#RPGaDAY: Day 5 - Most old school RPG owned

We'd like to welcome Governmental Tinlid on his
return engagement here at Out of My Mind.

The question for Day 5 brings in a lot more uncertainty than the previous prompts, for what is 'old school'?

The oldest game I own is Maelstrom, for sure. The book pictured is the one I have; it's a 1984 printing that retailed not as I claimed at £4.99, but at the princely sum of £1.95.

Looking back over it, what really shines through is the almost stream of consciousness layout of the text. The rules are presented pretty much as they come up (most glaringly, the Endurance cost of casting spells is seamlessly attached to a paragraph which begins as the example of casting spells) and there are sections which are clearly the writer, Alexander Scott, just waffling and trying to show his working out. It also contains the classic statement that players should 'remember that women are weaker than men, and will be at greater risk in combat', a statement with no mechanical support which is therefore just an assumption of fact (Scott was a teenage boy when he wrote this, and it was the 80s; we can let him off, I think, but it's interesting to note).

But I'm not sure if Maelstrom is actually old school. The wealth of class (living) specific skills fits the bill, but other than that its design is actually pretty far from the classic 'old school' mould. Character creation is largely non-random, and the only significant random element is one not touched on in most old school games, age. You pick a living and roll to see how long it took you to train, adding that to your base age (14, or slightly higher for nobles), and if you get too old, you start having limits on your attributes. The attributes are also percentile-based and directly rolled, in contrast to the derived values common in old school games, and bought up with a points system.

I'm willing to bet that a more determined man
than I could count the stars on that cover.

So, if we define old school as conforming to the traits of the dominant 'tribe' of RPGs from days of yore, then we're looking at something considerably newer as my most old school title.

Stars Without Number is one of a number of games produced in the 21st century using a very 1970s sensibility. Character generation is heavily randomised, each attibute ranges from 3-18, but is only really important in as far as its value derives a bonus or penalty from -2 to +2, and different types of roll use different sizes of dice (Maelstrom sticks to 6 and 10, but SWON rocks pretty much everything from 4 to 20).

I was going to ponder when random generation started to be replaced by point builds, but Maelstrom kind of answers that. The two have always, or at least for a long time, coexisted, and the distinction is more of choice than of era. I guess that the point build comes from a growing desire for play balance, where all PCs have the same basic potentials, and I suspect that this in turn has been promoted by the rise in prevalence of a PvP approach. Partly due to the development of games with a more morally grey setting than classic fantasy, and partly to the increasing influence on tabletop and live-action roleplaying of computer-based MMORPGS, the dynamic of roleplaying has shifted, in the average, from 'players vs the world' towards 'character against character'.

And perhaps in the end, that's the real distinction between old school and new school, that in an old school game like SWON, there is a basic assumption that the PCs are working together; they aren't just the PCs, they're the Party.

Your mileage, as with any definition in... well, more or less anything, may vary.

Come back tomorrow for Day 6 of #RPGaDAY, in which I talk about the games I want to play, but never do... or something related at any rate.

#RPGaDAY: Day 4 - Most recent RPG purchase

I hate this artwork; just for the record

My most recent purchase is, like most of my recent purchases, something I picked up on PDF because of a game I was running or playing in. In this case, my friend Jon's upcoming game - so, I've not played this one yet, nor even read it through comprehensively - using the Dresden Files rules, for which I picked up the payers' book, Your Story. I'll write more on the pro and cons of licensed RPGs in a later post, since there's a specific topic for licenses coming up, and today focus on the specifics.

I think because it is so recent, this will be a less personal account than some of those which came before, as I don't have an emotional connection to it.

The Dresden Files is based around a) The Harry Dresden novels of Jim Butcher, and b) the Fate/Fate Core game system, of which also more later. For those even less familiar with the books than I am, Harry Dresden is a moderately disgraced wizard who works as a private investigator in a Chicago that is positively wormy with supernatural gribblies; not that the police will admit to it. As urban supernatural fiction goes, it's pretty high-level, although the game contains options for playing anything from hapless beat cops wrestling with barely known demons, to magicians with enough oomph to split the world open.

As I say, more on Fate Core will follow, but the basic set up breaks a character down into Aspects, Skills and Stunts. Aspects are descriptors which define the character and allow the player to modify their rolls or make declarations which change the scene. Skills are basic, mundane abilities; Stunts are special abilities which come from training or natural abilities and which modify the way the rules apply to your character in some way. The Dresden Files adds Powers, which are like Stunts, but are much more wide-ranging and result from a supernatural origin or training. Aspects are activated using a limited pool of Fate points, while Stunts and Powers are always on, but are bought by expending your initial stock of Fate points, trading definite and specific bonuses for a limited, but wide-ranging advantage.

