Dissecting Things

I've been watching some videos dissecting Monopoly, many of them returning to the oft-repeated trope that Monopoly wasn't supposed to be fun and that it was original invented as a lesson to teach that capitalism was bad.  This gets repeated from video to video as though it is original information, I presume because 6-year-olds who have finally been allowed onto the internet by their parents need to be informed.

And naturally we have a need by presenters and commenters to express how boring monopoly is, how long it is, how dreadfully one-sided it is and how it is definitely not fun to play.  Hm.  How interesting.  You-tubers who are younger than 30, who would have been 6-years-old when the internet became widespread, in a time when home video games began to crush arcades, have discovered that a board game invented in the early 20th century doesn't hold their attention.  Shocking.

I played a lot of Monopoly and I commonly use it for metaphors for examples of game play because it is an extremely common and simple-to-understand game.  I don't play Monopoly any more because it is 2017 and the world has changed.  So have I.  In 1973, without cable television, without home computers, with the sort of programming we had then, I promise that Monopoly seemed like a much, much better game.  Go figure.

At times I find I have to take long breaks from the internet, particularly self-invented content, mostly because of the staggering lack of intelligence behind the creator's motivation.  Who hasn't stumbled across yet another screed about the awfulness of super-hero films this week?  People seem awfully disturbed by the size of film budgets they don't have to raise or spend themselves, or the proliferation of this sort of content, or what was chosen as a soundtrack, or the destruction of things that don't actually exist, or the "dramatic" over-emphasis, blah blah blah.

Again, I grew up at a time when it was possible, on most nights, to watch television shows about cowboys from the end of the news in the evening to the beginning of the late-night news, without a break.  In the theatre, one had a pick of five or six westerns showing at any given time.  I can vaguely remember a time with double-features, when a "bad" western film would precede a "good" western film.  While Westerns did not win best picture awards, they were regularly nominated for best picture: High Noon, Shane, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the Alamo, How the West was Won, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

People would shit themselves if there were not one, but 30 super-hero films a year, as was common during the western era.

As far as budgets go, I just don't care.  I don't.  It's a business.  Clearly, the makers feel the budgets are worth the take, so what matter is it that some disgruntled hack in a self-made video wants to bitch that it cost 850 million to make a film?  Ain't my money.  Want to complain about costs, how about a multi-billion dollar stealth fighter that is suffocating its pilots?  There are 20 stealth bombers in America, valued about about 2 billion apiece, most of which aren't flying right now.  For the cost of half of them, we could make 80 big-budget superhero blockbusters without breaking a sweat.  All this talk about the cost of movies is just bullshit.

But then, how about we talk about plots?  Superhero films are just so boring, whine the critics.  Their character developments are just so two-dimensional and cardboard.  It's such terrible writing.

The best films this year, for me, have been superhero films.  Not because I think they are slashingly brilliant, but because of the alternative.  Here's what's opening this week, that I could see if I didn't want to stay at home and watch Spiderman: Homecoming again:

Marshall is about the first African-American Supreme Court Justicce, battling through his career-defining cases.  What a visual spectacle that's going to be, as we watch a film about a care-taker judge whose only actual claim to fame is that he wasn't white.  Yes, yes, I know, it was just great that America ended racism once and for all by nominating a black Supreme Court judge, before having to do it again by electing a black President (thank gawd they never have to do another thing to stop racism in the country), but seriously - when was the last time any of us gave a thought to Thurgood Marshall?

The Foreigner is about a humble businessman who seeks justice after his daughter is killed in an act of terrorism.  It's described as "cat-and-mouse intrigue."  Oh good, a revenge plot featuring a common man against a corrupt system.  That will be new and original.  Certainly won't be anything like as repetitive as a superhero film would be.  But that's okay, because it stars Jackie Chan - who is in no way predictable.

Happy Death Day is about a college student reliving the day of her murder until she discovers her killers' identity.  Which happens to be Friday the 13th.  Oh, right, this is October.  When we get to sit through a lot of shitty repetitious horror films, absolutely not at the end of their derivative use of camera angles, jump scares, piss-poor writing and dialogue expression, in which I'm supposed to piss my money away because I just love being "scared" so much.

78/52 is an unprecedented look at Alfred Hitchcock's shower scene from Psycho, a scene filmed in 1960 and so repeatedly over-examined and overblown in concept that I am, frankly, after 53 years of life, sick to death of fucking hearing about it.  But no worries, because this documentary is going to be so special, so different, so amazingly profound that it is absolutely worth releasing in a theatre at the same price of a superhero film, unlike the 200 previous documentaries about the same goddamn scene.  Seriously.  If I want to masturbate, my room is more comfortable.

Breathe is the "inspiring true love story" about two people I've never heard of, who were apparently living in Africa with some sort of disease, which promises a rich, full evening of angst and watching two people slowly degrade physically on screen while new director Andy Serkis, famous for dressing as computer animated characters, carefully fits in at least one sweaty love scene.  Gah.

Goodbye Christopher Robin is a documentary about A.A. Milne, the creator of  the Winnie the Pooh stories.  Yeah.  I'm supposed to get all weepy, remembering being read these by my parents when I was four, but no.  I'm just not interested in the least.

Wasted! The Story of Food Waste is a documentary about the wastage of food in the food industry, lovingly turned on its head by having famous chefs turn food garbage into "incredible" dishes.  From the description, it looks like famous chefs save the world.  Imagining this sort of shit reality show programming being sold as theatre-fare convinces me we ought to burn down all the fucking theatres tomorrow.  How crappy is this?

And then there is one more:

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is ... well, I've got to give this one verbatim, because it is just so fucked up I can't straighten it out.  "The story of psychologist William Moulton Marston, the polyamorous relationship between his wife and mistress, the creation of his beloved comic book character Wonder Woman, and the controversy the comic generated."

That is just going to be bad.  It's presence is a clear indication that people are so desperate for a real movie, in the face of the absolute dreck that is being released week after week, that they'll glom onto anything that at least sounds like its going to vaguely be about a character that people might conceivably like.

Because that is the central point.  We don't make films about likeable people.  We make films about people we're supposed to respect, or empathize with, or feel sorry for, or conceivably identify with, but factually none of these people are the sort we think of as warm, friendly or fun.  A.A. Milne, Alfred Hitchcock and Thurgood Marshall might have been important or talented, but we're not edging for an opportunity to have people like this over for a barbecue.  On the other hand, Wonder Woman would be fucking cool to have over for a barbecue (though not her fucked up creator, obviously).  The same is true for Captain America, Tony Stark, Batman, Natasha Romanov and Thor.  Hell, even Thor's brother Loki would probably tell some good jokes.  Instead, we're told we're not supposed to see movies with these people because they're "bad," while the crap described above is being foisted on us as an enriching experience that would be good for us.

I am really tired of watching films about assholes or the boring creators behind so-so childhood characters.  I am really tired of films about some select group of blue collar workers who have somehow been transformed into "celebrities" by reality television.  Chefs are boring.  Writers, as people, are boring.  We're writing, for fuck's sake ~ that's why we make movies about the characters they create, not the actual people.  It is boring watching me hack and hack at a keyboard.  Seriously.  You'd kill yourself if you had to watch my life-story.

