-cut perfection.

Tiffany Wiggs: I sort of picked this card up by happy accident. I was standing at another dealer booth and saw a young lady holding a woven, albino beholder and asked her where she had purchased it. Turns out her mother makes them, and her daughter passed me one of her cards. She doesn't go through any distributors or anything yet, but I'm going to see what I can do to get some woven, stuffed dragons and beholders in the store.

Crystal Commerce: These guys sell a point-of-sale system that does basically everything we wish our point-of-sale system could do. I asked a lot of questions. They gave me a lot of answers that I really liked. Most importantly, it will work on any number of computers and on my ipad at the same time. *glee!*

Dragon Pets: Holly bought a small, posable dragon from these folks, and they are very, very cute. Again, they don't have a Canadian distribution arm, but we may still order a selection of them in. Some come with armor. And helmets!

Medieval Collectibles: This was a card that also came with a catalogue for quality LARP materials, both costuming and boffer weapons. LARP seems to be growing in Edmonton, and I think there is always a market available for foam weapons with which young people may hit one another. As a whole, Warp has shied away from LARP (it takes up a lot of space, and the gear doesn't tend to sell as well as, say, books), but with the growing interest, both in the store and in the city, it's probably a good idea for us to start looking into it as a viable expansion market.

Hirst Arts: There were a couple of people I was looking at buying things from in the direction of 3D terrain. In the end, I decided I wanted to go with Hirst Arts, because they don't sell terrain at all, the sell the moulds to MAKE terrain. They have some beautiful rubber moulds that you can fill with plaster of paris and make some fantastic 3D terrain for role-playing games, miniature war games, what have you.

Geek Chic: If you haven't seen the tables these guys make, you're missing out. I mean, sure, they're costed similar to gently-used BMWs, but they're worth it. Seeing the tables in person has made me rearrange my expectations of which table I'd like to have in my home (the Sultan was actually just the size of my living room), but I would absolutely love to work with these guys and get some custom play space built for the store. Card tables that convert to role-playing tables that convert to miniature war game tables would be a hell of a thing for us, especially if the conversion were _easy_.

Q-Workshop: When I buy dice, I do it in three ways. I buy a pound of them (you can buy them at the store! while supplies last!) or I buy semi-precious stones (like the limited-edition 16mm bone dice I picked up at the convention) or I buy Q-Workshop. The last way has been, traditionally, the hardest. Q-Workshop is located somewhere in Europe, and their dice are of a much higher quality than most. While not as precise as the dice at Gamescience, they tend to be much, much prettier, with runes and elven script or pictures carved into the faces. I bought three sets of Q-Workshop dice while I was at GenCon, two for myself and one for Holly. They were well worth it. According to the good folk at GenCon, Q-Workshop has been working with one of my bigger distributors to get their dice into Canada, so I hope to have a much larger selection of them in the store very soon. They are more expensive than Chessex or Koplow, but if you like your dice pretty, they are well worth it.

Serious Pixie: This woman is amazing. She's one of the driving forces behind Heroes of Hesiod, and did a bunch of awesome seminars and things over trade day. I didn't get a chance to hang out with her nearly as much as I would have liked to, but she did let me know that she's looking at building a role-playing system that brings kids into the game step-by-step, year by year, which I think may be the coolest thing anyone has ever done. Don't get me wrong, I deeply appreciate what Daniel Solis is doing as a story game designer, but if we want the hobby of role-playing games (as we currently know them; what Daniel is doing is for a different post) to survive, we're going to need a way to introduce them to new generations of gamers. And that means we need people like Susan J Morris in the world.

Stuff I Got!

I figured, since the convention is over, I'd might as well list the things I picked up this time around. I'm doing this mostly from memory, so if I miss something, I'll be sure to edit the post to include it.

Burning Wheel Gold - An updated version of the insanely popular Burning Wheel, having taken some lessons learned during the creation of Mouse Guard and applying them to the base system. Awesome looking book and I can't wait to tear into it and pick it apart.

A GenCon Hoodie - It has a dragon on it, and the words "GenCon 2011." It will be nice to have when I'm in weather that isn't counted in the thirties centigrade.

A shot glass with 2d6 in the bottom - Every time you do sneak attack damage as a level-one rogue, take a shot. Then figure out how much damage you did. ^_^

Dice - I picked up a set of Crystal Caste's semi-precious stone GenCon exclusive, the seven-piece set of 16mm bone. I also picked up a few sets of elven dice from Q-Workshop, and a dice cup with elven writing around the edges. Fucking hot.

Designers and Dragons - The most comprehensive history of role-playing games, the companies that make them, and the people involved that has ever been put together. It is my sincere hope that the people who put this together (Mongoose, I believe) continue to update the history as time goes one. If they put out a new edition of this every five years, it would sell.

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple - Daniel Solis' new book. He's the guy responsible for Happy Birthday Robot, and Do has been getting a LOT of attention this year. It's a "wind punk" story-writing game in which the players take on the roles of Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. When prayers are sent to the Temple, the Pilgrims come to help out, but their natures are such that they cannot help but get into trouble while getting things sorted out. I haven't had a chance to give it a full read-through (why hello, three hour layover in Toronto), but what I've read so far looks incredible.

A new vinyl grid sheet - The one that I have at home is really solid, but when you get into the paragon tier it can be REALLY hard to constrict combat to a battle mat. I picked up a mega mat at a hell of a deal (roughly what they wholesale for), and plan on abusing the extra space, and my players, accordingly.

Magnets - I love status markers, and I picked up a fairly expensive Dungeon Master's kit of colored magnets that are meant for exactly that. The biggest reason is, again, the weirdness of paragon tier D&D means that there is a lot of flying and a lot of falling (and burrowing and phasing and all sorts of other ridiculous bullshit). It was pricey, even after the fifteen percent discount, but it's a thing I've needed and wanted for my games for a pretty long time. There are just too many statuses running around to not have a good way of keeping track of who is doing what.

Art! - I planned on doing some ordering at the store, and while some of the people I approached about that were open to the idea, they weren't prepared to action the orders from the convention and would have just taken my order back home and called me to confirm it. So I'm just going to call them when I get back. So, for the store, I picked up three adorable prints of classic monsters: a gorgon, a minotaur and a manticore. All of them are signed, with a cute little sketch of the monster in the corner of the print.

Gifts all around! - When we were walking through the art exhibit, I saw a picture that I gushed over quite a bit. It was a bank of clouds, and bursting from it was a turtle with a jet pack on. It sounds goofy, and it looks goofy, and I loved it. So Bloodsong picked it up for me and surprised me with it at the Bed and Breakfast. I picked up a set of super-pretty elven dice and a My Little Pony shirt for Autumnblade; for Bloodsong I got a cloak and clasp. Autumnblade picked up a wand for Bloodsong, as the one Bloodsong had bought earlier in the convention had broken; I thought the gesture was sweet.

All in all, I spent... a lot of money. ^_^ My boss was concerned that my budget was going to be too big, but I have about a hundred and twenty dollars left after buying the above and food. I would have spent much more if I'd had it. I'm not even kidding. I had to restrain myself.

I ended up buying a LOT of water. It was uncomfortable to carry a bottle around for too long, and the number of places I could fill one up were few and far between, so I ended up spending some three dollars a pop on water during one of the worst heat waves I've ever had the discomfort of living through. Also, Steak & Shake got more of my money than any one exhibitor, because their food is delicious and deceptively inexpensive. Fifteen bucks for a meal for two is less than you would expect at an A&W or McDonalds back home, so it seemed like a steal to eat there all the time...

GenCon Day Four

2011-08-06T23:49:00.000-07:00

GenCon Day Three

Today I lost my fiancé, pissed off my girlfriend, and got into long, difficult discussions with both. I also played a cute game that takes longer to learn than to play, watched a few demo guys who really know what they're talking about (and it showed, man; these guys were great), took an end to end search of the Exhibit Hall for the second time and found a wicked gift for Natalie that I will need to buy tomorrow. So, not a total wash.

