Why D&D4e suxxorz

... because it's perfectly balanced.

Just yesterday I played Car Wars - not a roleplaying game, but that didn't stop me. We had six cars gunning for a truck and trailer with a safe with something fancy in it we wanted. I had two cars, driven (I said) by Jean-Claude Van Waffle, the Belgian kickboxer with learning difficulties but great stretch (he could kick people out both car windows while driving), and Li'l Joe, the fat greasy hairy-manboobed trucker spilling soggy burger lettuce all over himself as he drove. 

The truck barrelled along at 55mph, and Van Waffle and Li'l Joe charged up at 80mph, firing lasers and rockets into the back, blowing off the side and taking out a wheel, the truck swerving madly across the road. The truck's lasers blew out Van Waffle's engine sending debris across the road and the bonnet flying into Li'l Joe's car. 

Van Waffle's car, powerless, kept rolling along under its own momentum, slowing but still closing with the truck. Next the truck dropped little mines out the back, and these blew out the tyres. Li'l Joe swerved back and forth across the road to avoid them. Van Waffle rolled forward on his wheel rims, sparks flying into the air, his mulletted hair blowing majestically in the wind through the broken windscreen. More mines went off, disintegrating the wheel rims and the underside armour, but the car kept sliding along on the transaxles. 

Behind him, Li'l Joe was knocked unsconscious by sustained bursts of laser fire, and just as Van Waffle was slowing and pulling behind the truck, Li'l Joe's now driverless but still powered car rammed into Van Waffle's gliding car, slamming him forward up the truck's side, now with the back armour blown away and the safe lying blackened but intact, tantalisingly open. 

Van Waffle perched on the edge of his vehicle's window as powerless and without wheels it began to spin about, and leapt. To succeeded, he needed a 9 on 2d6. The dice came up...

5...

3.

Van Waffle leapt through the air, clutching at the side of the truck bed, his glorious locks trailing behind him... his fingers just missed, and he faceplanted the tarmac at 65mph, rolling away across the road, and the unconscious Li'l Joe ran over him. 

You can't get that kind of awesomeness in a perfectly-balanced game

Autumn 2009 Geektogether

And so we met last night, Monday 18th May 2009, for the seventh Geektogether, there was good attendance and it seems everyone got to chat to someone they'd never met before, as well as catch up with old gamer friends.

There were,

Chris and his Dark Heresy group meeting at RMIT, Wilfrid (Banestorm GM of same group plus Aron away in the savage lands of the Hun), Graeme, and Shane. They shared the adventures and coming doom of their party.

Colin blithely strolled in with the victims of his TPK in Khara Tel, Kyle and Phill, who all looked forlorn and in need of a new campaign.

Melissa came with her Fly the Black group, Aaron, Tara and Tom, actually two campaigns but I'm not sure who was in which group.

John came as the representative of the Fitzroy Mob, now the Inner City Mob, and told us something of the thespy communist game of being small mice with swords, and their new campaign, The Mask of NyarlotheDoomOfPCs.

Ben & Skiz came along, but since they're moving out to help establish a colony in the wilderness in the orclands near Bacchus Marsh, we may not see them again for some time.

Darwin Nick emerged from hibernation to grunt and roll over and go back to gameless sleep, offering an enthusiastic "definitely maybe" to offers to game.

Ian, fleeing from the conflict-ridden Western suburbs appeared to tell us more than we wanted to know about his lovelife, and traded many a drunken thrust, parry and riposte on subjects gaming and not with Colin.

And so, 16 people in all, with four different active game groups represented, at least 6 of whom have less gaming than they'd like to and so should be nagged by those who want to give it to them

Thanks all for coming, it was good to see you all, those I didn't catch up with on the night I hope to soon!

The game must go on!

Giving up on a game line

For the second time in my gaming life now I've reached a point when I realise I'll probably never play or run a particular game line ever again - so I want to get rid of my books.

Does this happen to others?

The first time was with Rolemaster. I was introduced to it in uni, and soon converted my long-running AD&D game to it, and enjoyed it. I went off into the army and played other games, but after that returned to it for another long campaign. 

Then one day I sat down and played with K as a GM. It was awful. It was ages looking up charts, by the time we found out if we our characters lived or died we no longer cared. My character couldn't do anything, the randomness of the dice rolls was so much higher than any skill for anyone under 10th level that it was easier not to worry and just roll the dice. Half the time when I sprinted I ended up moving at slower than walking pace. 

After the session I said to another player, T - "Mate, it's not that bad when I GM, is it?"
"No," he said.
"Then why was it so fucking awful this time? This doesn't feel like the same system."
"It's different because you ignore the rules. You roll the dice and pretend to look up some chart and use that time to just make up what happens next."
"But -" I said, not wanting to admit that he'd pegged me perfectly."
"Look, you didn't realise the rules were shit because you never used them."
"Oh, alright then."