I want to watch films about people I like.  That used to be films about westerns, gangsters, detectives, space rangers and scientists.  Now it happens to be films about superheroes, because right now, those are the only people on the screen that we're still permitted to enjoy.

A Game

While we're waiting for me to get myself together after much too much fun over the weekend, let's play a game.

Fundamentally, it is a role-playing game, but one that is personal to each of us.  It begins with a choice, where both options are a flight of imagination, quite impossible, but both are full of possibilities.

Let us say that I'm able to alter your reality in one of two ways.

In the first option, you would be able to return to your 12-year-old self, at the time, the place, the world you knew back then, without any changes save one: you will retain all the knowledge and experience you have right now.  Like you never could the first time around, you could play the system; assuming you could find a way to lay bets, and do so with the memory you have right now (no making lists of winners in advance, I'm going to send you off in the next three minutes), you can make a ton of money, you can decide to change things and do things differently than you did the first time.

The upside is that, of course, everything will be familiar.  For some, perhaps their family life at 12 isn't something they'd want to return to, but for many it would be an opportunity to see relatives and friends again, to return to the comfort of a mother and father who took care of you, to see a world that is now long past or forgotten ~ particularly for those of us for whom 12 was a long, long time ago.

There are a couple of downsides.  Forget new music, movies or television for awhile; and if you're going far enough back, forget the internet and easy access to media.  To you, everything will be old. There won't be anything new for a long time, unless you invent it . . . not until you catch up to today.

As well, it will be hard to get the right timing on meeting those friends you knew after 12; hard to make your marriage happen again, if you're happily married right now . . . and forget your children.  Even if you knew the day your son or daughter was conceived, even if you actually succeeded in conceiving a child on that day, it wouldn't be the son or daughter you know now.  It would be someone similar, someone that looked much like the child you had, that behaved much like the child you had, but the child you have right now would be lost forever.  There's nothing you could do to change that.

In the second option, I make you 12 right now.  It's today and you're still the same person you were, but you're in a 12-year-old body.  Perhaps you'll be able to identify a surrogate mother or father in the next few minutes, explaining the situation for them, or perhaps you'd like to take your chances on your own.  You won't be able to play the system like in the first option, because the future will still be unknown ~ but at least you'll have the potential to begin again and do it better than you did the first time around, plus you'll have all these extra years of life.  That is, assuming you're not hit by a bus.

Which would you pick?  And once you picked an option, what would you do with it?  Be brave, imagine this is a role-playing game and you've just been transformed or reanimated, whatever you want to call it, and the DM is asking, "What do you want to do?"

Tell me in the comments.

Bad Air

Now, there are some who would argue that I am missing the point of Raph Koster's article.  He's talking about addiction and the substitution of social needs, the worry that some users will fail to recognize the difference between reality and fantasy, as well as concerns that the moral lessons learned in video games will leak out and cause everyday violence.

These are things, Koster says, that the creators of games ought to worry about.  People need help and surely it is better to make games that help people than it would be to make games that encourage divisiveness and unhappiness.  No?

It sounds very well but in fact the language is deliberately slanted to promote an agenda, that agenda itself couched with idioms like 'channel of communication' and 'imprinting behaviour' - both of which apply to every moment in which one person speaks to another.  Whenever I hear of people who speak of art in terms of opening channels, it's quite plain they've become enraptured with meaningless pat phrases that fail to specify what's happening any more than what I do when I ask the barista for coffee.  I'm opening a 'channel of communication' there, too.  When I'm told to have a good morning as the coffee cup is passed to me, that's also 'imprinting behaviour.'

Looked at closely, arguments like "a substantial proportion of the audience is using it [your game] as a therapeutic tool" betrays a strong, patronizing attitude.  It presupposes that anyone who turns to a game for satisfaction, escape or comfort is somehow more needy or weaker than those of us who do not need a video game for that.  The attitude is carried further when Koster says,

"Think about what sort of people these are, and how your design affects them. Think about the ways in which your design will be misused, and the ways in which it may impact a player emotionally."

Poor wee lambs, they need your help to encourage them not to 'misuse' your product or helplessly fall victim to your masterful power to confuse their tiny minds.

This pervasive attitude that has arisen, that argues game culture ought to be a means for social engineering and not merely a tool for entertainment, is an old, old pariah that has already made its way through prose, film and music.  It is the other side of the same coin that derived the Hays Code, sought to ban rock & roll and fears for what the young people are reading.  It is an ever-present argument that says, "We know what's best for you, because what's best for you has already been decided by experts who have been stung by the bad side of gaming."

Koster is precisely this sort of pundit.  He puts it right there in the article,

"I had seen many players of MUDs get hooked on them to the exclusion of studies, or watched them damage their real life personal relationships while favoring the virtual ones."

To which the reader is expected to have the visceral reaction:  "OMG, they ignored their studies? They ruined their relationships?  That's awful!"

But how much were they invested in those studies, really?  How good were those relationships?  We don't know.  We're not expected to consider even what specific coursework these non-specific people were involved in.  Our minds are led to immediately assume we're talking doctors and people who were married with a whack of kids - because that's the worst possible scenario that can fit the 'facts' - but don't worry, Koster created Ultima umpty-umpth years ago, so he's an expert on how people live their lives and the choices they make.

We're all D&D players here, so we've heard all the lectures about not spending too much time on D&D and how it is going to ruin all our lives.  We've heard the lectures on not taking imaginary campaigns too seriously, given by people who have never played or by people in the industry who are holding the next copy of Grakka's Death Castle IV behind their back, hoping to sell it's 32-page format for $40.  In the case of the latter, all this concern about the user is just so much lip service paid to people who are neither sellers nor users, just so the business model can include the disclaimer, "But we did warn them!"

It is all about disclaimers.  It was unstated in the previous post, but no one really subverts their freedom to write as they will due to this 'responsibility' they share.  Moral responsibility is fine, so long as it rides in tandem with what the creator wants . . . but as soon as the creation and the responsibility go their separate way, the creator very quickly argues "Art" and "Freedom of Expression" and the responsibility argument quickly skulks out the door.

Koster's argument carries the same merit.  Once a created video game gets off the chain, grows wildly popular and begins to reshape culture in ways the author never imagined, there's no rush forward by the creators to take any real responsibility for the fall-out.  It's only a matter of time before these same wee lambs realize they might have a court case if they sue the game manufacturers, based on the exact same 'responsibility' argument that was made prior to the game's success - whereupon responsibility is unceremoniously dropped while the game makers cry "User Accountability" and "Sanctity of the Marketplace."

These moral arguments only matter to people who are not playing the game.  For those on the inside, these arguments only apply when the consequences come to call.  The game player who realizes that he's been five months in his basement only because the pizza boxes and the bottles of urine are getting in the way of his monitor is happy to applaud Koster's morality.  The makers of Axe-Kill, Death in Schnectady, only sees the 'truth' of Koster's position when they've lost the court case against the sixteen families suing over the string of axe-murder deaths that began in Schenectady three days after the release of the game.  Until they lose, however . . . all that morality stuff is obviously nonsense.  There was, after all, a disclaimer on the box.

