A Brief Post on Gaming

So, I've started this post like half a dozen times today, and its been abortive every time. This time, I'm going to post this, for better or worse, even if I get to the end of it and have no point.

I'm a huge role playing game nerd. My fancies are broad and varied. I'm not a "D&D only" kind of guy. And I approach my hobby in a very Obsessive Compulsive fashion. It always goes like this: Jerm gets SUPER CRAZY excited about game X. Jerm spents gobs of time and attention on it, perhaps strongarming people into playing it. Game runs smoothly for awhile. Jerm's attention begins to wane. I'm like the media when there's a big **something**. I'm all like "LOOK EVERYONE! LOOK OVER HERE!!" and then its three days of NON STOP coverage of nothing but that one thing. Then it starts to trickle off, and soon you don't hear about it anymore. I'm whining, and yes, I do like cheese, thank you very much.

So. I think I started this because my blog is, in theory, partly about my gaming hobby. And when I'm quiet about it, it feels somehow like I'm betraying myself, or my blog, or you (stop snickering).

I'm kindof in a minor funk with my D&D game. We lost Maddie and John, and with Krissi due to deliver just weeks from now, my game has a weird limbo feeling to it. I still like the game, and 4e, though I confess that I've been somewhat seriously entertaining the idea of trying a retro-clone game, Labyrinthine Lord or Swords & Wizardry or something. With our baby's arrival being right around the corner, it has my panties all in a wad, so to speak. I've talked long and loud to anyone who will listen about how I intend to hop back into gaming as soon as I can. Not to the neglect of Krissi or the baby, certainly. Its just something that I intend to make every effort to continue to do.

Heh, you know, now I remember that I was going to use this post to chat a little about 4d vs 0e retro-clones. Someone's post this morning about character death made that little buzzer go off in my head. And it made me think about, and chuckle about how I seem to be doing loops to some extent, with regard to my role playing game philosophy. Which also makes me chuckle because I spend WAY too much time and energy thinking about a game that I imagine tons of people play without giving it much more though than you would to a really good game of monopoly. Its like I get paid for this stuff or something. But I don't. Anyway, it wasn't so long ago that I was whinging about how much I hated D&D. And then I was talking about how character death was a terrible mechanic in a game. And now I find myself drooling over 0e, which is basically a player character meatgrinder.

I'm sure there was a point, or three that I was flailing around for, but I don't think I've grasped at all. If you've read this far, you deserve a medal.

Heh, the title of this post has "brief" in it. Hilarious.

Weird

Do you ever type up a post about something, and stop in the middle of it, and think about it for a minute, and wonder if you're really crazy and COMPLETELY narcissistic, and maybe kindof a jerk, and then get fed up and frustrated with the whole post, and with questioning your topic and tone and style and so forth? And wonder "Why am I even bothering to type this?" Cause I do.

A board game that I want to play

This board game may already exist. If so, great! Or, it may not exist, and I may be forging bravely ahead into uncharted territory, and will be able to soon retire off of the millions and millions that I'll make when I publish my board game. Now I'm being silly. Anyway.

After playing a [seemingly longer than necessary] game of Dungeons and Dragons 4e, and a game of Shadows Over Camelot, and having recently played games like Tomb, and Order of the Stick, and having read some stuff about old school 0e Dungeons & Dragons.... I'm getting to it, I promise... I want to play a game that is an even mix of boardgame and D&D.

Since I'm brainstorming this, here's what I'm looking for.

Each player has a character. Each character is somewhere between Munchkin and D&D4 in complexity. Like, you may be the thief, and you'll have a few stats, but not reams and reams of them. And while each player will have a character, the party doesn't get to split up, there'll be a party marker for the dungeon, which I'll get to right now.

There'll be cards, dungeon tiles, if you will. Much like the street cards in the Zombies game, where you flip them over and line up the streets to create the town. In this case, they'll be dungeon corridors with rooms and stuff. You'll have cards for monsters and traps and treasure and so forth. Instead of being hugely static, there'll be some randomness to it, to simulate D&D's random encounters and random treasure and traps and so forth.