Still, this was a very event-light day at the convention. I went to the "first" showing of Laura and Tracy Hickman's Killer Breakfast which was by turns funnier and full of more downtime than the Second Breakfast. Most of what I did afterwards was pass my card around and collect information for products I'd really like to carry. Well, _most_ of what I did was wander around looking for Holly, but for work purposes, that was pretty much it. I'll have a better post for you tomorrow, when I play a bunch of games and buy some kickass stuff.

I did get to spend some time watching demos of Fantasy Flight games that I now rather desperately want to play. But until I actually get some free time to sit down and demo some games for myself, I'll have to settle for whatever plans for demos I can dream up.

Instead, let me tell you about alchemy. Alchemy is a board game (sort of) in which you are attempting to craft "elements" that are represented by different colors of dice. To start, you get one die of each color (there are five) and a set of cards that live in front of you. The white die represents Aether, and to win the game you need to collect five of them.

Cards have costs and products on them. Some costs destroy the dice you have, some do not, and each card produces one die. To make a die, you put the cost on the card along with one of four turn-markers. You can typically take one action per turn, but there are special rules to allow you too occasionally put out more dice.

You can also buy more cards with a cute bidding system, in which you put a turn-marker and a die under a card and the number on the die represents the bid you've made. If your bid is the highest after four turns, you get the card.

It was an alright game, one that I would certainly consider selling in the store, but nothing spectacular. It played a lot like solitaire, and I think adding a third player to the mix was needed. Also, likely,a screw-you mechanic, or at least a way to interact with and or harm your opponent's progress. Beyond that, a solid design.

GenCon Day Three

2011-08-06T04:42:00.000-07:00

Or: Looking for a Needle in a Haystack, and More Robin Laws!

Today I managed to wake up early for Laura and Tracy Hickman's Killer Breakfast, which was fantastic. It's the first year they've ever done a second showing of the Breakfast (it's usually on Saturday mornings), and so the hall was only about half full, though there were more participants, I think, than Tracy was used to. There were songs. And some dancing. And beach balls. And mass murder. It was basically great.

I think one of the coolest things about GenCon is that it strips down the biggest personalities in gaming to a human level. I mean, I'm not implying that I ever thought Tracy Hickman was a godlike individual, but I was, at some points in my life, fairly convinced that he was Fizban the Wizard from his Dragonlance books. In person, he's an approachable, funny, witty guy and he improvises his strange-ass DM show with a ferocity and speed that I've never seen before. He easily handles tables of eight people throwing ridiculous actions at him like he's been prepared for them all day, that every single eventuality is already thought out, that he's seen everything and knows the answers to the most dire of questions. That's why he is a legendary writer, game designer and Dungeon Master, and I am the guy who mans a comic shop games center. ^_^

After breakfast, I again hit the Exhibit Hall. I was on something of a quest for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I'm a huge fan of Daniel Solis' other recent hit Happy Birthday Robot, and I figured that a role-playing game drawing inspiration from Avatar: The Last Airbender couldn't possibly be horrible. I could not, for the life of me, remember who published the damnable thing, though, and the lack of free wifi at the convention center made it impossible for me to check while I was in the hall, so I had to make a systematic row-by-row search for the damnable thing. I didn't pick it up until well after this point (chronologically). The game is better than I had originally anticipated, especially for something designed for the 12+ crowd, and I have every intention of playing the shit out of it. Also, I will be getting a bunch to sell at the store, so if you want it (and you want it), you can pick it up when I have it.

I also picked up a package of the magnetic miniature markers. I've seen them in play a few times, and I've meant to pick a set up, and the 15% convention discount more than convinced me to throw money at the Alea Tools guys. One of the cool little bonuses about buying from them at GenCon was the ability to mix and match my magnets so that I could tailor them to my play style. There are a lot of blue magnets to designate how high in the air a person is, an a number of brown tokens to show how far underground a person is. There are a lot of red tokens to signify that a person is bloodied. There's a solid mixture of magnetic strips to put on the bottoms of miniatures so that they can adhere to the bases. It's very pretty and came in an awesome carrying case. Again, I'll be looking to pick some of these up sometime in the near future.

One of the coolest things about conventions, for me at least, is getting to chill out with the people who make the stuff I sell. Maybe that's just weird to some people, but I like to be able to shake hands with folk I deal with on a regular basis, let them know who I am and let me get a feel fro who they are in person. A distributor or wholesaler or manufacturer can be a great person over the phone, but until I've had a chance to meet someone in person, I don't think I have a very clear idea of who that person is. To be honest, I'm something of a rarity in the industry in that I greatly prefer to do things over the phone than on the internet with the people I buy things from, and meeting someone in person just gives me a much clearer idea of who it is I'm dealing with.

I collected a lot of business cards today. I gave out as many as I got.

So I'll be doing my best to make arrangements that include magnetic miniature markers, Do (and related games, because games for kids are amazing). I also picked up a new Chessex megamat and got to have some solid conversations with the guys at Gamescience, Dwarven Forge, Fantasy Flight, and more. Tomorrow is going to be my primary business contact day, so I'm looking forward to a lot more of that.

We stopped by a seminar about using wikis to keep track of your campaign data, which was actually pretty informative. The wiki system they support is called Obsidian Portal, and you should almost definitely check it out. The service is free, and there's a LOT going on for it, including the ability to make maps for your campaign that zoom in and out, have pins, tag various things in various ways, and make all sorts of crazy notes about your game (including secret notes, player secret notes, lists of NPCs with their bios, the places they were encountered, etc). With one of their paid memberships, you can get even more in-depth with multiple maps, more wikis, etc. Definitely a service worth checking out.

Next up was a seminar about the Gumshoe system, which is one of the most innovative things to come out of Robin D. Laws' head (and that's saying something, because Robin Laws has a ridiculous amount of awesome in that head of his). For those that are unfamiliar, the Gumshoe system is an investigative role-playing game in which you never fail to get the clue you were looking for. No matter what happens, if the character has the appropriate investigation skill, they find every clue in the room. Always. If you want to find the clues in the room in a particularly spectacular way, or you want as much information as the clue has to offer, you can spend a point and learn more. It's pretty neat. It focuses the attention on the exciting bits, where failure might actually be interesting.

There was supposed to be a seminar about Intergenerational Gaming, something that is sort of near and dear to me as a retailer. How do you get kids gaming? How do we invent a new generation of gamers to take part in this ridiculous hobby of ours? Sadly, the speaker didn't show up, but we did have something of a rousing conversation with the folks who did show up.

Right around now is where, chronologically, I found my copy of Do. ^_^

GenCon Day Two

2011-08-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

Or: Larry Elmore Hit on my Girlfriend, then White Wolf Fucked Me

Today's the first day the Exhibit Hall is open. I meant to hit up a seminar called Wizards R&D At Your Service, but the bastards scheduled it to coincide directly with the opening of the Hall, which is sort of like saying "We really hope NO ONE shows up for this thing." Given the way the Wizards seminar was handled yesterday, I'm not at all surprised that they're aiming for smaller turnouts at some of these things. What do you want to see out of Wizards of the Coast R&D? More 3rd Edition, of course...

Anyway, I didn't manage to make it to any seminars that morning, however much I would have liked to. I stood in line at will-call with my girlfriend Natalie for just over an hour and half after checking out the Exhibit Hall on my advance ticket. In the fifteen minutes I was in the hall that first go around, I spent over one hundred dollars; I already own a copy of Burning Wheel Gold, and I picked up two sets of dice and a dice cup from Q-Workshop, who I have a bitch of a time ordering things from, so that was awesome. I waited in the ridiculous line at Will Call mostly for morale support. The people in that line fucking needed it.