I'm pretty sure, however, that if the case ever came up, the defendants wouldn't lose.  No one wants a legal precedent that supports the argument that Koster makes. No one, anywhere, wants to make creators - or any of the other manufacturers who have a little TOO much in common with creators - to ever be brought up on charges for social effects resulting from electronics, toys, motor vehicles, alcohol or any of the other things we use to actually affect people.  Point to the right of someone to bring me to charges for the consequences of a book I've written and I will point at all the gun manufacturers who should also be put on trial.

So long as they're safe, so am I.  And a responsibility without consequences is just air.  Nonsensical, self-promotional, moralistic, patronizing, condescending air, but air.  Empty, except for the lingering bad smell in the room.

Meaning

It seems lately that most of my posts begin as responses to someone's commment. This is no exception. Ozzie Pippenger, in this long comment, argues (among other things) that D&D has to become more competitive, like the chess and bridge I discuss in the post The Day Is Coming.  Ozzie begins with the statement that "It's primarily competition that makes people take some things seriously ..."

I could not disagree more strongly.

Perhaps it is an American thing.  Certainly, people take competition seriously.  I am not certain, however, if this seriousness derives FROM the competition or if it is simply enabled by it.  There are a considerable number of people out there, it must be admitted, that are awfully serious about 'winning,' even though the situation may in fact not include any formal competition at all.  But let's leave this aside, and address ourselves to the subjects, once again, of chess and bridge, in terms of their competitiveness.

Beginning with Chess.  The structure of the game makes it undeniable that one side is going to win over the other - I wouldn't suggest otherwise.  I do not dispute that within a chess game there is a winner and a loser.  I do argue, however, that the value of chess is not found in competing to win.

The desire to win, or more commonly, the desire not to lose, is inherent in an individual's introduction to chess.  Most who have never learned the game have an intuitive understanding that if they were to play it, they would absolutely lose.  They watch others play, they are baffled by the moves of the pieces, and often the rapidity by which they are moved, and tend to conceive that people who play chess are really smart.  Of course, chess and 'intelligence' have very little to do with one another, but the acquisition and success at anything that seems complex suggests the opposite.  I have taught many people to play, including many children, and the initial association new players make between playing and succeeding to win is without question one of feeling inadequate in the face of achieving something intellectually 'impossible.'

Those with a strong desire to play mark their achievement according to whom they can beat at the game.  My father taught me, and it wasn't long before I could beat him; my brother was better at the game, so it took longer before I could consistently beat him also.  I played through school and university, gaining ability, and so there were more and more people I could win against.  In those days, I did not really understand chess.  I never became devoted to the game ... and because of that, who won or who lost seemed to matter.

I had glimpses, however, in my 20s.  There was a fellow, Dan, who I would get together with and play chess for five or six hours at a sitting.  Game after game, all afternoon and through dinner.  And who won began to matter less and less.  I played literally hundreds of games with Dan over a period of about three years.  I do not know how many I won.  I do not care.  I don't remember the winning or the losing.  I only remember that we played.

Take the group of chessplayers that I used to know.  If I wished, I could set out this evening, find them, get them to remember me, and sit down to play with them.  I would almost certainly lose.  These fellows are frighteningly good.  But I've played them in the past and they know I will offer them a game of at least passing decency.  Try to keep that in mind as I finish this paragraph.  Two of those players, Charles and Paul, are two of the best players in the province.  Right now, I assure you, as I am writing this in the early evening, they are playing chess.  They play every night.  This is all they do.  Sometimes Charles will win, and sometimes Paul will.  That doesn't matter.  What matters is not the competition of the game - these two have played so often that they've ceased to think of the structure of chess in relation to the course of a mere game.  The structure of chess is in the inherent structure of each precise combination and the possible responses to that combination.  These two have seen virtually every combination possible, and have in their lives tried out the various responses to each; within the game, they understand the difficulty - and the satisfaction - is in finding the response that they do not know.  To hell with who wins the game.  The comprehension of that one move that produces enlightenment in a puzzle that has endless variables ... THAT is the purpose of the game.

You and I do not understand it at that level because we do not play at that level.  We are distracted by the winning and the losing because that is the most we are capable of understanding.  My ability to offer them a game is in my ability to produce a combination they haven't seen recently - most players cannot produce ANY set of moves that has the slightest complexity in it for these players.  I am imaginative; relatively crappy at chess compared to these fellows, but I am inventive and I think 'differently' than typically mediocre players. Thus, while they are destroying me, they have to do it by moving the pieces in a way with which they're unfamiliar. It doesn't matter that they'll win.  It matters that they can do it against a surprising opponent.

I don't know what else I can say to get that across.  If you haven't played enough chess, or you're unable to understand how or why you continue to lose against great players, then this is going to fall with a thud.  All I can suggest is that you try to play a lot of chess against a player who is slightly better than you are.  And I mean, dedicate six months of your life or so to doing only that and nothing else.

Bridge, then.  Bridge, unlike chess, is not a set arrangement in which players are free to make whatever moves they like.  Once the cards are dealt, there is in fact a 'correct' way to bid and play them.  The game, then, is not in who 'wins,' but who most often successfully bids in a manner that defines exactly what the goal is, followed by the ability to produce that exact goal by managing the cards correctly.  This, I admit, will fall short of explaining this to people who have never played bridge.

I should like, in the interest of expanding the consciousness of the reader, discuss the principles of something called Duplicate Bridge.  Duplicate bridge is a favorite form of competitive bridge, the reason for which will become apparent as I continue.  I would like to emphasize, however, that of the tens of thousands of people who are playing duplicate bridge at this moment, very few of them are doing it 'competitively.'  Bridge, like chess, is played by participants so intensively that the importance of individual games ceases to matter.

A typical set-up for duplicate bridge in someone's home on a typical Monday night might run as follows. Five card tables are set up in a living room.  Five decks are dealt, one for each table, and the twenty chairs at the tables are then occupied.  Each foursome plays the hand, first bidding on it, then playing it.  The bidding process is a means by which I tell my partner in code what I have, a code which everyone at the table knows.  The code is very complicated and imprecise, however, and while a very good player can be very good at knowing the right code, the partner may not be as good at interpreting the code, while the opposition themselves each are challenged to interpret the code as well.  All four participants can begin bidding, but usually it requires the possession of valuable cards to make bidding worthwhile, so typically only one partnership of the two at the table have enough good cards between them to make a 'contract.'  The contract states that, given the chosen trump (dominant suit) or lack thereof (called 'no-trump') the number of 'tricks' that shall be taken will be six plus whatever the final bid was.  Thus, "4 spades" would mean the partnership will take 10 tricks with spades as the dominant suit.  Most people are familiar with tricks or trump from having played Hearts.

Success comes from defining the exact number of tricks that the partnership will take if all the cards are played perfectly.  Imperfect play, or imperfect bidding, results in a reduction of points gained ... so really, the cards having already been dealt, the perfect play and the perfect bid have BOTH been predetermined.  This is why newspapers that used to print bridge hands could tell what a perfect play was - the hands all laid out, that perfect play can be identified.  Perfect play, however, is stymied by the fact that during a game, you CAN'T see all the cards.  And yet, a really, really good player will know, almost down to the exact composition of each trick that hasn't been played yet, what cards will out at what times.  It's quite marvelous to be able to do this, I assure you.