I'd want players to be able to do stuff like disarm traps, or solve somewhat simple puzzles. My first stab at it is to have a trap card, which the player would not see (one player would be the GM), the player could choose to use Strength, Cunning or Dexterity to try to disarm it. One would be a great deal more likely to succeed than the rest. Somehow the player would have to figure out which to use. I wouldn't want it to be totally Gygaxian random, but I don't know how you'd give them clues without completely removing the guesswork.

Fights against monsters would have to be somewhere between (again) Munchkin and D&D4. Maybe a few dice rolls.

I'd want it to be scalable, and have campaign play. Treasure and some kind of XP could be kept, and it could totally take the place of your regularly scheduled D&D game. You could find some stairs and go down to the second level (!!!), and continue the adventure, and so forth. In order to not have hundreds and hundreds of cards, you'd have to have some way for the monster cards and stuff to scale.

You know, after having typed all of this up, I think I'm talking about 0e Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe I just need to cool my heels and read my Rules Cyclopedia. Maybe that'll be the fix I need.

Overly Complicated

So our most recent game of D&D had some difficulties, which I'll try to deconstruct here.

Since I know that at least two of my players read this, let me first make very clear that I'm not shifting blame to my players, or trying to be especially defensive. I'm just attempting to deconstruct things in the hope that I can work out what happened, why it happened, and how to avoid it or do it right in the future.

The problem, I believe, was that they players got frustrated with the lack of success or progress in their attempts to follow the plot. In a very broad sense, I think that I lost sight of what they were after, and I got way too tangential.

The players are following a thread in the game in which a family called the Lathiens seem to be somehow connected to a wicked cult of Orcus. The players have been trying to follow this down.

So far, they've sortof saved the neck of a fellow who was being hunted by the Lathiens, and they send that guy to Illyes. They discovered that a guy named Athurn was acting on the Lathiens behalf when he kidnapped a farm family. They ended up fighting and ultimately killing Athurn, and then did some sneaky stuff and intercepted a shipment of slaves destined for the Lathiens. They also ended up intercepting two orcs who were apparently being smuggled in to Drugen on the behalf of the Lathiens. However, this was where things got a little difficult. The players tried to sneak/beguile their way into the Lathien compound. As a DM, I had two choices, I could either start saying "yes", or roll dice. I went with rolling dice. Sometimes I like to keep things random, instead of just being the Ultimate Decider in stuff. In this case, the dice were not kind, and their ruse was foiled. The guards were onto them, the players fled, and the guards chased them. They fled from Drugen, and that was where we left off from the previous session.

In the future, I'm going to make a point to have some discussion at the end of a session if I don't have any idea what the players are going to get up to on the next session, so that I can prepare more. Last session, when they'd fled Drugen, we did not do any real discussion after, and so I didn't know what direction they were going to go. I don't feel that this has anything really to do with the problems of this past session, as I don't mind winging it, but I prefer to have some inkling as to which direction the players are headed.

After the session in which they'd fled Drugen, some of the players expressed some concern about having "broken" the adventure. I tried to explain that this is not the case, that they can't break it, cause its not written yet. I get the feeling sometimes that there is some conscious or unconscious reservations on the part of the players about not being on a tightly written adventure. And perhaps that ties in to some of the problems that we run into, or maybe I'm misreading my players. Put more plainly, when I tell my players "You are not on rails. THe story is not written yet. I'm responding to what you're doing.", they tell me something to the effect of "But its a giant sandbox and nothing is happening and we're bored!"

So, in my opinion, the problem was that I'd created plot that was too complicated, or too tangential, or my players are too easily frustrated, or all three.

I analogized that I'd blindfolded them, and placed them inside a home, and told them that there are three exits, and to find their way out. They felt along and found a door, went through it and were in a room, felt around and found another door, and when that door was not the exit, they threw up their hands in frustration. So either there were too many rooms in my analogy house, or they just gave up too quickly. Either way, like I said, I'm not trying to pass blame for a mediocre-at-best game session, instead just puzzle out what went wrong.

So lets assume that my players are blameless, and that I am responsible for fixing the problem. Going with that mindset, I need to simplify my plot and conspiracies, or at least make them more direct and less tangential.