Every time I go to GenCon from now on, I will be getting the Trade Day package. Not for the awesome early admission to the hall, not for the Trade Day benefits itself. For my badge, I waited some ten minutes, then I was GenConning to my heart's content. So, if you're even remotely associated with the industry, I highly suggest picking one of these things up.

I bought a shirt for my fiancee Holly that is in all ways amazing (Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie giving one another a Bro Hoof with "Bronies before Honies" emblazoned across the top). I picked up a 16mm set of bone dice that were quite expensive, but also a GenCon exclusive (which makes them even MORE awesome!). Larry Elmore signed my Dungeons & Dragons Red Box shirt, and then hit on Natalie a lot. I picked up a copy of Designers & Dragons, which is a comprehensive history of role-playing games and the good people who make them, from Gary and Dave sitting in their basement hand-typesetting the original brown-backed folios to stuff that happened just a few months ago. Every role-playing game should have a cover like this history, as well. It's gorgeous. I'll probably be bringing a few copies into the store for you to buy them.

Because my coworker and brother-at-arms Ian Lauder wanted to know what was going on with White Wolf, we hit the White Wolf 2.0 seminar. There was a lot of interesting stuff going on, here. They're releasing a new version of Vampire: The Masquerade for their 20th Anniversary, and they'll be releasing new OLD World of Darkness books over the course of the year. New World of Darkness will be seeing a new game (Mummy the Somethingorother) and all of this will be available online... Or by print-on-demand... When I asked them when I would be seeing any of this new material in my store, they let me know, in no uncertain terms, "Well, never..." Starting this year, White Wolf will no longer be publishing books for sale in Friendly Local Game Stores. If I want to carry their product, I will need to buy the same print-on-demand material you have access to from Drive-Thru RPG. Which is basically White Wolf telling me, to my face, that my store no longer matters, that distributors with whom I have really solid working relationship no longer matter, and that you, the end consumer, don't really matter either. People without credit cards? Why would we want to sell product to THEM?

So, we won't be carrying White Wolf product at Warp One anymore. Which is a damned shame, because I was really happy about a lot of the stuff they were talking about publishing this year.

We hit the Exhibit Hall one more time and Natalie picked up a wand and a wand holster for her wrist. Also, a new corset. She now owns one more piece of Geek Chic product than I do (the wand). I got to take a look at some of their tables, and they're fucking GORGEOUS. I want two. I want them to make a round table. And then mail it to me for testing or something.

Then there was an awesome Game Design seminar that was awesome mostly because Greg Stolze and Matt Forbeck were two of the people running it. Also, the guy who invented Killer Bunnies is fucking hilarious. After that wrapped up, I got a quick massage from the spa downstairs and, since the Hall was closed and I had no more seminars to go to, it was time to grab something to eat and head home. I developed something of a nasty headache from a mixture of the neon lights at the convention hall and the ridiculous, wet heat that is blanketing Indianapolis right now. It doesn't look like the weather is going to lighten up at all over the next couple of days, either...

GenCon Day One

2011-08-03T20:03:00.000-07:00

I went to three seminars today, and a game event. The first seminar I went to was about super-charging my marketing, and it gave me a few really solid ideas for how to get my marketing message out there and grow the business some. I mean, the business is already growing like crazy, but if I can ever put 20% growth on my resume, I will.

The second was about an e-mail program and I mostly stuck around for that because I had no idea what to do with the next hour or so. I planned lunch after that, but we ended up taking a fair bit of time with it, and I decided to check out the Wizards of the Coast seminar about making my D&D and Magic events better than they currently are. Everything they talked about equally applied to my Yu-Gi-Oh! events.

The last seminar was probably the most eye-opening for me. There was a strange, nearly adversarial tone to the whole thing, from both the point of view of the retailers and the point of view of Wizards of the Coast. When the subject of places like WalMart or Chapters sometimes selling things before street date got out, Wizards' sales head got his feathers in a bit of a rustle (and later, when I suggested letting event store sell earlier than the Big Guys, he told me that a) there's no way WalMart gets product before we do and b) they give us pre-release events and that should make us happy, right?). Other store owners complained about many of the same things I complain about on a regular basis (better internal communication at Wizards being a necessity, the opaqueness of the Judge program, etc), which gave me a pretty solid sense of community and kinship with them. I'm not the only person who thinks Wizards of the Coast needs to get its ass in better shape.

I stopped for lunch and then headed over to the advanced play-through of D&D Lair Assault, which was ridiculous fun. I played a cleric, myself, and did a passable job for a guy who sits on the comfy-chair side of the screen more often than not. The Lair Assault initiative is sort of an answer to the D&D Encounters Initiative and the Fourthcore movement started last year. The scenario I played had our group chasing down a cult of Asmodeus in some sort of fire temple. The plot was obviously unimportant, as the Game Master flew through the description and got us right into playing.

The first room had four pits of oil and some minions that lit themselves and everything in a burst one on fire with them. It was only five damage, but that set the oil alight and got us taking ten damage every time we ended our turn in the burning squares. A non-minion warlock lit most of the party on fire and scattered them into the burning pits while we tried to clear out the minions and take down their lieutenant. Clearing that room, we moved into one that was empty except for statues (that shot us with their laser eyes), and that led to a false door that burst with a solid athletics check from the slayer. We faced off against a few more minions that killed off the slayer and the wizard (by this time I was out of heals), and we wrapped up because we were over time. I'm proud to say that my party made it the furthest in the adventure out of the showing at six o'clock.

A few interesting details from this Lair Assault:

It was one encounter spread over multiple rooms with a 20-turn time limit. At level fifteen, that would make things difficult. At level five, with mediocre characters, it was easily impossible.

There were no punches pulled on the damage. The baddies weren't dealing damage in the 20s, but they were in the high tens, and the environmental hazards were seriously kicking our ass.

The DM had a card with a bunch of different possible placements for his creatures, so that players can play through a few times and still not know what's going on. There were tokens for the statues in the rooms that flipped over to reveal if they were traps or a gargoyle.

There will be absolutely no pre-generated characters for Lair Assault.

Chris Tulach congratulated my party for making it as far as we did. ^_^

Yet More GenCon Stuff

2011-07-30T19:59:00.000-07:00

While this is mostly a blog about gaming, it is occasionally also a blog about me. And around travel time, it also becomes a blog about travel. This is one of the posts that is mostly about me and mostly not about gaming and a little bit about travel.

I don't really have normal relationships. At least, I don't have normal relationships if you consider a heterosexual, monogamous relationship the norm. I have, at present, two girlfriends. Those girlfriends are each seeing people that are not me. Autumnblade is seeing a lovely young lady from our weekly D&D campaign, and Bloodsong is seeing one of my co-workers and a business contact of mine she met through me. We all know about one another. We all approve of this style of relationship, and with one another's choices in partners. Google "polyamory." That's what we're up to.

That isn't to say that everything is always lovely all the time. There's drama, and it can be really tough to work through. Anything you do that involves more than one person's feelings runs the risk of being difficult. Any time you add more people to that mix, it gets exponentially more difficult. I'm serious when I say "exponentially," as well; it isn't a case of one person bringing enough drama for one person. Each new romantic relationship brings with it a new non-romantic relationship with every other person in the group. Things get sort of crazy sometimes.

But it comes with the territory, and everyone is generally in agreement that the good heavily outweighs the bad most of the time, and we struggle on like any other relationship or network of relationships might. Think of it sort of like an extended group of friends who occasionally sleep together.

This year, I'm bringing both of my girlfriends to GenCon. That's sort of like saying "I'm bringing two snarling wildcats to sit with me in a phone booth for three hours!" There's a lot of potential for things to go horribly, horribly wrong with this trip. I'm confident it's going to be alright, mind, the above comparison isn't meant to convey that they hate one another or that they're at one another's throats. I've met some very lovely snarling wildcats. But there is certainly the potential that everyone and everything in the direct vicinity is going to get mauled, I'm not ignorant of that fact.