Once the hand is played in duplicate bridge, the original hands are reassembled at each table, so that the next players will play the exact same cards.  I an my partner, then, move clockwise around the room, while you and your partner move counterclockwise.  We then play hands that someone else played before us, and our success at playing those hands is measured against the success at other persons.  Thus, 'duplicate' bridge.

If you have never had another player that is better than you explain where you went wrong, and how you could have better played a hand, then you haven't lived.  More to the point, you haven't yet grasped that the hands themselves are the thing you compete against - that is to say, against yourself.  In the grander scheme, after much play, you begin to realize that you're doing the best you can, because you are who you are ... and that 'competitiveness' matters far, far less than the pleasure of playing a hand with or against people without letting them down.  The best thing in bridge is not beating an opponent (though some boors continue to think it is, but they're often not invited back), but in SUPPORTING a partner successfully, either in the bidding process or in the opposition play.  This is difficult to describe ... but if you play enough bridge, being a person of empathy and consideration, you will understand what I mean.  Some of my greatest moments have been in playing the 'dummy,' completing the bidding process and being able to lay down a powerhouse set of cards for my partner to then play.  It's quite a warming experience.

It is only on the surface that these games are 'competitive.'  And this is true with ALL games and sports.  On the surface, it only seems to be about competition.  The Sochi Olympics are starting Friday.  Every competitor there wants to win.  But these are profoundly aware individuals, who recognize that one small error, one unexpected turn, will mean losing.  And anyone can lose.  Obviously they hope that it won't be them, but they're well aware that the moment of perfection can elude them, and that there's nothing they can do about it. That moment of perfection will elude many.

Only the very stupid, very smug ones will think they're invulnerable.  Some of those will also be lucky, more's the pity.  All the others will recognize that the fact of being there in Sochi in 2014 is more important than winning.  The people they meet and compete against are the best in the world ... and among themselves there is respect that you nor I can comprehend.  To us, it seems phony and ridiculous when we hear them praise one another, or say they are just incredibly happy to be there, whatever happens to them.  It isn't phony.  It is only that these are people who have risen so high in their ability that they no longer view 'competition' as the purpose for their being there.  When you and I say 'competition,' we mean winning.  When they say competition, they mean playing.

Even those readers who have gotten this far will, no doubt, have failed to 'get it.'  In light of the fact that I won't quit trying, I'll propose a completely different argument, that really isn't different.

What are these people doing?



What is the purpose of tapping out sand into a mandala which will ultimately be destroyed?  I can assure you it is not out of boredom.  Nor to achieve an artwork.  Nor to demonstrate their prowess.  I leave it to you, o Gentle Reader, to try to comprehend how, within the apparent outer construction of detail and exactitude, there is meaning.

Only, do not tell me D&D requires greater competition to find it.

Better

Recently, it was made clear to me just how ... weak was the game of Pathfinder, which from the comments on this post, seems to be overloaded with the possibility for lone adventurers to heal towns at will. It's well known that 4e suffers from a similar rule-design. It's very clear how video games, which are based on the premise of indefeatable protagonists (once the user has adjusted to the new platform), have influenced not only role-playing games, but the mind-sets of players. Having said that, I'll now speak as a nearly 50 year old man and say, "Jeez, these kids are fucking soft today."

Well, perhaps. There certainly seems to be a connection between not wanting to die - EVER - and weakness of character. Realistically, however, its only that video began to conceive that it was no fun to start over again a hundred times in an afternoon. Making a game hard seemed like the right thing to do, but if there's no real need to get good at it, then why do that?

I feel like I'm flailing a bit. A video game, or an RPG, is generally deemed a past-time. It is designed to pass time. Time is passed more pleasurably if one is having fun (and I mean that in this case), and having an image die on the screen, and having to return to the beginning and do it all again, isn't much fun. Comparatively, playing an RPG on a given evening is more fun if it isn't messed over by having characters die - and it was only natural that this would be the complaint players made to marketing departments looking to 'fix' the game. It is the most obvious complaint. "We're not having any fun because our characters are always dying."

Well, the cultural insistence that fun be a priority is evil, but let's not beat that drum right now.

The long and short of it is that RPG's are not perceived as something you get 'better' at. You sit, you play, you win, you die, you get treasure, you do it at a series of tables over a series of years and on the whole, you have a good time but you don't get better. You get more familiar with the rules, you learn the patterns of power-grading, you get familiar with all the character types and mostly the strategies, but it all seems like memory work, NOT skill. It's like, you may remember a lot of the actors from the films you watch, and you may be able to name thousands of films now that you've seen, but on the whole, you're not a better film-watcher. You're a better film-detractor, but the actual watching part, you do that with the same eyes you used twenty years ago ... and you do it sitting next to some kid who hasn't even lived that long. Same goes for RPGs ... and it seems there's nothing in the game that says, "If you don't become more skilled, you can't do this thing that other RPGers can do."

It isn't like, say, kayaking.

When you start with a kayak, on a pond, or on a smooth lake, you're well aware that you're not ready to be out in this kayak when the wind whips up. You may think about paddling on a river, so long as it's a very slow one. You're not ready to shoot rapids. Over and over you roll and face plant into the water, proving how helpless you are. You're an idiot at kayaking, no question about it.  And when you look at your teacher showing you enders and popups and squirts, you have no doubts in your mind who is better at kayaking here. There isn't the glimmer of delusion. Your teacher is skilled.  You're a noob.

If you care about kayaking, if you like it, you  learn that if you want to do any playboating on wild white water, you'll have to beat your body to pieces. It is going to be fucking HARD. It is going to bruise you, all over. You're going to suffer. And no one, not a soul, is going to make you do it. They may help, they may give advice, but if you're going to get this skill you don't have, it's all going to be because you're driven.

At some point in the future, you may get to have some fun . . . but for several months first, you're going to look like a moron.  Other kayakers are going to laugh and make jokes at your feeble attempts and you're going to want to quit every gawdamn day. Facts are, if you get better, it will happen because you couldn't stop trying. Someday, you'll tell others, "Yeah, I thought about quitting hundreds of times ... but something in me just kept pushing me forward. I kept coming back to it no matter how awful it felt or how impossible it seemed."

These are NEVER phrases associated with role-playing games. The reason is obvious. Kayaking is fucking hard. Role-playing seems, comparatively, stupidly easy.

I'm saying the players of RPGs don't imagine themselves depending on skills, not like kayakers. That is because the goalposts for getting better at kayaking are more obvious than RPGs. It is plain in a couple of seconds of watching who is a good kayaker and who is a bad one. Not so much with RPGs. A bad DM, or a bad player, looks like anyone else. It only becomes obvious when the DM has clearly gotten unhinged during a game or begins to display behavior that is willful, inconsiderate or obtuse. It only becomes obvious with players when they demonstrate themselves to be manipulative, abusive or poor losers. If a marketing company sits down with a bunch of random RPGers and says, "What would make the game better," there's no way to tell what kind of player is being asked. If a marketing company wants to know how to make a better kayak, that's no problem. There's a professional kayaker's association; there are kayakers who compete at world competitions.

In other words, if we mean to ask kayakers for advice, we're going to get advice from competent kayakers. If we ask RPGers for advice, the chances soar astronomically that some of that advice is going to come from complete morons. But the marketers will never, ever know.