In further detail, what happened previously was that after being chased out of Drugen, the players were still interested in the Orcus/Lathien thread, and figured that they had two routes to pursuing it, one being through the Lathiens, which they were at a loss on. They were completely unsure about how to get at the Lathiens. They figured that they could also pursue it via the orcs. The previous session had them picking up two orcs, that they later battled with in the streets of Drugen. They'd picked up the orcs via Velder (via Athurn, via the Lathiens). They decided to go back to Moore's Creek and talk to Velder and see if they could get onto the track of the orcs. I threw in a fight against some bugbears because, well, it IS D&D. They made it to Moore's Creek and tracked down Velder with only a small amount of trouble. As I recall, Velder was happy to give over some information, but not quite all. The party parted with some cash, and wanted to get in touch with the people that set Velder up with the orcs.

At this point, on a lark, I decided that Velder had some stuff that he needed doing, as opposed to simply wanting to get some cash for his info. Why? I like trying to create a world that lives and breathes around the players. I'm not interested in all of my NPCs simply being "quest givers", and entirely one dimensional. I like to try to give my major NPCs at least a couple of motivations and such. Anyway, I think that this was the beginning of our trouble.

Velder tells the group that one of his rivals in town, Palmer, is getting some gems from somewhere that he is using as payment and such. Velder wants to know where Palmer is getting the gems, and figures that the party isnt associated with his people, and could find out more than his own people can.

The party starts to track Palmer, trying to figure out an 'in'. Palmer goes to a number of warehouses and seems to conduct some business there. Also, Andrew's thief goes and breaks into Palmer's place to do some snooping. He finds a list of names with numbers beside them. One of the names is that of a mercenary company captain. This particular mercenary company guards the food stores for Moore's Creek. After a little more snooping, Andrew and Jason's characters ended up deciding to take jobs with the Merc company, guarding one of the warehouses, hoping to get an 'in'. The shift passed uneventfually, and shortly afterward, we wound down.

Now, without trying to show all my cards, my plan involved a link between Palmer, the gems, the food warehouses and its mercenary guards. The party was doing a fine job of trying to slowly pursue this, and all of their actions were moving them closer toward their goal. However, I think that my players felt that they were just floundering, and that I was letting them flounder.

So, I think that I need to have less convoluted plots. My players aren't stupid. They are however expecting more immediate rewards, I believe. I need to keep things to one or two levels of complication. If all of the cats in town are vanishing, it needs to be because a Nasty Monster is eating them, or it needs to be because a wizards apprentice is snatching them to give to his Nasty Monster, but it does not need to be... a wizards apprentice snatching them because his wizard master blackmails him into doing so because an orcish chief holds mystical power over the wizard and feeds the cats to his Nasty Monster. etc.

I also need to be more careful about getting too tangential. I need to remember that side quests are stand-alone, minor quests that are really pretty much optional. I need to keep my players goals in focus. Their goal in Moore's Creek was to find out how to get to the nasty orcses. Instead, I had them guarding food warehouses in the middle of the night to try to figure out where some gems are coming from. Simpler quests. Everything should work toward the goal, instead of going off in all different directions. I'll cite Lord of the Rings: everything in the books was done with focus on the main goal, that of returning the One Ring to Mount Doom.

So I need to find a balance. Crafting stories and adventures and plots that are memorable, and can hold a few surprises, but not ones that make my someone's brain hurt, or that start to read like the entire set of Robert Jordan books.

Approaches to Games

By "Games" I mean tabletop role playing games. But you assumed that, I bet.

It occurred to me that there are at least two ways that people approach a session or sessions of a role playing game.

There's "Beer and Pretzels", which needs very little explanation. Most games of D&D are this, heck - most role playing games are this.

"Serious Drama", Unlike the Beer and Pretzels approach, Serious Drama approaches role playing like people approach art or opera. This is "Serious Stuff". Not for kids or the faint of heart. In fact, one might not even want to refer to this as a "game". I'll pick on my own kind here when I say that folks in a Serious Drama game are likely to be elitist, aloof, a little snotty, and very particular about what goes on in the "game". LARPing and games like Vampire and some Indie RPGs can easily fall into this group.