So this is going to be something of a strange trip. Autumnblade is a fairly avid gamer, and has the entire weekend planned out. There have been a few moments where she's looked at me and said something akin to "Then, at midnight, I get to stop for a snack!" I'm not even really sure how much I'll see of her. Bloodsong's new to gaming as a hobby, and plans to mostly check out every single game in the exhibition hall and try out whatever anyone is playing near her. Honestly, I envy her a little, in that she is going to be exposed to so many games in one of the most incredible environments possible. If she doesn't like the game she's playing, she can stop, turn around, and start playing a completely different game at the drop of a hat.

I'll likely spend a lot of time in the exhibition hall myself, but more for buying purposes than anything else. The events I'm most keen on attending are seminars. There are a lot of cool talks going on this year, and I'm really excited to learn a thing or two about my various hobbies (and my business). I'm part of the Trade Day program this year, which is something I'd pushed for in my first trip, but the bosses were pretty solid that that first go-round was not to be a working holiday. I think they've figured out that I breathe this shit, though, and have stopped trying to pursuade me from working on my days off (I have been known to come into work occasionally just because I'm bored).

About the only gaming event I'm absolutely taking part in is the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series. That might seem a touch strange, given my dislike of the game, but it's for a good cause.

I will be trolling.

I have built a deck that is older than God, and have every intention of having some kid look at me like I have a screw loose when I play it. A few kids, in fact. I will be wasting a good portion of my day fucking with Yu-Gi-Oh! kids. It will be very lol. I am considering blogging about it live. Maybe live-tweeting. If I can, with pictures of my opponent's faces when I lay down a card they haven't seen since people considered Hammer Pants a viable fashion choice and the Y2K bug was going to doom the planet. Yes, that's right, I'm playing Toons.

I also plan on buying things and doing some business networking. But the YGO game is going to be the highlight of the trip, I'm sure.

What Wizards is Doing Wrong, Part 86x10²³³

2011-07-25T15:38:00.001-07:00

We all love to rag on Wizards of the Coast for fucking up our amazingly wonderful awesome incredible game. And to be fair, they fuck up a fair bit. Not enough that they’ve gone out of business, mind, but enough that they’re hurting us, and enough that they’re hurting their market share. According to ICv2 (which is brilliant), the good folks at Paizo are a close second in the role-playing game market, and they’re selling a game that Wizards of the Coast invented. Anyone looking at this should be able to understand the problem pretty quickly: Paizo is making nearly all of its money off of an intellectual property developed by their direct competitors, and they’re doing it legally, and it’s eating a healthy stack of Wizards’ lunch.

Most of the time, I don’t give business advice to the folks at Wizards of the Coast, because they’re supposed to know what the fuck they’re doing. These are some smart folk, the best and brightest that the gaming world has to offer. They’re supposed to understand that there is a very simple solution to this problem: they need to sell what Paizo is selling, and they can make more money selling it than Paizo can.

Back when 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons came out, a lot of people were pissed off that the company was replacing the best role-playing game in the world with some new, weird thing. They complained and they argued and there were some solid edition wars going on, but eventually most of the 2nd Edition folks came around to the new way of doing things. Why? Because they had no choice. It was getting harder and harder to find Dungeons & Dragons material for the edition they liked the best, and this new version was still Dungeons & Dragons, right?

This Edition War has a different flavor, though. There’s a new factor, and that factor is that you can still find material for the version of D&D you like better. You can still find 3rd Edition support from the folks at Paizo and their allies, and that means that the grognards of 3rd don’t need to eventually filter over to D&D4. I think what Wizards was hoping for was that the Dungeons & Dragons name would carry through for them, that people would rather play “Dungeons & Dragons” than “Pathfinder.” And to a degree, they’re right. I get a lot of waffling in my store. I have a set of the three core rule books for 3.5 sitting on my shelf, and it’s priced at a whopping $275. I don’t think I’m going to get that much for it. Yet. But eventually someone is going to come down to my store hoping to find some D&D3.5 core books, and I’ll say “Well, there’s Pathfinder over here…” And they’ll let me know that $275 is a steal for the Dungeons & Dragons name on the edition of the book they’re looking for. But a lot of people walk away, think about it, talk to their gaming buddies, and decide that they’d rather pick up Pathfinder than 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. The name means something, but if it’s the same product in a different wrapper, a lot of folks are going to buy. If it’s the same wrapper around a new, different product, they’re not so sure. Obviously, this is doing Paizo fairly well.

If Wizards wants to capitalize on this shitty situation, the solution is pretty simple. They need to open up their backlist. They need to put the entire collection of 3.5 D&D books on the idevice book apps for a dollar a piece. They need to print black-and-white perfect bound versions of the core books and put them back in circulation at a much lower price point than Pathfinder’s core book (say $25; it works for Palladium). They need to put 2nd Edition and 1rst Edition books up as .pdf files for free, and run that site on advertising packages. The most expensive part of making 3.5 D&D is paid for; all Wizards needs to pay for right now is reprinting and inventory, and both of those things are super-cheap compared to the loss of market share Paizo is currently representing.

Then they need to change how they’re doing 4th Edition entirely. Their focus is currently divided between online content and published content, and that hasn’t been doing them any favors. My coworker Ian and I were discussing the myriad ways Exalted and White Wolf have been sucking donkey balls for the past few years, and one of the ideas he put forth sort of struck home with me. Wizards of the Coast needs to put out two different versions of Dungeons & Dragons. On one side, they need printed product to support their organized play initiatives and to get most of their new playerbase involved. People become involved with D&D because someone passes them a book and says ‘This shit’s great, let’s give it a go.’ People need to have a thing in their hand before they become properly invested in the product you’re selling.

But Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a product as much as it’s an idea. It’s information, and if nothing else has been proven in the last few years of gaming, it’s a fluid idea. It’s a living idea, and the print medium is not best suited to that sort of document. Wizards should by all means continue to publish print books, but only the print books that fucking matter. Core rule-books. Setting information. Monsters. Things you need to sit down and play with your friends for a few hours.

Then they need to publish the most comprehensive online role-playing game experience ever attempted. They need to build the Google+ of role-playing games: huge online database with every word of every book, organized, searchable, integrated with a new character builder, an adventure designer, a monster-builder. Every power, every character, every dungeon tile, every sentence, all living in the cloud. The game’s errata occurs immediately. Characters are updated as the rules are. Player-built content lives side-by-side with official data so that every player can draw from every other player that uses this new set of tools. Online chat with video and audio capabilities, as well as an online table built in java allow for online play. Charge us more money for an actually robust online game, and we will gladly fucking pay it.

What problems does this solve? It means that product printed a year ago isn’t out-dated, it’s just the introductory product and it doesn’t represent the game as a whole. It means that errata can happen at the drop of a hat when something is proven to be broken. It means that you no longer have to pay scads of cash to publish high-quality book when you can pay less money by far to have a game that constantly reproduces itself, constantly updates itself, and never goes out of print. It means you stop having to deal with distributors, because you can send the logins that grant you access to this new and wonderful game to the same people running the D&D Encounters and D&D Dungeon Delve initiatives (which means that people who don’t have credit cards can still buy and enjoy your online offerings). It means you make more money, you spend less money, you increase your market share substantially, you make a lot of players much, much happier with you, you stop dividing your attention between print and online media, and you have improved the public opinion of your company with a huge division of the folks who currently hate you.

If someone at Wizards would like to hire me to fix their busted shit, they can reach me at friggert@hotmail.com. I’m not cheap.