There is a skill to playing the game. There is decidedly a skill to running the game. But it is impossible at this time to tell who has skill, and who does not. Moreover, we know that many players have spent their whole lives playing in bad games. For many players, a 'bad game' is the 'right game.' It is the game they know. Any other game seems 'wrong' by definitiion, because it would have to be different. And different, at first, is always bad. Different only becomes good when people grow used to it.

Now, we are adjusting tens of thousands of players to the idea that games like Pathfinder or 4e are 'good games.' They have been programmed to think these games are good, because that is how they have spent their time. There are no markers for them to reckon the value of the games, or their own skills within the game, as there is no outward sign that proves either (such as there is with kayaking). So they invent markers. They invent the markers that seem best suited to the game they've been programmed to like. It is as though I were to argue that my kayak is red. Red kayaks are obviously better than blue kayaks. Therefore, I am a great kayaker because I understand that red is better.

This has been going on a long time. It is going to go on a great deal longer. There isn't going to be any acknowledgement of actual skill in RPGs until someone recognizes that to be skilled will mean working. At present, there's nothing obvious that one is expected to work at ... and there's a loud chorus screaming pedantically that WORK is anathema to gaming. "You're an idiot if you work at this! AN IDIOT!"

Yep. Just like that first idiot who looked at a deadly run of white water and thought, "I bet I can take a one-man Eskimo boat down that and live. Water like that would destroy a canoe." Why he did that, who knows. But when he was done, and lived, I'm sure he thought, "Gawddamn. Bet I'll do it better next time, though."

Query Regarding Crazy Notions

I am beginning to worry my regular participants in the online campaign with all this nonsense ... since they now are beginning to feel I might change my mind and not run, preferring to play around with this.

Nothing has changed.  I will start the online campaign again.  I'm never quite sure how much of my time it will take, or what's practical, and the situation has changed for at least one of the players, so things will have to be taken a step at a time - but what the hell, we've been playing since 2009 and a lot of ground HAS been covered, given the fact that the whole thing is in text.  Most campaigns, I think, don't last as long or have this kind of continuity.  However slow or fast we're able to move, I'm sure we'll make progress and I'm sure the party will feel engaged.

Now, this other thing, this suggestion yesterday.  I think it goes without saying that any DM is a megalomaniac in some regard; that we tend to conceive of weird, wild, woolly things to try, and that in the trying there's things to learn and fun to be had.  A bunch of people expressed a desire to run in my world and no, sorry, I haven't got the time to run everyone.  Running takes more than just describing a few events.  There's character creation for one, and explaining the complex rules of my world, all of which takes a lot of time.  There's mapmaking for combat, there's the processing of weather and other tables, there's keeping records, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done to maintain the various elements of the campaign ... and doing it in text makes it doubly harder.  Something I could explain live at a table in three minutes can be virtually impossible to get across with sentences.  Thankfully, I think that the screencapture program I started using this year will help enormously with some things ... since I can demonstrate movement as well as describe it.

What I can do is fuck around with a sort of mass game, see if I can't get a dozen, two dozen, even more people playing a bit of simple combat with simple characters.  Some strategies might come to light, some realities about player interaction, and some FUN may be had.  A lot of work?  I guess.  The blog might suffer.  My writing might suffer.  I may have to play a LOT less time-wasting video games.  I may have to stop watching crap on Netflix.  Who knows.  Time is a movable feast, and there's always tons of it that gets wasted.

I have more time than most people, for a number of reasons.  I don't have any family that needs my constant attention.  I don't drive for two hours every day commuting to and from work.  I don't donate my time to causes.  I don't support any charities.  I make time for stuff; I'm not duty bound by anything or anyone to fulfill any commitment except the one that pays me.  This seems to make me more flexible than everyone, who tell me constantly how little time they have.

Do I get stupid busy?  Yes.  Do I sometimes find it hard to fulfill my commitments?  Of course.  But I let everyone know, I make my apologies, and I move on.  If you were to play this game I proposed on the Dungeon board, I promise your commitment would be a lot less than mine ... and when it ended, no matter how little time passed before it ended, the worst angst you could possibly suffer would be a mild disappointment.

What, you live in this world and you're not used to disappointment yet?  You poor bastards.

That said, I have some simple questions.  I want to see nicks and avatars, not just results from a poll, and the way people respond matters as much as what position they take.

1)  Would you want to play?

2)  If you did play, would you want a clear, transparent indication of what monsters, and how powerful they would be, there were at each level?  I remember the original Dungeon monster cards were pretty nasty on Levels 5 & 6, so they wouldn't be that harsh ... but I do think I need more than merely 6 orcs in the 6th level room.  Should my actual solution be revealed, or would people rather be surprised?

3)  If the monsters go up, so should the treasure.  Shall it be a Treasure Shower, so that succeeding a room practically makes one a higher level, or should it be a hard slog, with maybe three or four rooms first.  In other words, 4 people kill 3 rats on the first level.  If there's a thousand gold pieces in the room, that's only 250 each.  If you want to go up levels more quickly, there has to be something like 5,000 g.p. in a first level room, to cover the whole party.  Don't try to get too specific answering ... just, ridiculous treasure, or the expectation of having to suffer before reaching the next level?  The power of the monsters would have to be adjusted.  Also, greater monsters means greater slowing in the lower levels ... and a greater dependency on lower level fights.  If the danger level for the rooms in toto is flatter (less treasure per room, better chance of four 1st levels taking on a 4th level room) the spread of people on the map board is greater.

4)  Should there be Player vs. Player?  If not, what sort of victory conditions do we want to specify.  If there is, how should it be restricted?

5)  Are we just playing until we're sick of it?

6)  Do people who die get to start again?  How often?  Infinitely?

7)  It will save time if I pregenerate simple characters.  Who isn't good with that, and why?  I can always create a group of 20 that people can pick from.

I think the only thing I might be uncomfortable with is the too much treasure option.  Other than that, I don't care one way or the other.  I know I'm going to run until I'm sick of it, or until interpersonal drama kills it.  That's how it goes.

But tell me emphatically that you don't want to play.  Make it clear that there's no interest and then I can drop it and move on to whatever is next.

Even Crazier

Okay, I must be getting delirious.

Let's say, for the present, no money (what the hell, I don't need to be poorer).

Let's suppose you submit a character, very simple, along the lines of the stats produced on this post.

Every other round, one new player starts at the beginning of this map:



Orange = Level 1; Green = Level 2; Red (left side) = Level 3;
Purple = Level 4; Red (right side) = Level 5; Blue = Level 6


You get a two round head start.  You can run, you can wait for the next person ... or you can enter one of the rooms.

Everyone is first level, so ... a die is rolled on the 1st level monster table from the DMG, and whatever appears, that number of monsters is in that room.  If I roll orcs and you're on the second level, you get 2 orcs.  If on the fourth level, 4 orcs.  All combat in the rooms is straight rolling - enter, roll surprise, attack goes to whoever is not surprised, then roll initiative, then fight until you're stunned (still my general combat system) or killed.  Others can run in and help you.  Others can run in and try to kill you (they can try to kill you in the halls, too).  If you want to leave a room where the monster isn't dead, you make a wisdom check and if you succeed, you leave.

