John Desmond, a member of PAGE (Philadlephia Area Gaming Enthusiasts), sent this item about Allan Calhamer, the creator of the popular board game Diplomacy. Turns out he peaked early and never really accomplished much after that, moving on to a series of menial service jobs.
A shame, really. Diplomacy was a cornerstone of past and present game clubs. It is still an elegant paragon of good game design, spawning countless imitators and variants. Nerds like me learned a lot about social skills (like lying and skullduggery, to be sure, but they marked an improvement over what I started with: none) through the game. Who doesn't have a story about how the game brings out hard feelings in the real world?
So, Allan, for what it's worth, thanks.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Overrated "Classic" D&D Modules
Hey, sometimes the good old days aren't as peachy as we remember them. A good, close look at the adventures that lured us into gaming decades ago often don't stand up to scrutiny one we strip the gauzy film of nostalgia off of them. That's not to say that there has been no crap published in the last ten years, but, hey, let's give today's crap time to ferment, no?
10. B2 Keep on the Borderlands. This was the first published D+D module I encountered, as it was for legions of gamers entering the hobby in the early '80's. It gave my twelve-year old self what I craved, the chance to feel powerful as I cleaved my way through legions of vile humanoids. But that's all there is to it. Cave after cave stocked with generic foes. No greater plot (Gygax implies some sinister conspiracy, but it is up to the GM to flesh it out, a hallmark of his). B2 is a decent enough proving ground where new players can learn the rules. But for years I was trapped with this model of the dungeon adventure. Plot and a sense of mystery would have to come much later.
9. X1 Isle of Dread. This one gets remembered fondly because it was the first published wilderness adventure. There is a cool tip of the hat to King Kong, but in the end, the authros (Cook and Moldvay) do not exploit the setting as well as they might. The plot is as linear as it ever was in the previous dungeon adventures, and players options are far more limited than later "setting based" modules would provide.
8. EX1 Dungeonland. Gygax was clearly past his prime when he published this former joke level of Castle Greyhawk. He alludes to it in the 1e DMG as a possibility for GMs to stretch their imaginations. Instead, what we get in this published module is a hacked-up effort to turn Alice in Wonderland into an RPG setting. Dungeonland shows the limits of D+D as a storytelling engine. With its roots in wargaming, any genre that does not have violence at its core does not translate well. So we get the bells and whistles of Lewis Carroll's fantasia, but none of the whimsy that made it so distinctive. No amount of GM improvisation could save this stinker.
7. S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. This is another one by Gygax (my, doesn't he seem to appear a lot on this list?). It drew a lot of attention for merging sci-fi and fantasy conventions. Given how often that has been done so well since this module was published in 1980, this early effort is looking more than a little thin. Once you get past the new monsters and cool toys for PCs (I remember drooling over my very first Laser Rifle), this was yet another boring dungeon crawl with little rhyme or reason. Plunder was the primary motivation for continuing on. My group of adolescents grew bored with the monotony after three sessions and we had hardly penetrated the third level.
6. D- and G- series
Against the Giants and Drow. Yeah, you knew these would be on the list, didn't you? Once more, Gygax informs us that there is some great sinister plot that the characters must disrupt, but for three boring hack and slash dungeon crawls, this amounts to little more than finding a note that leads to the next adventure. And if the party does not find the secret treasure room (which, given the 2 in 6 chance of finding secret doors), what then? The GM is given absolutely no guidance as to how to play important NPCs. The lairs of giants, troglodytes, and kuo-toa are treated a static, with only Wandering Monsters to suggest that creatures ever leave their assigned rooms. For instance, if players hear the noise of Nosnra's east and decide to come back in eight hours, he will still be there, partying it up with a ridiculously overpowered bunch of homeboys. The climax of the adventure is entering the vault of the drow (thank you, Gygax, for inventing a sop to throw to emo gamers everywhere), where we are told that infighting politics have left the Drow in chaos, but once again the GM must flesh out the details and figure out how to involve the PCs in the strife.
5. T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil. The first part of this adventure, The Village of Hommlet, remains one of the best introductory-level modules ever written. Despite the dungeon c
rawl feel of the moathouse, it all made sense, was well scaled to a low-level group of adventurers, and was near a village full of interesting and meaningful NPCs. The long awaited temple, however, left me feeling robbed. The setting was a complete mess. Once again there is a lot of implied political tension among the baddies, but there are no hooks to get the players involved. This is a common complaint of mine, and I realize that it sounds like I am pining for more programmed adventures, but I'm not. It is possible to create a complex setting, as Gygax and Mentzer did, with plenty of options for PCs to pursue, without having to resort to boxed text. What I wanted was some sense of how PCs were supposed to involve themselves in these intricate plots. What might prisoners know? Under what circumstances would the characters actually be approached by NPCs to take a more active role in the temple's power struggles. And how on earth are they ever supposed to learn of the role of Zuggtmoy, which will provide the climax to the adventure?
4. Dark
Tower. Heaven knows how this stinker from Paul Jacquays warranted not one but two 3rd edition revisions. Judges Guild provided us with some fascinating wilderness settings with some exquisite maps back in the day, but their weak area was creating dungeon adventures (there are a few exceptions, like the cool Book of Treasure Maps). Dark Tower was long considered the best of the bunch. It had a plot behind it, which to be fair was explained far better than Gygax ever did with his modules. However, the setting is a hopeless mishmash of monster encounters and NPCs who seem to have no relationship to other folks who live fifty feet away. Some encounters are played for laughs (like the Giant Gay Gnome who gives out belts and the room of Mind Switch) while others are supposed to be played for bone-chilling intensity. PCs are supposed to gather artifacts to defeat Set's plot, yet they're pretty much in the dark as to what they need to do and why.