D&D Confessions

2011-07-10T22:08:00.001-07:00

This one was a little too long for twitter, so it turned into a blog post instead.
When I first started laying Dungeons & Dragons, I was doing it wrong. This lasted for a really, really long time. Well into my high school years, and I started playing between grades three and four. See, my buddy Landon had this awesome box of stuff he’d discovered at a cousin’s place, and he brought it over one day, and it was basically the best thing I’d ever seen. It was the Red Box of D&D, and it literally changed my life. From that moment on, I was playing D&D.
Except that I wasn’t playing D&D. The version of the Red Box that we’d gotten our hands on had a rolodex of cards that taught you the rules (which is, by the by, completely ingenious, and why people aren’t using it as a method to teach games today is completely beyond me). So one of the cards would have stuff like “Climbing a Wall:” writ huge on the header, and then it would go into the rules for climbing and falling and ability checks and the like. And we were missing some cards. Also, we were eight years old, so we ended up reading all sorts of ridiculous bullshit into the rules. Eight year olds are not masters of literal reading.
So what we ended up playing was some insane amalgamation of the make-believe games all kids play (“Okay, so this GI Joe is going to be the big bad villain, and this group of lego guys is a bunch of dwarves. And they’ve kidnapped this princess that we… stole from your sister? Yeah. Okay. And then we’re gonna come in and kick their butts!”) with some of the rules of D&D haphazardly tossed over them. I think the one thing that we really took from D&D was the idea of dice as a way to mediate dispute. Whenever one of us would try to do a thing that we weren’t sure we could do, we’d toss some dice and see how it went.
I played this version of Dungeons & Dragons until Landon moved to Calgary in the mid-nineties. Then I tried to teach other people the only version of D&D I knew how to play, because it was a game that I wasn’t about to give up on.
It actually took a group of Palladium Fantasy players to straighten me out, and show me how other people played role-playing games. It was an eye-opening experience for me; it showed me exactly what I’d been trying to do, refined to a story-telling art. It was, again, life-changing.
Anyway. Out of all of my D&D Confessions, the fact that I played it all wrong for some seven years is probably the most personal and embarrassing. ^_^

Playing an NPC

2011-07-05T02:06:00.001-07:00

One of the cool things about being involved in as many gamer circles as I am is that I get to occasionally drop in on someone’s game and play a single session or three, usually as a fill-in. I get invited a fair bit, but I only ever make it out to a few games, as my schedule is usually pretty ridiculous.
Being a drop-in character in a long-running campaign is different from playing a character from the beginning, or joining full-time. You aren’t there to play a character, really – at least not in the traditional sense. You’re there to fill a gap, or to make something happen, or sometimes both. In a lot of ways, you are a glorified NPC, an extension of the Game Master’s will. There are almost always plans for you.
So when I come into a situation where I might be filling in a gap, the first thing I do is put my Game Master hat on. I come up with some ideas about who or what the character I’ll be playing is, and how that is going to work into the overarching plot of the game. Sometimes that’s as simple as “My players need a healer for a few sessions while Jenny’s moving into her new place,” sometimes it’s as complicated as “I need someone who is not me to steer the group in a political direction that is better suited to the complete dissolution of the current regime in favor of one that is strongly detrimental to the player characters.” I treat the former like I’m a player. I treat the latter like a special sort of Game Mastering in Miniature.
One of the biggest benefits to this, I find, is that a fellow Game Master brings something new to the table, a perspective you don’t have. In my case, I bring a lot of plot. No character I create lacks a backstory. No character I create lacks goals or aspirations, and that can often change the dynamic of the table drastically. When my goals and the goals of the other player characters don’t exactly match up, all the better for the dramatic tension it causes. Then, when things hit a peak, I leave and let the Game Master figure out what happens next.
Where this helps other game masters is in the flexibility it offers. If one of the players sitting at your table is pulling the party towards a specific direction, the rest of the players aren’t going to jump down the Game Master’s throat for rail-roading. A lot of times, I’ve come up with the direction entirely on my own, or with minimal direction from the Game Master, which gives me a lot of flexibility in how I get that plot point to work. It also means that I can surprise the Game Master with a point of view he or she hasn’t considered previously, a plot point that might not work in any situation except as initiated by a player-character, or a situation that is much more dramatic because of the tension that comes from interacting with another person playing a single character.
It can also be a lot of fun, plotting and planning things that the other players may or may not expect. I’m looking forward to sitting in on a few sessions of Siobhan’s Changeling game, for instance, mostly because I don’t think anyone has any clue what it is they’re dealing with, and it has the potential to change the political landscape of the game forever.

Testing, Testing

2011-07-04T02:14:00.001-07:00

This is mostly just a test-post to see how quickly the aggregator works on the new Warp One website. I am hoping it is faster than the old one. ^_^ I deleted the post once already, but it didn’t change in the feed thing at all, so I’m putting it back up.

In other news, you should go to www.warpcomics.com and lavish me with praise for putting that shit together in my spare time for nothing but the satisfaction of a job well done. And praise. I’m also doing it for praise.

Have a picture of a pony:

On the Subject of Passports

2011-07-04T00:13:00.001-07:00

I usually write a lot of blog posts while I’m travelling, because I consider travel to be one of the few adventures left to the suburbanite masses. If you want to go to a place, there’s a way to get there. If you want to go on a quest, someone’s got your hook-up. If you want to stab a dragon in the face, there’s a tour for that somewhere.
So when I travel, and I see things I’ve never seen before, I figure “Hey, maybe Tim in Cedar City Utah has never seen this before either.” I mean, everything I’ve seen, someone else has seen. But not everyone has seen all of the things I’ve seen, so there’s still someone who’s interested.
I’m not going to be travelling for another month or so, and when I do it will be back to Indianapolis, Indiana for GenCon. I’ll be taking much more comprehensive notes this time around, but it’s still not going to be nearly as impressive for adventure notes as, say, going to Amsterdam, Paris and London, or spending eight days living on seas.
My friend Zak, though, is supposed to be in Kenya right now. He’s not in Kenya, though. He’s in Edmonton, which is about as different from Kenya as a place can get. He forgot to renew his passport, which sort of got me to thinking about the passport as a thing.

To be honest, I’ve never really liked the idea of a passport; that I need to pay the nation of my birth for a piece of paper that says I’m allowed to leave it seems strangely restricting to me. I mean, in a free country, shouldn’t I be free to leave whenever I damned well please? But I have one. I’ve had a total of two in my lifetime, and the current is sitting in my filing cabinet as I write this.

There have been a few different sorts of passports in history. The first recognizable passport was given to Nehemiah by Artaxerxes I, the King of Persia in some 450 BCE. It was a letter requesting safe passage from the “governors beyond the river,” as Nehemiah travelled through their lands. The second was actually a tax receipt, proof that you had paid your taxes and had thus earned the right to travel to different regions of the Caliphate. King Henry V invented the first passport we might understand today as a way to help his people identify themselves overseas.

The first is sort of what one thinks about when we think “Passports and Adventures.” You are given a writ of passage by the king of a nation to travel across the lands of savages to rebuild a holy city and repopulate it with the chosen people of the gods. That’s a hell of a quest. The writ of passage is a fine way to manage passports in general, as it provides some level of legitimacy to one’s claims as a person on a quest given by someone important and/or awesome. It’s also almost-built-in railroading for your players, as they only have permission to be travelling out here for the sake of their ultimate quest.

That’s not the only way to use passports to restrict your players’ movement, though.

The medieval European passport didn’t work the same way ours do. Normally, it would be a document written up by the local authorities that would dictate which towns a person could go to or through overland. In a lot of ways, it didn’t just restrict the towns you could go to, but the path you could take to get where you’re going. If you need to get from Paris to Brussels, there are a few ways you can do that. The fastest of them crosses through seven different cities. What if one of those cities isn’t on your passport? Well, you’re not going through that town. Pick a different path. Sea ports, which were seen as a free trading zone, didn’t really suffer the same restrictions. You could go wherever you wanted by sea, but overland you’d need to get yourself permission.

This flies in the face of how things are done in a standard game of Dungeons & Dragons. I mean, travel documents rarely come up at all, and when they do, it’s usually for special occasions. You’re crossing the border into dangerous territory or something, not just travelling to the next town to kill some goblins. You don’t have to make nice with the local sheriff if you don’t want to because you can totally kick his ass, steal his girl, and make a pile of rubble out of his home. But if the next-town-over will only accept a passport as written by him or his...