I'm breaking these down because I noticed something recently on a gaming forum. Folks were discussing games in which "One person does something while everyone else twiddles their thumbs". I could be wrong on this, but I think that you'll find two things, that are sorta one, but I'll call them two.

One: You tend to only get this much in Serious Drama games. The rest of them let the players run around as a team or group, and often their goals are not so wildly divergent that they end up all over the map.

Two: The only games that this would be tolerated in anyway are Serious Drama games. Your average D&D player is going to get bored and start playing Yatzee after about 5 minutes of Watching Someone Else Do Stuff. And I don't blame them. Watching other people play games while you wait around is boring.

Let me pause for a second and note that I'm not trying to say that you have to involve everyone at the table, every second of the game. I feel compelled to throw in the word "FUN", all caps. The whole point of the first form, the Beer and Pretzels gaming, is fun. You guys could theoretically be playing a game of Talisman or watching Lord of the Rings, and having a great time too. While Serious Drama is a little different. Its not that you can't have fun, or that its not supposed to be fun, but its more serious than that. It means to be. It requires more investment, more time and focus, and those that favor that type of game would probably argue that the reward is greater.

I think people will tend to be in one of the two pools, and while you'll find some exceptions, I think that finding people who can hop between those two types of games are somewhat uncommon.

Narrative Control

One of the coolest things about the game of Shadowrun of Yesterday that we did, was that thanks to using Shadow of Yesterday rules, I had much more control over the narrative of the story.

Case in point: the Cyberzombies busted in. In a normal game of Shadowrun, one of two things would have happened. 1) The players manage to somehow take down the cyberzombies. 2) more likely, the players shoot back in an intense firefight, cause that's what players do, and the cyberzombies would have eaten them for lunch.

Two vastly different systems. In Shadowrun, which is pretty hard core "Sim", the rules are the boss. With TSOY, which gives alot of space to "Narrative", I had the ability to direct the story by deciding the stakes. And I guess that's the difference. With Shadowrun, I have no real control over the stakes/outcome. Its all down to the dice. I can influence it, by rolling more dice, but I can't control it. With TSOY, we talk about what happens, instead of letting the dice decide for us.

/game nerd

Questioning your players ethical choices

Questioning your players ethical choices is tricky business, and one should be very careful when doing so.

Obviously, its just a game, and everyone except the most pure and expert of theatrical role players will, to some extent, behave and respond accordingly.

D&D functions best with well defined black and white/good and evil. While groups will vary wildly, D&D doesn't feel geared for soul searching morality plays (go play Sorcerer, or Dogs in the Vineyard, or maybe even Vampire). Its all black and white - "That guy is evil. We're gonna kill him." And then, to some extent, the end justifies the means. If he's fleeing, riding away as fast as he can? Shoot him down.

Games like Sorcerer or Dogs in the Vineyard are geared toward being stories about morality, and as they put it "how far will you go?".

So, if I follow my own line of thought, I'd say that D&D should probably be kept simple. Its a game about heroic adventure against dastardly foes. Do D&D players want to have to deal with tough choices, or choices in which there is not a reasonable choice? I'd say no, for the most part. I'm not insulting D&D players by any means, but I think that people sit down to play D&D so that they can take part in what D&D does well. I'm not saying that they want mindless "old school" adventures in which the toughest choice that you'll face is whether to take the left passage or the right passage when trying to get to the minotaur at the bottom of the dungeon.

Note: I probably owe a short apology to anyone that read this. I started this post like 7 times, and erased it and started from scratch 6 times. I don't think I really have a point, or much of a conclusion. This is just me musing.

More on gaming

In which I fumble around and try to talk about gaming. I just cant seem to collect my thoughts in a manner that seems to communicate effectively. I'll try anyway.