Rooms have 250 g.p. treasure per level; I'll make up a % chance for magic items.  You heal 5 hp per round in the Kitchen and Laboratory; you can buy armor (Player's handbook prices x5) in the Armory.  All rooms, including the Start room, are safe non-combat zones.  I'll take other ideas for other zones.

Pretty much as many who want can play.

How stupid is this?

The Goldfish

I said in the comments section to Hills Cantons' interview with Rob Kuntz that I could write three blog posts on what was said there.  In reading it Monday, I conceived of all three in a matter of minutes, just gauging my reaction and considering how I might reply if I had the mic.  This is then the third post, and after this I shall drop the matter.  I am getting a truckload of pageviews for the material, but very little in the way of comments ... which always says I'm doing something right.

I now direct the reader towards that portion of the interview in which 'hot dogs' are discussed.  As ever, I encourage the reader to examine the quote in context and to review Kuntz's purpose for writing it.  I am only going to quote what is relevant to this post:

"As the main courses being served again and again are hot dogs a publisher vested in that route doesn’t want to change the menu that is working for them until it stops working, which directly relates to a-nickel-up-your-ass-at-a-time planned obsolescence. So a really good designer (offering steak, let’s say) is really up against it. Most everyone is used to seeing, smelling and eating hot dogs and thus cannot sense the steak vendor, and even if they did, they can’t “get” what it is they’re offering."

In answering this, I am now going to do something wrong.  I am going to talk about the elephant in the room, the fact that I have never seen "steak" where it comes to any design for D&D, ever.  I have argued from the beginning that D&D, as a game, is broken.  It, and everything that has ever been written for it, is a lumbering hulk of cobbled-together crap that barely hangs together on its shambling, contorted frame.  But this is not generally understood.  This is not generally believed, particularly by the echo chambers of the D&D blog universe, which simply refuses to accept that far more people have quit this game than play it now.  I don't mean twice as many people, I mean at least 20 or 50 times as many people, or more.  They have picked it up, spent money on it, tried it a few times, found it to be absolute crying shit, and have returned to their lives wondering why the fuck anyone would play this game.

And meanwhile the remaining participants slobber over 'classic' materials like old Greyhawk or the Tomb of Horrors, remembering fondly how wonderful these things were, their eyes glassing over with tears of games gone by that will never again be played with that happy fervor of youth.

I mean it.  Consider the best of the best of the best material you have ever seen in all your many years of playing the game, and now reflect upon all the copies of that material that have been thrown away because really, the vast majority considered it totally worthless.  You know, I can go into any used bookstore and find a whole wall of National Geographics; but does anyone, anywhere, offer more than three ratty issues of Dragon Magazine?

Hey, maybe New York City does.  Maybe Chicago is a mecca for such things.  But I live in a city of more than a million people, which boasts at least five hard-core D&D bloggers, and I would bet I couldn't find a Dragon magazine if I tried.  But I'm not going to try, and you know why?  Because the Dragon was SHIT.

Spells I didn't need.  Gods I didn't need.  Monsters that were repeated rehashes of existing monsters.  Two or three adventures which were the same old shit that I wasn't interested in using.  Really, really bad fiction.  One page of 'meh' humour and three pages of really, really crappy graphic fiction.  Articles about trends or reviews which were palpable filler, exactly the sort of thing Kuntz still writes and exactly the sort of thing that has no value to me whatsoever.  I find it remarkable that month after month the Dragon managed to remain the premiere magazine of a hobby I absolutely loved without ever actually giving me any information that was actually useful for me.  But then, I'm having the same reaction to what I see on blogs.

Readers, you can snipe and gnash your teeth and insist upon the genius of the Dragon and any other concocted writings you masturbate yourselves with, but one day it will dawn on you what is actually wrong with D&D, and what will always be wrong with D&D.

It is boring.  It is hideously, awfully, compendiously, hopelessly dull.  As a stand-alone game, it is absolutely crap.  It will never be popular.  It will never be embraced by the masses.  The cluttered mass of rules is far too feckless to ever appeal to people who want success and 'fun' spelled out for them.  That may not be nice to hear.  Truth never is.

There is one thing, and one thing only that makes this game enjoyable for a very, very, VERY small number of people.  That is a DM who can pull all this shit together and create a performance out of it.

Two days ago I said that "We stuck it to the man, and we stuck it so hard that yes, there is only one real manufacturer."  Kuntz would have you believe that this was a clever marketing ploy, that WOTC fills the market with garbage so the great material can never be found.  The truth is, we're both wrong.  I'm wrong, because we never stuck it to anyone.  We merely didn't care enough to put our tiny bit of collective weight behind a manufactured idea, no matter who did the manufacturing.  Kuntz is wrong because in 40 years no one has managed to invent any product associated with this game that could reasonably be called "steak."

The people who put it to the man, the people who really fucked over TSR, and the WOTC, and destroyed their dreams of empire, are the people who QUIT playing the game.  These are the people who never found a DM who could put all this shit together and make it good.  Their number of friends in their high school didn't happen to include such a person.  The fellow they met in university who could do it also turned out to be a major asshole.  The chances just never lined up in their favor.  And while some of them might wonder how it might have been if they didn't grow up in Shithole, Kansas, with the books their grandmother in New Jersey sent because she'd heard it was popular among young people, the majority will never think about the game again.  Their response will be, "Oh, that ... fuck, do people still play that?" with the clear, lacking in tears memory of a very stupid, crappy afternoon when four of them tried to figure out how the fuck the game was played.

I am sorry to put it so bluntly.  If you take the DM out of the equation, all the rest of it has no value at all.  Sadly, however, for DMs who haven't figured out yet how to do it themselves, all this crap for sale will continue to serve as a crutch; and for a lot of would-be designers, who haven't yet figured out that they are reinventing the wheel again, and again, and again ... and omg again ... it will forever seem that their decision to use this art image for the cover of their really profound Dungeon Imaginarium proves finally that they are the bestest designer EVER!

It all reminds me of the goldfish, roaming around its bowl, with its 3-second memory span:

"Hey, there's a castle here ...
oh look, a castle! ...
wow, I didn't know there was a castle here ...
oops, someone put in a castle ...
Hey, there's a castle here ..."

Ad nauseum.

Have Lance, Will Tilt

I spent much of the day yesterday becoming more acquainted with this former employee of TSR Rob Kuntz, reading his contributions to the blog Lord of Green Dragons, specifically those which seem to describe his philosophy, his extensive achievements and references to his apparent fame.  I had said that I hadn't heard of him before yesterday, but we here in Canada are used to this phenomenon.  We have a public broadcaster named the CBC which spends much of its time presenting "famous" Canadians of whom no Canadian has heard, so I expect to learn of famous D&Ders whose names escape me.  Wandering around, then, learning about Rob Kuntz, I chanced into a number of bits and pieces around the net, ending at the rather candid discussion of the man going on at YDIS, which has lately become an indespensible source for me.

For those who may be familiar with Kuntz's writing style, and find themselves daunted by its degree of depth and scope, I make this recommendation: copy any heavy text of your choosing into Office Word, then diligently remove every adjective.  Clarification will occur immediately, with little or no loss of content.