And restrictions make for interesting play situations. If you can’t get a passport to the next town over, but there’s a vampire in there, and he’s killing people to death, you’ve got to make a choice: rush in and save the town anyway (probably having to break in, because the guys at the gate aren’t going to be opening the door), or sit on your hands while people are getting slaughtered - and the gold stolen, for those folks of an evil or selfish persuasion. If you need to get to Dunbastion, and the fastest road is through Gramerthay, but you can’t go through Gramerthay, you’re going to have to find a way around the city with the thieves and the rapers and such that live outside the city walls.

And if, by some circumstance, you forget to renew your passport before you leave, well then you’ve got a whole slew of problems that need fixing.

Prepping for GenCon

2011-07-03T22:12:00.001-07:00

The last time I went to GenCon was in 2008, and it was a blast. I ended up bunking with Amber and Jason Scott, who are both the loveliest of people, and because it was my first time at the convention, I basically wandered around like an idiot and hit up as many interesting things as I could find. I did not, strangely enough, play any games. Well, that's not true, I played Katamari Damacy, which may be the worst thing a person going to GenCon should ever admit.

I did go to a lot of interesting seminars, though, and I think that's going to be my focus this time around, too. I can't really see myself joining any convention RPG tables; organizing short-term game events is sort of my job. Instead, I'm going to do a lot of seminars, learn as much as I can about as much as I can, and maybe invent a boffer sword with which to hit people in the store.

Both of my girlfriends are coming along this year, though. That sort of changes the game plan a bit, in that I'm not going to be quite as footloose and fancy-free as I was the last time around. I'm going to need to know where I am occasionally, and how to get to some places, and how to make my way from those places to where I'm supposed to be. That's going to take a bit more preparation than I'm used to. So there are a few things I'm going to need to figure out when I get to Indianapolis.

1) I'm buying a crappy cell-phone. A local one. I didn't have a way to get in touch with anyone last time around, and while that wasn't a huge problem, it will be this time. I'll be buying my crappy phone in Indianapolis at a 7/11. I will be leaving it there.

2) I'm going to sit down and actually map out some important shit in Indianapolis. Like where the cheap-ass restaurants are, the various halls, that sort of thing. They give you a map when you get into the con, and that map is pretty useful. I may end up scanning it, or getting a digital copy of it, and putting it onto my ipad.

3) Oh yeah, I'm bringing my ipad. There are few pieces of technology I love more than I love my ipad, and it is going to be something of a lifesaver next month. It's got an on-board scheduler. It's got a to-do list on it. It's got text-editing software so that I can take notes. It's got a doodling app so I that I can take notes FAST. And when I need REALLY fast notes, it's got an audio recorder. It's got maps on it. It's got an internet on it. It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy lives in my satchel.

4) I'm planning ahead some. I know I missed out on some killer stuff last year because I was asleep for it. I didn't sleep through the whole show or anything, but I definitely did not make as great a showing at the seminars as I was hoping. I never made it out to the Fantasy Flight party. I didn't make it to the charity auction. So there are some things I'm going to get to, and I'm going to plan ahead to make sure I get to them.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure I'll think of more awesome things that will help me prepare later. After all, I've got a month. ^_^

2011-02-24T12:42:00.001-08:00

I haven't posted in ages. I'm aware of this. I am stressed out with real-life job things, and I'm playing the Wakfu Beta. This has taken up almost all of my time.

I'm going to Cuba in three days, and I will be staying there for a week. While I am there, I am going to catch up on some of my reading, some of my writing, and see what happens from there. Your almost-but-not-quite-fourthcore programming will resume after the break.

Encountering D&D: New Season Woos!

2011-02-09T23:41:00.001-08:00

Ah, the first encounter of a new season. This is always fun for me: I get to see some new faces as the season starts, because people want to jump on when they're on the ground-floor; we get our first look at the new designer and get to make some judgements about the adventure path as a whole; we get to see what sorts of innovations are being brought to bear this season, and whether or not they work in the game's favor or against it... The whole initiative has been sort of trial-and-error for this first year; we had a solid showing in the first season with Undermountain bringing us some cool new ideas for how to run Skill Challenges and doing something the-same-but-different. We had a huge hiccough with Dark Sun, and a redemption of the initiative with Chris Sims taking the helm. I don't know Rodney Thompson, but he's done a lot of work with Star Wars over the years, and has had a hand in d20 Modern and Future. All of these are products I've never really played with, but recognize the quality of. I own a copy of the Star Wars Saga book, specifically because I wanted to take a look at the design elements that would be transitioning to D&D 4. I'm reserving the right to moderate optimism.

The Adventure Book for this season is just one huge book, instead of chunk books like last season. I consider this a step in the right direction, and wouldn't at all mind seeing more products like this in the future. It makes this set easier to give away when the season is done (we don't sell the adventure books; we get them for free, and give them away for the same). The first few sections are familiar to anyone who has done some Game Mastery for D&D Encounters in previous seasons. You get a breakdown of how Encounters works, and a n overview of the adventure as a whole; it tells you how to deal with Renown Points (something I forget about consistently), and notes on advancement and treasure.

The stuff that's new is in the Advancement, Treasure, and Fortune Cards.

As a bit of a departure from the way D&D:E has been handling Advancement in previous seasons, this time around you will actually need to keep track of your experience points. You will not level automatically at the beginning of each chapter; if you come in at the middle of chapter three, you will be starting as a level one character. I'm not sure what this is in response to, but I think it's a general improvement. It rewards the players who show up every week, and provides a bit of a slap on the wrist for those players who choose to show up only occasionally (or just the once).

I've been giving out random treasure since I started my home campaign. Admittedly, the table they've come up with for D&D:E is way better than the system I'm using at home (and I may actually just come up with a different version of it for Bones). I like that the GM doesn't really know what the party is going to loot off of BGuy #13, and I like that players get to customize their characters a bit within the preset limits of the adventure. Also, I've already jacked the roll for one packet rather than give out one piece of a packet per person, I'm just having one of the player characters roll once or twice and passing out that much stuff; the resulting fights have been pretty great. ^_^

I've already said my piece on Fortune Cards in a previous Encountering D&D; I don't think the product works the way that the good folks at Wizards of the Coast imagined they would work, I don't think they were integrated well with the game as it was designed, and I dislike that they're being pushed into the D&D: Encounters initiative. They seem rushed and a bit under-play-tested, and I would have preferred to wait an extra season for a more fully-fleshed out product.

The Encounter

The first session actually takes place over a few days. During the preview talks at DDXP, the guys at WotC were talking about how the Encounters would make a lot more use of time, and occasionally months would pass between chapters. Having spent a looooooooooong time doing extended campaigns, I can honestly say this is something that rarely crosses my mind. D&D can be a day-by-day account of the lives of the player characters, and often is. Taking some time out for a breather, or having entire days go by during a session can be an interesting way to show that your characters aren't busy all day every day, they actually get some down-time in.

The set up is pretty standard Fantasy Adventure Fare. A call has gone out to adventurous souls to build a new settlement southeast of Hammerfast (go read the Hammerfast book, I guess...). They've been offered a small stipend to help build their homes, and it is assumed that each player character has a reason for wanting to leave the comfortable confines of civilization for the wilds. The town is to be built on the bones of old Castle Inverness, recently rediscovered by a group of rangers. The new town is to serve as a waypoint between Hammerfast and Harkenwold. There is an argument about fording a stream up ahead that the players can help mediate (and choosing one side or the other will effect later encounters). Then you fight stirges.

Session Theft

There are a couple of cool things you can steal from this encounter for use in your home games. The first and probably most important is how protecting the caravan is worked into the encounter itself. The horses can be saved by a standard action terrain power (terrain powers, by the by, fucking great; more after the break), but it's a standard action and you need to be within five squares of a horse to make it go away. It saves both the horse and the wagon, necessitating that the players split up, some saving the caravan, others killing stirges dead. Little challenges like this make encounters harder to beat, while at the same time adding a new layer of interactions to the game, keeping it from being "just another fight."