This evening it our Tuesday game, and we're either going to continue some of my Zombies World of Darkness game, or we'll work on doing chargen for my Constantine/Buffy Feng Shui game. I think I'll dub it Monster Hunters, so I can stop calling it Constantine/Buffy. I'm excited about the Feng Shui game (and the Zombies game - I'll continue to run it as long as folks want to play it.) I'm totally trying some new stuff with the FS game. Kickers, Bangs, Flags, and good stuff from the Forge forums. We'll see how it works in play.

Part of what I'm trying to do is to totally separate from "traditional" linear GM engineered gaming. In what I consider a typical role playing game scenario (usually D&D is cited for this example), the GM has created or purchased an adventure for the players to run through. If you look at it from this overview, it is usually a narrow track for the players to go through, a linear series of events that they encounter, one after another. Depending on the DM and players, there is an illusion of player control. "Umm, we'll pick this door", or "We'll go talk to this guy". Or the DM just railroads the players along the given story path, hitting them in the head with it when they stray. But at best its just an illusion. The GM (or publisher) has developed a story that the players are supposed to play in. The players are really just spectators, having little or no real control over where the adventure or their characters will go. The GM paints a picture, the players respond. The GM provides the next scenario, the players respond (usually, and to trivialize it slightly, the players respond with "We hit the orcs on the heads with our swords." Then move on to the next thing.)

I want to create a gaming environment where the players DO have control over the adventure and where their characters go.

backpacking and gaming

Okay so two subjects for discussion.

As I have mentioned, we're headed out to go backpacking.

For entertainment value only, here is the list that I compiled a few weeks ago of the things that I thought were needed:

backpack
sunscreen
sunglasses
spare sunglasses
boots
boot socks (x2 or x3)
compass
GPSr
spare AAA batteries for GPSr
flashlight
spare batteries for flashlight
lantern
knife
camera
batteries for camera
hat
water bottles/water
water purifier
first aid kit
camp stove
camp plate/bowl, cup, fork/spoon, knife
one or more change of clothes
sleeping blanket?
food & snacks
toilet paper
coffee
coffee filters (for coffee and water filtration, etc)
toothbrush/toothpaste
hammock
bungee cords?
extra rope
tarpoleon
trash bags
large ziplock bags
cell phone
map
extra map
bug repellant
belly pack
whistle
signal flare?
bandana
duct tape
shovel
watch
towel
hankerchiefs
claratin
pain killer
crystal light?
gloves
light jacket
rain poncho
book
notebook and pen
pair of shorts
lip balm
pepper spray
camp shoes
walking stick
foam seat?
stuff sack

My list was not far off, and soon I'll comprise a list of what I actually am taking. I weighed my pack last night, and it was right at 40 pounds. I'm excited. We'll be leaving town about 5:30 Thursday morning and hiking Thursday afternoon, Friday, Saturday, Sunday morning, and driving back Sunday.