In addition to Powers, the game adds Catches. Powers are more potent and generally applicable than Stunts, but Catches reduce their costs by setting limits on when they can be used. I like this aspect of the system as it effectively models the supernatural checks and balances which lie at the heart of the Dresdenverse. Operating largely at the GM's discretion, an important feature is that certain powers must have Catches, and that Catches can reduce the cost by 0-points, so that they are important for more than just a way to rake back Fate points.

The game's licensed material is introduced through a Castle Falkenstein-type presentation, where the game text is given as an in-universe means of modelling the lives of the characters, who comment in the margins on its accuracy or otherwise. I've not read enough of the source material - or read the game text thoroughly enough - to know how well it models the original, but as licensed products go it seems to be pretty good. The game makes a decent fist at the setting's dark humour, and also uses the commentary to discuss applications of the rules, rather than as pure fluff, which already puts it streets ahead of Falkenstein's clunky presentation.

Next up, for Day 5 I'll talk about the most old school RPG I own, but sooner rather than later I'm going to need to start freeforming, because on a lot of these topics I don't have anything much to talk about.

Remember to look at the hashtag for more on this topic. Also, check out some of my friends' blogs for more #RPGaDAY:

Gonzo History Gaming Edition

The Anxious Gamer

Dice Tales

#RPGaDAY: Day 3 - First RPG you bought

I actually can't remember what the first RPG I bought was, but it was one of two. It was either Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, or it was Dungeoneer aka Advanced Fighting Fantasy.

We may be seeing this picture a lot.

WFRP has a clunky system which essentially attempts to transfer the Warhammer Fantasy Battle system directly into an RPG by adding an intrinsically flawed skill system (principally flawed due to its inconsistency; some skills grant a bonus to certain standard rolls, some allow rolls that most people can't make, others modify rules in specific situations) and converting the strictly 1-10 stat scale of WFB to a percentile system - except for Strength and Toughness, which remain 1-10, and Movement which is 1-X, where X is a number higher than 10, but not 100. The result is a deliriously uneven system in which an experienced adventurer is rocking a slightly better than even chance of hitting, but could conceivably arm wrestle a dragon.

The classic career transition following an
arrow-related patellar injury.

I do like the career system, clunky as it is in places, in which PCs are assumed to begin their adventuring life as a bartender or stable hand with itchy feet. The second edition cleaned this part of the game up a lot, as well as making the skills system much cleaner and introducing the 'Talents' category to cover the less standard effects.

But with those limits why did and why do I still love WFRP (because I do)?

It's the setting, and in particular the original, first edition setting; so much so that when I ran a game using the updated 2nd ed rules, I busted out my old 1st ed rulebook for the setting info. I adore the grubby fantasy Renaissance feel of the original setting, back when Brettonia was a land of political corruption rather than pseudo-Arthurian grail knightage.

Over time, the demand for distinctive army lists has led to the exaggeration of the various countries (and the virtual elimination of Tilea, Estalia and - Sigmar help them - the Border Princes), and the generally bigging up and tidying of everything. Nothing is cheap and grubby anymore, and for me, WFRP is at its best when it's cheap and grubby, even if you're rubbing shoulders with Electors.

Is that not the saddest dragon
ever?

Dungeoneer was also cheap, although that was the book itself. Sold in the same large paperback format as Maelstrom or the Fighting Fantasy Sorcery! series, at £4.99 it was the cheapest core rulebook around (although the wilderness adventure book set me back about £30, being bought long after the fact). As the subtitle - Advanced Fighting Fantasy - might suggest, Dungeoneer is (the first of three books) aimed at expanding the Fighting Fantasy game book series into a roleplaying game for more than one player. It focused on dungeon grinding, and was followed by two other books, a city guide called Blacksand - focused on the infamous Cityport of Thieves - and Allansia, named for the main continent of the setting and looking at wilderness adventuring.

The basic system is simple; you have three core stats and can also spend your core Skill points to increase skill in specialised areas, like 'sword', 'pick pockets' and 'magic'. Magic was flawed in AFF, as buying up magic allowed you to cast a larger number of different spells, but also reduced your core Skill and your specialised skills with it, including Magic. This meant that you could never get better at magic, just know more spells and be worse at everything else.