After that I realised I could never GM or play Rolemaster again. Why have this big pile of rules you never use? Get some other system where you do use the rules. I went to throw the books away, but T being a true gamer said, "no! I'll add them to my collection." So away went Character Law, Arms & Claw Law, Spell Law, Companion, Companion II through to Companion VII, and so on. Hundreds of dollars of books, gone.

Now something similar's happened with GURPS. In this case, I do enjoy the system in itself, it's just that nine-tenths of the gamers I meet never read the rules, so when GMing I have to just handwave over the details or we'll never get anything done. 

If you have a detailed system and the details come up regularly and people enjoy them, that's great - but if you have to handwave them all, why have them? That's what I thought when I got GURPS Martial Arts - my players can't even remember the difference between All-Out Attack (double) and All-Out Attack (strong), so what'd be the point in having Committed Attack or Defensive Attack? Again, why have this big pile of rules you never use? 

I just don't see any prospect of a group where even half the players really care about all that detail. Playing GURPS and ignoring the detail is like playing Ars Magica and nobody being wizards. You could do it, but what for?

I wrote to my two GURPS GM mates asking if they wanted to buy the books.

"How much?" said one.
"I dunno," I said, "I haven't sold any games since about 1985, I normally just lose them or give them away. Normal secondhand price is half new price, yeah? New they were $60 or so - nowadays in Mind Games they're as much as $80. So probably $30 each?"
"Wow thats nearly $300...did you really spend $600 on all those books?"
"Shit, I s'pose I did. But it wasn't all in one go! Bah, you have a bigger stack than me, you must have spent thousands!"

Rolemaster I gave up because I didn't want to run or play it anymore, GURPS I'm giving up because though I like it and others will play it, we'd be ignoring nine-tenths of it and so lugging around all those books to sessions is pointless.

So to me this is a big deal, having spent all that money on the books, all that time reading them and running or playing games with them. But now giving them up... 

I'm sure I can't be the only one who reaches a point where they realise they should just give away or sell a whole line of game books because they're never going to play them again. What about you guys?

Old school and the Arsehole GM

Looking at various discussions about D&D4e as against earlier editions and the "retro-clone" movement, and Ryan Dancey's famous comment that "roleplaying is twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours", we can see that many people don't understand what "old school" is about. The essence of old school is nothing to do with dungeons, but is a playstyle based on,

The GM hates you. The rules hate you. The dice hate you. Only your wits can save you.

It's a joke but in every jest a little truth, as Shakespeare said. The truth is that the GM is there to present you with interesting challenges, and you can't rely on the rules or lucky dice rolls to solve those challenges, you have to use your wits and think your way through problems. 

If you're a munchkin or attention junkie, you'll be upset at having to use your wits, because you haven't got any. You'll claim the GM is oppressing you. 

Many people don't get this about old school. Over on the GURPS forums people were discussing the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy books. The writer had the characters start off at 250 points, which is about 10th-15th level in D&D (depending on edition), and said this was because,

"I looked at the canonical GURPS stats for pits, poisons, dangerous animals, and other threats and disasters, and made the DF templates sufficiently robust that using them would yield the carefree, cinematic fun of old-school dungeon crawling instead of some sort of grim survival horror. 

"[...] the 250-point power level is needed to make a larger-than-life, carefree genre work in a grim, gritty system like GURPS, where enough kobolds will eventually get behind you, roll a critical hit, etc."

That is, he imagines that characters just fall into ten foot pits and jump out swearing a bit but largely unharmed, they regularly face down hordes of kobolds who line up to be dispatched one by one, and so on. He imagines that nobody uses their wits. 

Of course he's entirely wrong about dungeons. The pit trap, for example, is not something you fall in, climb out of and laugh at. It might kill you, so what you do is not fall in. You achieve this by looking for traps, and going around them, disarming them or setting them off harmlessly. 

The monsters are deadly and vicious. You don't survive them by sheer number of hit points you can receive or deal, but by using planning, tactics and teamwork.

Some will perish. But with wits and some luck, some will survive and prosper.

If you enjoy a challenge of your wits, you will enjoy this kind of gaming. If you're witless, you won't, and will probably complain that the GM is oppressing you. You might even come up with a new edition of your favourite game with detailed rules for everything and carefully minimaxed character classes to help protect you from the arsehole GM. 

The coup de jeu

A coup d'etat, wikipedia tells us, is

the sudden unconstitutional overthrow of a government by a (typically small) part of the state establishment – usually the military – to replace the branch of the stricken government, either with another civil government or with a military government.