So for my second topic: Gaming..
Specifically Pen & Paper role playing games.. I've been playing D&D and other games fairly regularly since.. um.. like 1991 probably. I think the first RPG that I bought was "Recon" an RPG set in the Vietnam War. Shortly after, I picked up "Twilight 2000". During this time I also found someone's homebrew fantasy RPG in an attic. The things that I remember about it, aside from its many typed pages, clipped into a 3-ring binder, were the many and varied spells, and the damage system. Armor in this home-brew system functioned like damage resistance. Stronger armor subtracted from damage dealt. Thus my first campaign ended up with the heros having armor which allowed them to casually dispatch any number of creatures that were simply unable to damage them in their heavy armor. I picked up (probably stole - I was a semi-hooligan in high school) the AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters Guide. I wasnt allowed to have/play/etc D&D stuff, as my folks were super opposed to anything easily labeled evil or misguiding. So I kept it secreted away for awhile until it was discovered and confiscated. I continued to run with home-brew fantasy for some time. As high-school wound to a close I got into D&D again, for real this time, moving from my home-brew-with-stuff-taken-fromD&D into real AD&D. Ahhhh tHAC0. I played AD&D like it was my full time job. And I guess for some time, it was. I was able to live a little fast and loose right after high school, so I did alot of D&D and a little job-having. Anyway, years passed and my gaming went from frequent to infrequent, though I played some great games with some great people (I'm looking at you, former-jackson-gang.. and some still-in-jackson-folks too). I played some Shadowrun 3rd, Vampire the Masquerade, a Werewolf the Apocalypse game with GURPS lite-lite rules, some RIFTS, and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff - my wife will grimace and share with you that I collect gaming books. Anyway, that kindof brings us around to current day, and the last year or three.
After my gaming kindof trickled off, I got the itch and started scouring memphis looking for some gaming people. I finally found some and started playing with a group that had been playing a D&D 3.0 game. We converted to 3.5 during the campaign. It was alot of fun. I met some great people, some cool gamers, and a few people with whom I'm fast friends. (I promise I'm getting to a point, of sorts. My thought here has really been about RPG Theory, but I wanted to start at the beginning, for me.)
The crew from chizat, some of whom are the former-jackson-gang, have been somewhat influential in my gaming theory. For years, gaming for me involved killing orcs and climing ropes and all the other stuff you have to roll for in D&D. My philosophy has shifted from "Gamist" or even "Simulationist" to "Narrative". Previously, I played D&D, willing to overlook that things that go with Gamist or Simulationist D&D. Everything from 30 minute long rules arguments/negotiations/discussions, to trying and sometimes failing at mundane tasks, thanks to the dice. Its gaming that feels like you're literally playing Baldurs Gate or Diablo while sitting at the table.
I've lately been running with Narrative specifically in mind. It shouldnt be about who can "win" the game, or killing the most orcs, or jumping over the spike filled pit trap, its about having an engaging evening of gaming. That means changing the way the GM and players interact, and how the story and mechanics work. There are some great game systems out there that really help with this, like Donjon, Dogs in the Vineyard, FUDGE, Capes, and a ton of other games that I havent even been able to look at.
Anyway, I'd hoped to be able to phrase all of that in a more informative manner, but so many people are able to offer so much more information than I am at places like The Forge forums.

But coming up soon I'll be running a game with Feng Shui rules that's based on Constantine and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I hope that it works fantastically.

on video games

So I've been playing computer games since probably 1986 or 1987 (I would have been 9 or 10, respectively). Even before then we had an Atari 2600 with games like Pac Man, Haunted House, E.T., Pitfall, Space Invaders, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Donkey Kong (I assume we owned it), and I'm sure some others that I certainly can't remember. This was when we were in Birmingham, AL, between 1982 and ~1985.

My dad had a computer when we lived in Clinton, MS. I think it was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. I well remember make-believe batman in my dad's office and "typing" furiously at the keys. At some point, while we were still in Clinton, we got a Commodore 64 from a friend of my dad's. We had a couple of games for it, the ones I remember were Ultima IV, Choplifter, Gunship, Trolls and Tribulations. We had a monochrome amber monitor, and even had a printer, which I think never worked. No hard drive, 5.25" floppy drive. At some point, the C64 died, or we replaced it, but we got an IBM PC Junior. The only thing I remember for sure playing on this was King's Quest. Oh, we played some Zork as well. I assume it was Zork I. And Sopwith.

Later, probably after we moved from Clinton to Grenada, around 1989, we got an Amiga 500. We had Defender of the Crown, Team Yankee, Civilization (the first game I purchased! Got it at Boomerang games, at Park and Mendenhall. Boomerang Games closed a couple years ago.), Sim City, Shadow of the Beast, Universal Military Simulator, aka UMS, The Perfect General, Balance of Power, Conflict and Conflict: Middle East, and I'm sure a few others. On the Amiga I had my first programming experience. We had a (classic) BASIC class when I was in 7th grade, and I took what I learned and programmed at least one of the Lone Wolf choose-your-own-adventure style books. That was fun stuff.

Eventually the Amiga died, and we ended up with a PC. I'd bet it was a 386, but I cant be sure now. I do remember having to install a 2x CD-ROM drive in it.

Well I'm winding down. This has been alot of fun, recalling some of these old games, and finding info about them. Maybe I'll get back on it some more later.

Now some more linkage!

Play Zork I || Download the first three Zork games || Play Defender of the Crown || Download Civilization || Play Sim City || Note to self: find links to classic games and emulators for download!