I always wanted to run more Dungeoneer, not least because I also have the paperback editions of the setting books for Fighting Fantasy, Titan and Out of the Pit, which show case the mad bag of ideas that is the FF world.

As little as this character sheet has, most character won't
use half of it.

Both of these systems are notable for belonging to the great flourish of random character generation which these days is sometimes derided for lack of play balance. In strict WFRP character generation, you pick your race, but not even your career after that. It was entirely possible to end up with a Dungeoneer PC who was complete rubbish at everything. I may well touch on this subject again in a later post.

More posts to follow throughout the month. See you on Day 4 to talk about my most recent purchase. I am slightly tempted to go and buy something this evening just to queer the pitch.

#RPGaDAY: Day 2 - First RPG you GMd

The first game I ever ran was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

I hear the system is good, but damn
the combination of an RPG core
book and Fantasy Flight board
game costs.

 Now, that's not the giant boxed set Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay released a couple of years ago by Fantasy Flight, nor yet the edition released by Black Library just a couple of years before that.

I'm not even talking about the re-release by Hogshead Games back in the late 90s. No, I'm talking old school 1st edition WFRP, which is apt, as this was also at school, with the same group I first played D&D with, including Kev and with the addition of Simon, the only member of that group I am still in even sporadic contact with, who would later run a wildly gonzo Star Wars game using the West End rule set, which I mention just to push my retro cred a little harder.

More on this one at a later date.

I'm not going to talk system or really setting here or anything, since WFRP is a big enough part of my gaming history that I want to keep something for later. Instead, I'm going to talk about the game that I ran, which was - in a word - Godawful*.

Hello, old school

Now, only part of the blame can really attach to me, and that's the part that comes from my reliance on published campaigns. The other part of the blame lies with the people who publish such terrible campaigns.

The notable campaigns from this part of my GMing life were one bit of the Doomstones campaign, in which the PCs survived despite being rank idiots because I could not find the section of text describing the all-but inescapable deathtrap which they almost wilfully set off, and Revenge of the Lichemaster, which contained long sections inviting you to admire the craftsmanship on their NPCs and which fell down in our case because the PCs flatly refused to be even a little bit heroic if there wasn't a cheque coming from somewhere.

In retrospect, I can't blame them. Mercenary sensibilities are, after all, much more in keeping with Warhammer's fantasy-noir ethos than self-sacrificing heroics; especially in 1st ed.

My first self-generated GMing was an extended and extending old World of Darkness (then known simply as World of Darkness) campaign which I co-ran with my then girlfriend, primarily as a means of enabling her to play outrageously twinky characters. Bringing that campaign to Uni with me was frankly a disservice to my new players, and I'm amazed as many of them as do still talk to me.

I have literally no idea what's going on with
this cover, and I never have had.

Which brings me at last to my first entirely independent GMing experience, which I believe was the one-shot game Kung-Fu Vampire Hunters, heavily influenced by the movie Mr Vampire and run under the Feng Shui rules system.

Feng Shui was a bizarre mishmash of a conceptual, drama-driven aesthetic and somewhat unwieldy rules for modelling it. Dramatic, even physically impossible, actions were rewarded on a detailed scale (taking an extra point of action to go ca-click before firing a shotgun got you a +1 bonus, while running along a line of automatic weapons fire to punch someone in the face was actually easier than just hitting them), and ultimately it was better to be specialised in something than any kind of generalist.

The plot was a pretty basic tale of rival undertakers, necromancy and hopping vampire horror, and I made at least one huge mistake in allowing one player - and this was a pattern which repeated until he left the group - to play a character wildly at odds with the rest of the party (in this case a Japanese anime sorceress in a Chinese wuxia setting). The player got upset that his thematically inappropriate schtick wasn't rewarded, and I should have shut that down at character creation; mea culpa.

This was, however, the first game I ran that I was genuinely proud of, not for the game itself, but for my first shot at a credit sequence.

The game credit sequence is something I picked up from an ST in London who ran an eclectic game that several friends raved about, but which turned out to be pretty much one huge railroad. Still, it introduced me to the idea of opening each game with a piece of theme music and getting the players to introduce their characters with a montage of shots to represent them. I later expanded this idea to include the 'this week on...' section, in which the players each describe an action, and if they can naturally fit that into the game, they get bonus XP. There will likely be more mention of credit sequences later in the month.