Regarding the title of this little post, I have been thinking how best to go at the windmill, er, ahem, the position Kuntz presents regarding what he vaguely refers to as "the move to AD&D with its codification of rules" to be found in the Hill Cantons' interview.  I know I talked about the interview yesterday, but hell, if you're going to tilt, you don't beat the dragon with one pass.

According to Kuntz, the demise of the great OD&D phase progressed as follows:

"From this point forward we see the promotion of a flagship line of AD&D products 'For Your Imagination,' a consistent promotion of Basic D&D specifically aimed at the mass market and the abandonment, wholesale, of the original RP-Creative vision ..."

To be fair, I want very firmly to state that this quote occurs within an argument Kuntz presents about the evils of pre-made adventures, and that the gentle reader is urged to read the quote IN CONTEXT to understand how it fits within that argument.  I see his point.  What I do not understand is how the DMG, the Player's Handbook or the Monster Manual in themselves represent the so-called abandonment of creativity.  I understand that for the modules to work, some kind of standardization has to occur, but why precisely is the standardization itself a thing of great evil?

If you read Kuntz's writings, you will find a consistent distaste for conformity popping up over and over again.  It is central to every link he offers in the comments section of this post from Hills Cantons, and it is his parting argument of August 16th on that same post.  He then quotes various people, including Greg Bear:

""If we all think alike, if we all become uniform and bland, we shrivel up and die, and the great process shudders to an end. Uniformity is death, in economics or in biology. Diversity within communication and cooperation is life. Everything your forebears, your ancestors, everything you have ever done, will have been for naught, if we ignore these basic bacterial lessons."

Far be it for me to badmouth the Great Greg Bear, whose writing I find about as bland and uniform as it's possible to be in this modern cheesy age of processed sci fi, but the statement above as applied to a GAME has about as much relevance as my making a quote about the difficulties of isolating a meson and then applying it to my grandmother's cooking.  I have no doubt that it could be done, but my grandmother would be stupified by it.  That is, if she were alive.

Games tend to have rules.  It is one of those remarkable things about games that enable them to be played by wildly diverse cultures so that a winner and a loser can be agreed upon without the necessity of pulling out machetes or pistols.  Kuntz celebrates the spontaneous creation of ad hoc decisions as the highest form of play ... but it is really the lowest form.

I am always dubious of people who point at the children's playground as the epitome of creativity while typing out such drivel on their computer, sitting in a 30-floor apartment building, drinking cappuccino, listening to Deep Purple over the internet, cellphone and lava-lamp next to the keyboard, with the tailored landscape of the city stretching outside the window as far as the eye can see.  This childlike-innocence-as-proof-of-perfection has always struck me oddly, since none of the things that are truly remarkable on this earth were created by children.  All were created by people who obviously once were children, but the actual expertise necessary for the creation was gained AFTER said creationists reached young adulthood.  Children, as I remember from being one, were petty, cruel, fairly stupid, warped in many of their interests, fearful, foolish and quite often easily duped by figures of authority or the lies of the media.  True, there were flashing moments of creativity, and these are the moments all adults choose to remember, with an denial-fueled intensity that by 35 usually insists that no other emotion besides happy creativity possessed them before the age of 10.  I point all this out because Kuntz returns again and again throughout his writings, and his quotings of other persons, to the idea that if the children do it this way, it must be the right way.

It seems strange to me that Kuntz so consistently speaks of the need to stamp out the dreaded conformity from the D&D universe when so obviously the attempts to conform D&D have been a disastrous failure.  I am certainly no conformist to the businessman's perception of how the game should be played.  I know of no conformists in this regard.  The businessman clearly slammed straight against the wall of creativity when he produced the books, called them a GUIDELINE and not a BIBLE, and discovered that we all treated them as a guideline and went off in our personal directions with gusto.  He must have been one very surprised entrepreneur.  And yet, convinced of the importance of this need for conformity, he and his cronies went ahead and tried again to conform D&D by turning out one edition after another.  I think we can clearly call this the absolute worst strategy for conforming anything since the American Government invented the Melting Pot.

If I might return to Greg Bear's quote above, it is staggering that the bacterial lesson that has NOT been learned from all of this is that all attempts at forced conformity fail.  Bacteria do not avoid conformity through determination and pluck.  Non-conformity is a natural condition of their being.  It is central to the whole condition of adapting oneself to one's environment.  If the environment be different, then we ourselves MUST be, regardless of any and all attempts to the contrary.  My world is no one else's world because no one else has lived my life, enjoyed my experiences or been driven towards my creativity.  The pouring of RPG material on the market, both good and bad, by TSR, the business community or James fucking Raggi can never have any influence on my being creative in my own way, ever.  It simply is not part of the equation.

This is not to say that I am against conformity.  I write this blog in the expectation that one day all the readers in all the world will wise up and suddenly realize there is only one way to play the game of D&D, and that is the way that God intended.  This with the understanding that I am God.  I know that all you fools don't realize that this is inevitable, but I don't let that worry me, since in the end I know best.  In the meantime, I am satisfied to sit and produce and wait for the populace to make themselves ready.

Let me finish with a half-made point, half-made because I think the quote should be enough for anyone who at this point is on the ball.  Regarding the rules to games ultimately, after much time, becoming standardized so that they can be played and enjoyed by many, many people.  Standardization is not such a bad thing:

"A number of early folk games in England had characteristics that can be seen in modern baseball (as well as in cricket and rounders). Many of these early games involved a ball that was thrown at a target while an opposing player defended the target by attempting to hit the ball away. If the batter successfully hit the ball, he could attempt to score points by running between bases while fielders would attempt to catch or retrieve the ball and put the runner out in some way.


"Since they were folk games, the early games had no official, documented rules, and they tended to change over time. To the extent that there were rules, they were generally simple and were not written down. There were many local variations, and varied names.

"Many of the early games were not well documented, first, because they were generally peasant games (and perhaps children's games, as well); and second, because they were often discouraged, and sometimes even prohibited, either by the church or by the state, or both.

"Aside from obvious differences in terminology, the games differed in the equipment used (ball, bat, club, target, etc., which were usually just whatever was available), the way in which the ball is thrown, the method of scoring, the method of making outs, the layout of the field and the number of players involved."

- From the History of Baseball, Wikipedia

Car Wars

Without a doubt a different game, and in our opinion as players, a suspect one. I remember one long session in which it was argued passionately at what speed a car could ‘roll over’ from drifting and making a 30 degree turn at speeds like 30 -40 miles an hour. This resulted in four of us, at three in the morning, getting into a car and driving around the vast parking lot of a local mall, doing tests.

I’m surprised were weren’t questioned by a cop. This testing involved speed of acceleration, attempting to make sharp turns at the highest speed we dared (in an Audi, as it turned out), and experimenting with a high-pressure super-soaker out the window while ‘drifting’, to see if it did indeed reduce the likelihood of hitting. Turned out, driving straight or drifting proved one thing very clearly ... it is pretty-nigh impossible to concentrate on anything while driving except straight ahead.

Don’t know if anyone remembers that Car Wars ‘rounds’ were based on periods of 1 second. This was necessary in order to reconcile the movement of the vehicle physically over the ground ... longer rounds would have meant the cars moving much further per turn, which would have disrupted the micromanagement of the vehicle. Since the cars were designed to fire just as quickly (once per round), the game easily allowed the possibility of six to ten car maneuvers and as many as 10 to 15 combat attacks in a ten-second period. Intense driving or combat could increase the number of both maneuvers and attacks.