A coup de jeu is the gamer version of this. One or more people in the game group decide that the GM is unfit, and decide to replace them. Often, a conspiracy is involved - a private email or phone call saying, "Jim sucks, Bob has this game he wants to run, let's get him to do it." Usually players are considerate enough not to spring this on the old GM at the beginning of the next session, since unlike a coup d'etat you usually want the old GM to remain part of the group!

Often it's accomplished by people running some other game as "just a one-shot", and then, "that was fun, why don't we, um, postpone the regular campaign and play this for a while?"

Sometimes the coup de jeu attempt is carried out without much planning or check to see if there's any support for it, and it fails embarassingly, with the coup plotter slinking away from the group.

Have you ever carried out or suffered a coup de jeu?

Getting a game group

Let's be honest. The main problem for any player or GM is not which game system to buy, or which setting to play in, or the Creative Agenda preferences of their group (even if that bollocks were real) – it's finding a bunch of people they want to play with, and keeping that group together. This article was originally part of d4-d4, and it supposes that you don't bother with a game circle (about which more in a later article), but want to go the old route of getting a group, and then deciding which game to run, rather than deciding on the game, then recruiting the group to fit it. Every nerd and his dog will advise you to advertise on boards in game stores. Commonly that doesn't work. Nerds are shy. And they're lazy. They have to make the effort to write your number or email down, and even if you put it on a tear-off tab, they still have to screw up the courage to contact a strange person to talk to them about their nerdy hobbies.

What does work is two things: the internet, and making new gamers.


The Internet as Recruiting Ground
Anyone who participates in newsgroups, message boards or chat rooms online knows that people lose their inhibitions over just plain text. Scrawny or overweight geeks thousands of miles from each-other are unashamedly proclaiming their love for one another, or threatening to punch each-other's heads in over some minor argument. Whether speaking love or hate, they speak words they'd never speak in person. The internet, like alcohol, lowers their inhibitions, and suddenly they're not shy anymore. They acquire a virtual steel spine.

So, advertise your game on internet message boards. Do a websearch for roleplaying groups in your area. Plenty of people put up webpages about their game, or start message boards for "Gamers in Timbuktu" or wherever you are. If there's nothing for your area, start one. At first there'll be nothing, and you'll get downcast and imagine you'll never play. Stick with it.

One message board in my town has a couple of hundred members. It's found that it stays quiet for a few months. Everyone assumes it's dead and there's no games out there. Then some brave soul pops up and asks if anyone wants to play in his game of Kill Things and Take Their Stuff running on Sundays. This message floats out into the internet and into people's email boxes. Suddenly the guy who stopped running his game when one of his players went away says, "hey, maybe I can get a replacement and start again," as he remembers how much fun he had. So, he posts an advertisement, too. And another, and so on – a little burst of activity for a few weeks, then it goes quiet again.

These boards and chat rooms are like singles bars for nerds. They're places where people congregate because they all want the same thing. Often, the ones online are the ones who aren't getting any. If they were getting some, they'd be busy doing that, not messing about online. They're talking about gaming because they're not actually gaming. But they really want to game. So, join these online groups. You won't get laid, but you might get a game.


Make New Gamers
Okay, here you have to stop being lazy and shy. If you've got an office job, take your game books to work and leave them on your desk. You'll be amazed how many people come up and ask about them. "Hey, is this Kill Things and Take Their Stuff? I used to play that when I was a kid…" Work on their nostalgia, and get them into gaming again. This is not so much "making new gamers" as "retreads."

Have a look around at your workmates and friends. Let's say you want to play a roleplaying game set in a sci-fi universe. Sci-fi books and movies are popular. The sort of people who enjoy them, some of them – not all, but some – might enjoy roleplaying in them. Everybody at some point in a movie or book imagines themselves, at least for a moment, as one of its characters. Roleplaying is just doing this for hours, instead of moments.

So, explain to them that roleplaying is just imagining yourself as that character for a while longer, and that the rules are just a framework for that. If they're still a bit vague on what you mean, mention the Choose Your Own Adventure books. You know the ones, where you'd read a paragraph, and at the end it'd say, "if you go through the left door, turn to page 32. If you go to the right door, turn to page 57." It'd go on like that until "you" were killed or reached the end of the adventure. Roleplaying is just like that, but with a short reply instead of multiple choice. In the end, roleplaying is just a vaguely organised way of sitting around having a chat and telling tall stories. People have been doing that in bars, cafes and parties for centuries.

Of course, some people will say, "but roleplaying is just a game. It's for kids." Yes, games are for kids – games like football and soccer and basketball and monopoly and chess and scrabble. Adults play all those, too. Yep, it's a nerdy hobby. So what?