For Kung Fu Vampire Hunters I used the theme from Mortal Kombat (Utah Saints version). I was working from cassette (wikipedia link for my younger readers), which meant I was unable to accurately control the track starts, and I actually kicked off early, but some desperate winging it meant that I still managed to hit the right beats and end the credit sequence with the music.

I have, to this day, never failed to close a credit sequence on cue, and the pressure is now almost unbearable. To their credit, none of my players have ever sabotaged me for giggles.

Check back tomorrow for more #RPGaDAY, and don't forget to read some of the other posts coming out.


* Godawful is so one word, even my spell-checker agrees

#RPGaDAY: Day 1 - First RPG Played

One of the things that really jumps out at me looking down that big ol' list of topics, and also watching my good buddy James run down his early RPG experiences on his blog is that my RPG experience is comparatively narrow, and I think that a lot of that relates both to the difference between gaming culture in the US and in the UK, and to the specific and limited gaming culture in which I have tended to move as a result of circumstance and my own natural tendency to move in limited social circles, which means that in any given phase of my life I have tended to be gaming with the same group of people for a long time, rather than swapping about groups and playing lots of different games.

In this one, I never even managed to
find the potion that let the character
speak a language and thus leave the
starting dungeon.

The background to my introduction to RPGs came through Fighting Fantasy, a series of solo adventure books written by Steve Jackson (British co-founder of Games Workshop, rather than the Steve Jackson games one) and Ian Livingstone (the other co-founder of Games Workshop). GW predates Fighting Fantasy, but the books were actually released through Puffin books (the Penguin children's imprint) and although not the first of the solo gamebooks, were unquestionably the big one, at least in the UK, probably because Puffin could get them straight into mainstream bookshops where they came to form a lime-green mass in the middle of the fantasy section.

Technically, I actually hit Choose Your Own Adventure books first, but FF was the one that really transitioned me into roleplaying via friendship with a fellow reader, Kev. Kev was the one who had a copy of D&D.

Oh-ho! You say, because you think I'm going to talk about my first RPG experience with D&D, like a million other people. Well, it is not so, because while we quickly moved on to D&D as an easier sell for a larger group, we actually started with something quite different:

Hey; it's... some guys. What's a
Maelstrom?

Alexander Scott's Maelstrom was a bold departure from the prevalent influence of D&D, replacing a high fantasy world of fighters, wizards and generically employed elves battling dragons for mountains of gold and magical swords, with the muddy roads of a low magick version of 16th century England and a rag-tag band of beggars, mercenaries and distressed clergy brawling with dragoons for a purse of copper and a new whittling knife.

Aww yeah! Dude's fighting a dragon. I bet
they're in a dungeon and everything!

Compare and contrast the covers for the two sets. In the red corner, the D&D basic rules set. I'm not sure if that's an absolutely original version there, but it's close enough. It's bright red, with Horn-Hat McManly the Contortionist Swordsman going mano-a-talon with a fucking great dragon for gold and bragging rights. He's in steel, the dragon is in gold. And then look to the just-about-blue corner, where Johnny Sellsword on the cover of the Maelstrom book (which was also, by the by, a slightly oversized paperback a lot like a Fighting Fantasy book, rather than a box of glossy-covered, Letter-sized booklets unlike anything you'd ever seen before, this being in the days when the instructions for electronic devices generally fitted onto a single sheet of paper), looking like a fight with Governmental Tinlid and his friend is the last thing he wants, especially since Micky Stabbed-in-the-Hand and Polly Oliver in the cart there are clearly not up for providing backup.

Maelstrom was a very, very early proponent of the idea that you could roleplay in a setting that owed nothing to Tolkien or Howard; that magic - I'm sorry, magick - could be a weird and unpredictable force existing at the edge of the ordinary world, rather than a list of set spells with fixed effects, or that the road from St Albans to London could be as rich a source of adventure as a dungeon full of goblins with a sack of gold and recurring nightmares about adventurers kicking in their doors. The magick system in Maelstrom was pretty sparse, and paled into nothing compared to either the variant rules for different types of rogue or travelling entertainer, or the great and sprawling rules for herbalists, which pretty much included a basic herbology in the appendix.

It also had an idea, which I think has yet to truly see its day, despite several grand elaborations, whereby when you got hurt you tracked your injuries individually. If you got hit for 2 damage and then for 4 damage, you had taken 6 damage, but you recorded it as 2 | 4. This was because wounds healed separately, so if a knifeman pinked you for half a dozen 1-damage scratches, they would all heal together, whereas you'd be wearing a single 6-damage wound for months.