Terrain powers are a thing we've seen before, but they're pretty sweet and I love when they're incorporated into a scenario. I rarely, if ever, use them in my home games, but this one has made it pretty clear that I should be more often. I mean, it doesn't have to be horses; using a variety of terrain powers to maneuver a boat or use a keep's natural defenses (ballista! whatup!) can mean the difference between a humdrum encounter and a kick-ass fight with all sorts of weird shit going on because of the place you're fighting in. You want people swinging off of chandeliers and shit? Great, put the power in there, and make it a good one (treated as a charge, Dex+2 vs Ref, 3[w] damage). You'd prefer the slide-down-the-bar, head-in-the-wall bar brawl cliche? We can make that happen (Str vs Fort, 1d6+str+[2X] and you and the target slide X squares, where X is the number of squares from your starting position to the wall).

The last cool thing about this encounter that you should probably steal for your campaign actually takes a fair bit more forethought than most of my D&D planning does. I don't usually plan more than a day ahead of time, and when I come back to a theme, I decide what the repercussions of the party's actions are going to be, and roll with it. I don't pre-plan beyond that, so making something that happens one week effect the next week's encounter directly can be a bit of a chore if you GM like I do.

It is still a thing you should be looking at, especially if you don't GM like I do. If you plan things out, if you build your adventures well ahead of time, having branching paths is pretty much a necessity if you don't want to be Railroad Guy. We get it when we're talking about directions in a dungeon (if you go into this room, this monster is going to kill you; this other room has a totally different kill-you monster), but it so rarely enters the planning stages for non-dungeon planning. The fact that this takes place on a role-playing point makes it even more important for your home campaigns; sometimes the stuff that happens around before and/or after an encounter is more important to the encounter than the encounter itself is. If you go one way, the chance of you getting attacked by Goblins goes up, but your chances of getting attacked by Crocodiles goes down. So the encounter after this one is pretty much determined by what you decide to do this session, which is pretty dope for an encounter made for in-store play.

Bestiary of Badassery: The Vile Darkness

2011-02-07T19:00:00.000-08:00

Before You Read Further:
Abuse is not a game. It is the most horrifying and terrible thing a person can have inflicted upon them, and real-life heroes are fighting against it every day. I do not mean any disrespect at all to the victims of abuse or the forces that are doing everything humanly possible to make it stop.
Because I believe in acting locally, if you’d like to make a donation to an association against abuse, I’d suggest you head over to WIN House. They do good work, and can always use more help.
Also, while some of the abusers below are presented as victims of a horrible monster, we should never lose sight of the fact that the real victims are the abused. My heart goes out to them, and they are in my prayers.

The Vile Darkness

There is a monster that lives in the cellar of the el’Harr farm down the road a ways from Hammerfast. The only one that knows it’s there is little Alphonse, the youngest of the el’Harr’s children; he has tried to bring it to his parents’ attention, but you know how people can be about the monsters their kids talk about. Besides, no one’s ever seen it, so it’s all in the kid’s head, right?
At night, the monster whispers things to Cody el’Harr, things that shouldn’t be whispered by any good soul to another. Cody can’t see the thing, or even hear it, really. It speaks to his mind, and the dark places in his heart.
Alphonse is bruised betimes, and he’s a quiet lad. Walks with a limp since the incident in the barn a few years back, but it hasn’t slowed him, none. He plays by himself, mostly, the imagination games of children. In his head, he wears a suit of armor and slays monsters. One monster in particular, over and over again.
And when it’s dead, Alphonse’ pa never puts hands to the boy again.

Deeds, Not Words

It was announced recently that the Book of Vile Darkness is up for the Fourth Edition treatment this year. It was one of them ore popular books for 3.5, and it started the whole “Intended for Mature Audiences” movement of D&D books that brought on such wonders as the Book of Exalted Deeds and the Book of Erotic Fantasy (heh). It was probably one of the best sourcebooks 3.5 D&D put out, but I had a few issues with it. In particular, I found the focus to be more on gruesome content than any real discussion of evil. There’s some demons and stuff in it, sure, and a lot of the spell effects are like “Fuck you, good characters! Mwah ha ha ha ha haaaaa!” but there isn’t a lot of stuff that I would throw part-and-parcel into the “evil” category.
There’s a lot of wiggle-room on the concept of “evil,” though. Is killing sentient creatures and taking their stuff “evil?” Well, I put that into a solid “Yes,” on evil, but it’s the preface for the vast majority of D&D (and other role-playing) games that you will occasionally bash in monsters’ faces to increase your own power, wealth and status. So when I need to unnerve my players a bit, when I need them to squirm a little, I have to pull out some big guns. Simply hurting people isn’t enough to get across that a bad guy is vile; that bad guy needs to hurt people in the most intimate and horrifying ways possible.
This creature is an example of the sorts of things I’ll do to make my players a touch more uncomfortable than just putting them in a 10x10 room with a hobgoblin. It’s not something for the faint of heart; this monster feeds on the fear, pain and suffering of others, and manipulates people into some of the worst betrayals a person can imagine. It reaches into the darkest places of someone’s mind and brings those things to the fore.

The Monster(s?)

The real monster is abuse. Let’s be fair, this monster is not one you’re going to throw into a random dungeon; it can’t survive there. It needs to live in someone’s home, where the potential for real emotional turmoil and trauma exists. Most importantly, it needs to find a crack, a place where the dark desires and urges run through a human mind. While a mother or father might normally love and support their children, the Vile Darkness can urge them to the unthinkable. Where a woman might love her husband unconditionally, the Vile Darkness can seep into her mind, taunting her into an horrific betrayal. And though a young man may truly love his betrothed, the Darkness can turn his mind to harm, or even murder. It would be incapable of doing these things if those emotions, those thoughts, didn’t already exist in the victim’s mind. The most monstrous aspect of this creature is its ability to bring out the monster in otherwise good people.
Discovering the Vile Darkness requires some investigation. If you want to relegate this to the realm of the Skill Challenge, feel free to do so, but I would rely more on heavy role-playing with a couple of prompted Perception and Insight rolls. And the abuse that the Darkness brings out in people doesn’t need to be physical; sexual, emotional and mental abuse all happen every day, and each comes with its own cocktail of betrayals. Complicating factors for the encounter can be as complicated as the victim of the abuse trying to protect the abuser, or another abusive situation in which the Vile Darkness has had no part (and this, truly, is more terrifying than any fantasy monster ever could be). When it turns out that the physically abusive parents on the el’Menith farm aren’t violent at the urging of a monster, but that the Darkness’ target has been Avery ven Maslia and his pretty new bride, it pushes the encounter to a different level.

The Vile Darkness		Level 3 Elite Controller
Medium		XP 300
HP 86; Bloodied 43 AC 17; Fortitude 15; Reflex 15; Will 15 Speed 6 Saving Throws +2; Action Points 1		Initiative +1 Perception +1
Traits
O Betrayal • Aura 2
A creature that starts its turn within the Vile Darkness' Betrayal Aura makes a saving throw. If the creature fails that saving throw, it is possessed until the end of the Darkness' next turn.
Standard Actions
M Incite Violence • At-Will
Attack: +8 vs. AC
Hit: 1d6 + 4 psychic damage and the target deals damage to an adjacent ally equal to their Intelligence modifier. .
R Dark Whispers • At-Will
Attack: Range 10 (ignores line of sight); +7 vs. Will
Hit: 1d10 + 5 psychic damage and the target makes a melee basic attack against an adjacent ally. If the creature is possessed, it gets a +2 power bonus to the attack. .
C Shame • At-Will
Attack: Close burst 3 (targets enemies in burst); +8 vs. AC
Hit: 3d10 + 3 psychic and shadow damage, and the target is dazed until the end of the Vile Darkness' next turn. .
Triggered Actions
Feeding on Your Pain • Recharge 6
Trigger: An creature is hit by an ally's attack. .
Effect (Free): The Vile Darkness gains hit points equal to one half of the damage dealt by the triggering attack.
Str 11 (+1)	Dex 11 (+1)		Wis 11 (+1)
Con 11 (+1)	Int 11 (+1)		Cha 11 (+1)
Alignment Languages —
© 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This formatted statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

Art jacked from ~therook @ deviantart

Peculiar Curios: A Double Helping of Earrings

2011-02-06T01:38:00.000-08:00

Sun and Moon Earrings Level 17

This pair of matching earrings bears a crescent moon near the hook, a starburst in the center, and an arrow point at the bottom. When you wear them, a soft glow shows the time of day.