The other thing to bear in mind is that other gamers are like you - they have other interests, somewhat related to their gaming interests. So perhaps in your town there's no tabletop D&D group (for example). But maybe there's a yahoo group list of Vampire LARPers, with 13 members. Contact them - chances are, 3 or 4 of them are into tabletop gaming, too, and of those 3 or 4, at least 1 of them will give your D&D game a go. The same goes for fan clubs of Lord of the Rings, and so on. One particularly rich place to mine for roleplayers is among computer gamers - many people play computer rpgs or wargames, and would love to play with other people; they only use the machine because they've no people.

The biggest chance probably comes with wargames clubs. I mean, the latest edition of D&D is all about miniatures. And after all, roleplaying was invented by wargamers.


Keep Up the Effort
If you're looking for a group, decide what time you'd like to play, and until you do have that group, use that particular time to look for one. So if you want to game every Sunday afternoon from 1pm to 7pm, spend every Sun 1-7 looking for a game group. Then forget about it the rest of the week. Concentrated effort on a regular basis brings better results. And having a break from it lets you return refreshed and with new ideas and enthusiasm. Just idly surfing the net each day and putting notices here and there whenever it occurs to you, you'll end up doing very little. So, choose your gaming time, and until it's a gaming time, making it a finding time.

PS: Jim the Flame Princess has his own article on getting a game group, with some different advice.

Cavern of the Dead! Benny Hill style

The current regular campaign is just a short one to turn our experienced player Aron into an experienced GM. Last night's session was an alternate, which we have every fourth session or so, or when the GM or several players are away.

We had just me and Graeme, and Matt ran Conan d20. Matt suggested and Graeme accepted the spineless munchkin attribute generation method of "roll 4d6, keep high, arrange to suit", but as I am Old School I just went straight 3d6 all the way, though I did swap Constitution 5 / Charisma 9 for the other way around. Who needs Charisma? That's just for roleplaying and stuff. The rest was all this crunchy nonsense, skills and feats and manouevres and special abilities and all sorts of needless complication like that.

Graeme played Thespius the Thief, and I played Mongrel the Soldier. Nobody is sure what Mongrel's real name is, not because it's a secret, but just because Mongrel fits him so well. Matt provided an NPC, Valerius the Borderer who was the party healer.

We were in a tent town at a big market fair in Brythunia, and a scantily-clad woman, nubile with lustrous black hair walked in. Mongrel was up buying a round and bought one for her and tried his smooth moves on her. She said, "are you swords for hire?" Mongrel replied, "I would be happy to sheathe my sword in your scabbard, mistress."

Perhaps because of Mongrel's wit and charm, this woman Sethira returned to the table with us and told us that recently she had been on an expedition to the Cavern of the Dead with her stepfather, a place supposed to have the Amulet of Dione and oodles of treasure, alas plagued with old cannibal hag bitches or something.

Sethira said that on arrival she'd found that her stepfather was offering her as a sacrifice to the old cannibal hag bitches, "and I escaped by a lesser-known entrance, I could show you the way." Mongrel said, "I'd be interested in exploring your lesser-known entrance," and the others agreed. After a brief stop to load up on torches and iron rations and caltrops, the party set off, marching order was Thespius first, followed by the bowman Borderer Valerius, Sethira as a weak woman had to be in the middle, and Mongrel said, "Lead on Sethira, I'll bring up your rear." Many hours of walking passed with Mongrel enjoying the view and failing all his Spot checks as a result.

A day into the wilderness we encountered a merchant and his caravan. We were not very well-equipped so we took a look at his wares. He had a Greatsword but we couldn't afford it, Mongrel offered to swap Sethira for the greatsword. Matt said, "oh my god, the PCs are selling the NPC plot hook! oh well you can still go on without her." But in the end Mongrel thought better of it and so they marched on.

The next day they came to a valley and were set upon by a mountain lion. Everyone had a go at him, even Sethira produced a pair of daggers from some unknown hiding place and flung them at the beast, but in the end it was a mighty blow from Thespius' poinard and then Mongrel's broadsword which slew it. Mongrel and Valerius skinned the beast, since after all that skin is worth money. Plus they could dine on mountain lion steak, yum. Thespius had been sorely wounded by the lion, but Valerius fixed him up.

They camped out and Mongrel had his wicked way with Sethira that night, much to the ire of Valerius who was on watch at the time. In the morning they approached the cave entrance above which were scribed runes of some fallen civilisation, ancient and wicked. As it was late, the session stopped there.

d20 confirmed my previous impressions of it. d20 is to old-style D&D what a kettle with a tutu is to a kettle - there's a lot of pointless fluff and frills that get in the way, but in the end it still does what you want.

Also, you can now see why I am best GMing rather than playing.