While we convinced ourselves in the parking lot that you could indeed roll a car at 40 mph, we also realized how ridiculous the attack/manuever principle was in the game. We acknowledged that we weren’t profoundly excellent drivers ... but it wasn’t rational that anyone could make two 30 degree opposite turns at 60+ mph, check a panel for firing both forward and backwards at the same time, all in a two-second period, and convincingly expect to a) hit anything and b) NOT crash. There just isn’t time to do the checking necessary. If you don’t believe it, I invite you to find a big asphalt tarmac and give it a try.

Not that it stopped us from playing the game, as it was and without changes (where would you start?) I think the height of this absurdity came when we played an 8-person game on Car Wars’ Offroad Track in an all-nighter that lasted from 7 p.m. until 8:30 a.m. the next morning. Ah, youth.

For those who don’t know the track, it consisted of two jumps, a water ford, several bumpy places in the road and so on. We designed a variety of cars, off-road worthy, from large SUVs to trikes, and gave it a try. The result? Crash, crash, crash.

We each started with two people in each car, which allowed for one of the two people to die and still allow for play. It was an interesting game. We played to finish three laps. Three people were successful. No ‘team’ survived ... only individuals. No one finished the game in the same vehicle in which they started. Either the cars were wrecked beyond use, or the drivers were killed – enabling those drivers who survived wrecks to crawl out, cross the highly dangerous terrain in order to find a working vehicle, only to get in and get going. There was a lovely pile up of working and non-working vehicles at the end of each jump, and by the second round we realized the trick was pretty much to make the jump, survive, abandon your mostly-wrecked vehicle and take your pick of what was there. The winner of this profound race crossed the finish line in a vehicle that had been driven by four players during the course of the race. I came in second.

At some point we began to calculate the total time the race had taken. It worked out to less than three minutes. For the fans watching, it must have been the most profound three minutes of their lives.

Old Days

If there is something that sets me apart from the blogosphere, it must be that I don’t talk about OTHER games I play. I just talk about D&D. I have made allusions to other things (if the gentle reader is paying attention) ... but this is pretty much a one game only blog. It’s even been mentioned that I won’t use the term ‘GM’ to replace ‘DM’. I have thought about it, but since I want to emphasize what game I play, I don’t make the switch.

However, for the record, I have played other games. For a brief period, about six months in the early 80s, I played in a Rolemaster campaign, and I wasted another good six months playing in an Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. In and about that period, a friend of mine got very much into Chivalry & Sorcery, which I hardly ever hear mentioned, and I and a few others played while he ran. But that is about it for fantasy game systems. I just like the one.

But when it came to non-fantasy game systems, I played and ran Traveller very, very often. At first, the original three books, then with the Naval, Mercenary and Scout additions. At around the same time, I also played rather continuously (this would be 85-86) in a Top Secret campaign. I always liked the combat system in that one.

Around ’87 I conceived of a Traveller campaign with Top Secret weapons rules, and I ran that concordantly with my D&D campaign for five years. I called the unification “Star Jumper,” and since we played every week, one out of every three weeks we played it would be the space campaign. It went excellently for a time, and then it dropped off ... and by ’94, I no longer ran it. For about a decade after, until maybe five years ago, I would continue to work on the design ... but it’s dead to me now. I suppose I just got tired of the weak thinking where it came to the rules for an incredibly difficult universe (the later editions were NOT particularly comprehensive), and I did not wish to put in that work myself ... as I was already doing it for D&D. What’s more, no one I knew wanted to play.

We took a crack at Paranoia for awhile, but since you have to smile continuously during a good role-playing session if you don’t want the fire hydrants (and everything else) to shoot you for a traitor, overall it was an unpleasant game.

As long as we’re on the subject, however, I might just as well talk about non-RPGs.

My first experience there was way back in grade 7 ... circa 1977, when my friend Gary Stebbings introduced me to Panzerblitz. I fell in love with it immediately, and although later I was introduced to Squad Leader, I found the latter to be a bit too grinding where it came to rules. Panzerblitz was less ‘realistic’ but it flowed more quickly. In the three years before I was introduced to D&D, I played Panzerblitz, Panzer Leader and Arab/Israeli Wars quite a lot ... and for another four years, as long as opponents still existed. Towards the end, we used the maps and the units interchangeably. I remember very clearly one massive battle which included one Panzerblitz, one Arab/Israeli Wars, and two Panzer Leader games combined, with the Germans/Israelis (they were all blue and gray, so who cared about the logic of that) against the combined Americans, Russians and Arabs. More than 1400 total units on 15 boards, set up on a ping-pong table ... took an afternoon to make two complete moves. Damn, that was fun.

In High School, apart from a lot of D&D, it was all Ogre, all the time. I don’t know who remembers Ogre, but it was a convenient two-person game that could be played before, during, and after a D&D campaign ... most of which we played Fridays after school in the cafeteria, until six or six-thirty. There were usually three or four campaigns going on, and no one pushed us out because the sports teams were typically still practicing (or competing) until way after seven or eight. On sports competition nights, if we didn’t have to go home, we didn’t until sometimes 10 p.m., pretty much living out of the school’s vending machines. Those were days before D&D was banned at my old high school, something I learned from the younger brothers and sisters of the people I played with.

Anyway, Ogre. Yes, hundreds of hours spent at that. And at two other games, less popular but still memorable. The first being Awful Green Things From Outer Space, which I still have a copy of, and The Creature That Ate Sheboygan, which was huge fun. We played a variant where the citizens in the latter game were required to walk at their slowest speed towards the monster until they were quite close (five hexes) ... and then they could run to the edge of the board. At which point they would have to move towards the monster again. Was a hilarious variant, and helped smooth out some of the balance problems of the game (if you are competent with multiple units, you can usually beat a single monster).

I know there are words about these on boardgamegeek, so don’t suggest the site (I’ve been), but these are the ones I remember.

Other wargames included Tactics, Axis and Allies, Risk, more Risk, and Risk again. Jeez, I haven’t played Risk for six years and that is a good thing.

The last one would be a game of my own design, which we called Empires. This consisted of world maps drawn out to 1:5,000,000 scale, divided into ‘zones’ of ten thousand square miles each (America was thus about 360 zones), pasted on drywall roof tiles and nailed to the walls of the basement of the house I lived in for awhile. Nailed to the walls because the game also consisted of more than 2 to 3 thousand push pins (armies) scattered over the globe, with zones colored to indicate how rapidly they produced more push pins. The game could not be played in a day, nor a week of days, so thus it had to exist in a way that could be left for weeks at a time. Players used to make their ‘move’ ... which consisted of pulling and pushing back in about four or five hundred pins ... while we played D&D, or they’d just drop by to make their move when it was practical. Generally, we had four to seven players in the game, and it was necessary to supply your own pins if you wanted to play (100 pins were typically $2). We played several games over the space of a year and a half. The general complaint was that if we played several turns in the space of a day, our thumbs would hurt from the pins. This was all before it was practical to do it on computers (’89 to ’91, if I remember correctly). I’m sure a computer could do it, but I didn’t own that computer, simply because I was mostly broke in those days.

Good times.