Item Slot Head 65,000 gp

Property: Gain an innate sense of the time. You know what time it is, down to the second.

Power (Daily): Standard. Make a Primary Ability attack vs Will against a single creature within ten squares of you. If that creature is hit by the attack, choose Standard, Move, or Minor. That creature cannot make that type of action until the end of your next turn.

Something I think I'd like Wizards to do a bit more would be integrating flavor and rules a bit more. Like, it's great that the rules are simple to read and easy to use, but when I read something like the rules text from Legend of the Five Rings, I get all giddy inside. They can write "The troubles of the world take a toll on your soul that only sake can lift," right there in the rules text, and people are like "Yeah, sure, whatever. Card does this," without any difficulty. It would make reading rules descriptions for shit a lot more interesting. So I'm going to re-do the Sun and Moon earrings, and we'll put them side by side, and you can tell me which one is better.

Sun and Moon Earrings Level 17

This pair of matching earrings bears a crescent moon near the hook, a starburst in the center and an arrow point at the bottom. When you wear them, a soft glow shows the time of day,

Item Slot Head 65,000 gp

Property: Even though you can't see the glow, you gain an innate sense of the time. You always know what time it is, down to the second. The glow is not bright enough to betray your position to enemies while you hide, but it allows your allies to tell what time it is just by looking at you.

Power (Daily): Standard Action. You draw strength from the arcane time-magic in the earrings and direct it at your opponent, stealing a few precious seconds from their life. Though it doesn't hurt them directly, they'll definitely notice the inconvenience. Make an attack using your primary ability vs Will against a single creature. If the attack hits, you can choose either Move, Minor or Standard. The target cannot make that type of action until the end of your next turn.

That, to me, makes a lot more sense. Stealing a few seconds away from you is what I was looking at doing with the mechanic, and I think that the mechanic does that, but it's a lot more fun for me as the guy with the words to actually show you what I meant by it. And all it takes to separated a piece of flavor text from the rules text is some italics.

Encountering D&D: The Boss Fight

2011-02-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

To be perfectly honest, if anything was a misstep in this adventure's design, it's putting Benwick up as the last fight instead of the giant, awesome dragon of the previous encounter. Story-wise, it totally makes sense to have a showdown with Benwick at the end of the chapter, and I understand why the choice was made, but fighting a portly monk/cultist after taking down a fucking dragon seems a bit anti-climatic.

Also, the meeting with Longstrider seems a bit, y'know, tacked on. It's like this entire encounter was more of an afterthought, and the season actually ended last week. Still, there are some nifty things going on here, and there are a couple of cute tricks you can pull into your own games, if you look for them.

Kendon Longstrider

The idea of having a wishy-washy NPC ally mechanically represented is cute. Here's poor never-seen-before Kendon, hanging out and doing his own thing, when his whole life gets flipped by some dragon cultists and a boatload of lizard folk. He doesn't know whose side he's on; he isn't on anyone's side, and if he can be convinced to fight for one side or the other, that has more to do with the force of personality of the people involved.

Kendon is sort of Everyman Fighterguy. He is the very definition of what I consider the Neutral alignment from 1-3.5 to have been; he's indecisive and will fight for anyone, mostly because he doesn't know what to think. He's known Benwick for a good long time, and he's seemed like a pretty alright dude, but the adventurers have saved the keep a couple of times now, and Ben's acting like a bit of a douche.

Having some (pretty much all) of your non-affiliated NPCs act like this guy probably isn't a horrible idea. I ran a session of Bones where a crowd of people was loyal to the villain, but when he started causing the deaths of hundreds of his fans, they started to turn on him. For a while, the struggle went back and forth between the party and the rock star they were fighting, but eventually the group won out and the crowd came to their aid in fighting the Badness.

It's Okay to Let the Boss Fight Go Long

There's a lot of boxed text in this session. Not so much in the beginning, but after everything's been taken care of, there's more, and the more is pretty hefty. That is totally reasonable, and I'm glad Wizards took the time to wrap the campaign up in a way that is interesting from a rules perspective (more on that in a bit).

One of the things that's been getting a lot of airtime in the 4E community is the length of your average fight, and how to make that time shorter. Personally, I like the long fights. If I spend a five hour session of D&D, and the single fight of the night lasts about an hour and half to two hours, that's a pretty solid session. It's something I needed to learn to account for in my game planning, but beyond that, there's no reason to vilify long fights.

Boss fights are allowed to go longer than most. They're supposed to be climatic moments in the story of the game, points where everything finally gets resolved, and sometimes you need to take some extra time to really focus in on those and make them worth it. It can be very satisfying to bash in the skull of someone who has been screwing you around for a few months (like Benwick has), and the players are going to enjoy finally taking his ass down,

The Quest Challenge

One of the best things about this chapter, one of the things that I looked at and went "Huh. Why didn't I think of that?" is on page eight of the adventure book. It has a little chart that tells you what all the minor quests were in the chapter, and then has you tally those up and see how you did overall. If your party succeeded in most of the minor quests, you get the happy ending. If your party failed at most of the same quests, you get the unhappy ending. This is an interesting look at what Chris Tulach, Greg Bilsland and Gregg Marks called "Branching tree design" at D&DXP last week. It's interesting to note that in this season, the only branch to the tree is in the last chapter, but I think we can expect to see branches like this coming out earlier in the season through March of the Phantom Brigade and Dark Legacy of Evard.

It's something that people who GM at home do fairly naturally. "Oh, you sucked at this thing? Well, it's definitely going to come back and bite you in the ass."

That's all I've got for this week's Encountering D&D. I have the books in for next week's Session, and I'm chomping at the bit to get the new season started. This one was a lot of fun and I hope that continues through the next few seasons.

My Players Wrote Filk

2011-02-01T12:07:00.000-08:00

So the universe is in peril, and my player characters are trying to build an alliance of peoples to fight against it. There's this dead god they woke up a while ago, and he's doing naughty things to all of existence. While trying to convince Jacques le'Dwarf to sign the alliance papers, they wrote a song, and I thought it was clever. It's in Jacques' native Dwarven.

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques
Signez-vous? Signez-vous?
La fin du monde arrive, La fin du monde arrive
Maintenant, maintenant

Type	Bonus	Cost
Heavy	AC +4	60gp
Medium	AC +3	30gp
Light	AC +2	15gp
None	AC +0	0gp

Weapon	Damage	Cost
Longsword	1d8	10gp
Shortsword	1d6	5gp
Battle Axe	1d12	15gp
Hand Axe	1d4	3gp
Dagger	1d4	1gp
Bow & Arrows	1d6 (range 100ft)	10gp (arrows 1gp)
Spear	1d6 (range 50ft)	1gp

Gear	Price
Ten foot pole	1gp
Ten days iron rations	5gp
Caltrops	2gp
Hammer and pitons	3gp
Rope 50’	1gp
Sacks	2gp
Waterskin	1
Tinderbox	1
Mirror	1
Flask of Oil	2
Lantern	10
Torches (10)	1
Wine (1 liter)	10