I played his cousin. I'm not proud of that, but
I can own it now.

We only ever played a couple of games of Maelstrom, and never very successfully. Why did we drift away from it so early? I guess you could say it was because of the complexity of the rules - in that one paperback volume you had rules for fatigue and exhaustion, lasting effects from injury, experience and aging, and a price system based on proper LSD currency. However, in retrospect we probably didn't get into it because at 11 it was just much harder to get your head around the motivations of Johnny Sellsword (scrape a living, don't get stabbed up to much) than it was for Horn-Hat McManly (kill dragons, gold, glory); although in truth my metier in those heady days was a hard-drinking soldier priest of some kind.

I also played a Chaotic Good Drow in AD&D, because I was 12 and had no shame (if you think I exaggerate, said Chaotic Good Drow was Drizzt Do'Urden's cousin - if you don't know what that means, don't look it up; it shall profit you naught - and had Wolverine-styled claws built into his armour). You don't even want to know about my Cyberpunk and Traveler builds.

We also had no separate GM until we pitched D&D and got a couple more players. That didn't help, since co-run and co-played games can work, but not when both players are 11.

This is not to say that we gained nothing from our time with the game. In Maelstrom, Kev played a dual-class Assassin-Herbalist, because the Herbalist's restriction against killing had no mechanical enforcement. I think I did the same in the first game, and then switched to a Mercenary, but it might have been the other way around. We may therefore have technically learned to metagame before we learned to game.

Stay tuned for more #RPGaDAY - tomorrow is the first RPG I bought, but that might go up early or late as I'm visiting my folks this weekend, which it turns out will include visiting my Dad in hospital; I'm actually kind of glad of this project as a distraction for while I'm still at work - and more torturously run-on sentences, and scope out the hashtag for stuff in a similar vein from people who aren't me. I also highly recommend James's blog, Gonzo History: Gaming Edition, for game stuff in general.

RPG-a-Day

An idea floating at me out of the social network space is #RPGaDAY. Proposed as an equivalent of the Borough Press #bookadayuk in this post by David Chapman, the idea is to post on RPGs every day, following the schema set out in this lovely graphic:

I don't know what's special about the gold categories.

So, I'm going to have a crack at this one (although I'm staying with my parents this weekend so may have to resort to catch-ups sooner rather than later). As the idea is to promote and provoke discussion, and as pretty much everyone I know on G+ roleplays in one way or another, I'll be posting the notifications more widely than my usual Out of My Mind circle.

Board Games: Pandemic and Castle Panic

A couple of weeks ago, I went over to Ipswich for a barbecue (turned grill, due to rain) and board games party. Since Hannah has a strong preference for and no-one had a preference against, we went with two co-op games: Pandemic - In the Lab and Castle Panic.

This is us, one turn and one action from victory, and with
only one turn left of play.

Pandemic is a slickly-designed game of world-saving virology, in which up to four players take on different roles to battle four deadly plagues threatening humanity. Two decks of cards determine the fate of the world. One is used to determine where infection spreads, the other to provide the cards needed to fight it. Just to screw with you, it's the 'good' deck that contains the Epidemic cards that screw you over just when you think you're doing well.

The original version was brilliantly balanced so that victory would be assured with a fifth player, but with the maximum four a win was a rare, rare treat. This, however, was In the Lab, an expansion with a cure-finding mini-game which makes it easier to split the burden of cure-finding, and also adds a whole load of new roles to the game. It also supports five-player play.

We lost, infuriatingly running out of time with pretty much one action left to secure victory. Interestingly, we essentially lost not because there was too much disease, but because there was too little. With the In the Lab expansion, you need to collect disease samples in order to cure them, and the damned red disease - I think we dubbed it a particularly virulent strain of scarlet fever - refused to turn up. We had Andy's engineer parked in Taipei praying for sick people.

Damn you, global viral armageddon; you win this round.

Castle Panic is a castle defence game. Each turn, players play cards to attack monsters in particular zones, trying to take them down before they reach the walls and towers of the castle. Each turn, monsters move forwards and new ones appear in the forest.

The first game we played really failed to live up to its name. There was never much panic, just a little casual slaughter, largely because the last two chips in the box ended up being 'draw three more monsters' and 'draw four more monsters', so we never got rushed.

This made us cocky, and in the second game we were all 'let's play the variation where you start without walls and have to build them all from scratch'. That was the game where draw three and draw four turned up earlier, and while we won it was largely thanks to a couple of very lucky boulders.