3. H1 Bloodstone Pass. I had high hopes for this one. I came to D+D from wargaming, and I read with excitement the Battlesystem rules when they came out. For the time, they were a pretty good set of medieval rules, and they made a decent effort to incorporate the fantasy element. H1, though, was a disappointment. In an effort to weave the Battlesystem rules into an adventure, we get a tired Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven retread. The players must make all the right choices in the preliminary encounters, or they will be seriously undergunned when the bad guy forces arrive. The opportunities for roleplaying are severely limited, and the setting amounted to a village and the uninteresting camp f the opposing army. Authors Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson had to contrive all sorts of reasons why our party of high-level adventurers couldn't just sneak into the camp and whack the leaders, like they have done in all of their adventuring careers up to this point.
2. WG4 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. "WG4", I believe, was an early spelling of "WTF". Once again, Gygax gives us a garrison full of humanoids, an implied sinister plot, and a perplexing resolution to the end. While the setting is cool, this baby must have made countless GMs pull their hair out. Somehow, players were supposed to know to dress in unholy robes (yeah, let's hear the good cleric's apology for that one), light candles that are hidden in the upper levels and don't appear to be candles, than perform the right juju to open a gate to the (admittedly cool) cyst in the center of the earth. If they do not find the right written clues (and being a Gygax module, that is entirely likely), the PCs will wander around pointlessly until they get bored.
1. S1 Tomb of Horrors. Yes, Gygax makes it yet again. I have heard that, as a GM, he used to cackle maliciously whenever he killed off a PC. He must have been in stitches when he ran Tomb of Horrors. This module exists for no reason other than to kill PCs and make their players feel helpless and impotent. There must be a half-dozen instances where a character can die with no chance of saving themselves. As usual, Gygax presents challenges that can be overcome with the correct knowledge, but then he gives players no chance to acquire that knowledge. Take, for instance, the encounter with the demilich, assuming players make it that far. Gygax gives several means by which a player might hurt the undead villain, but then denies the players the means to do so. The pregenerated characters that come with the module do not have access to the spells or weaponry they will need to defeat Acerak. Unless, of course, a mage loads up on a half-dozen or so Shatter spells. You know, just in case. This module works well as a joke, if player go in knowing that they are going to be killed in nasty ways. Otherwise, it's a very very bad joke.
10. B2 Keep on the Borderlands. This was the first published D+D module I encountered, as it was for legions of gamers entering the hobby in the early '80's. It gave my twelve-year old self what I craved, the chance to feel powerful as I cleaved my way through legions of vile humanoids. But that's all there is to it. Cave after cave stocked with generic foes. No greater plot (Gygax implies some sinister conspiracy, but it is up to the GM to flesh it out, a hallmark of his). B2 is a decent enough proving ground where new players can learn the rules. But for years I was trapped with this model of the dungeon adventure. Plot and a sense of mystery would have to come much later.9. X1 Isle of Dread. This one gets remembered fondly because it was the first published wilderness adventure. There is a cool tip of the hat to King Kong, but in the end, the authros (Cook and Moldvay) do not exploit the setting as well as they might. The plot is as linear as it ever was in the previous dungeon adventures, and players options are far more limited than later "setting based" modules would provide.
8. EX1 Dungeonland. Gygax was clearly past his prime when he published this former joke level of Castle Greyhawk. He alludes to it in the 1e DMG as a possibility for GMs to stretch their imaginations. Instead, what we get in this published module is a hacked-up effort to turn Alice in Wonderland into an RPG setting. Dungeonland shows the limits of D+D as a storytelling engine. With its roots in wargaming, any genre that does not have violence at its core does not translate well. So we get the bells and whistles of Lewis Carroll's fantasia, but none of the whimsy that made it so distinctive. No amount of GM improvisation could save this stinker.
7. S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. This is another one by Gygax (my, doesn't he seem to appear a lot on this list?). It drew a lot of attention for merging sci-fi and fantasy conventions. Given how often that has been done so well since this module was published in 1980, this early effort is looking more than a little thin. Once you get past the new monsters and cool toys for PCs (I remember drooling over my very first Laser Rifle), this was yet another boring dungeon crawl with little rhyme or reason. Plunder was the primary motivation for continuing on. My group of adolescents grew bored with the monotony after three sessions and we had hardly penetrated the third level.
6. D- and G- series
Against the Giants and Drow. Yeah, you knew these would be on the list, didn't you? Once more, Gygax informs us that there is some great sinister plot that the characters must disrupt, but for three boring hack and slash dungeon crawls, this amounts to little more than finding a note that leads to the next adventure. And if the party does not find the secret treasure room (which, given the 2 in 6 chance of finding secret doors), what then? The GM is given absolutely no guidance as to how to play important NPCs. The lairs of giants, troglodytes, and kuo-toa are treated a static, with only Wandering Monsters to suggest that creatures ever leave their assigned rooms. For instance, if players hear the noise of Nosnra's east and decide to come back in eight hours, he will still be there, partying it up with a ridiculously overpowered bunch of homeboys. The climax of the adventure is entering the vault of the drow (thank you, Gygax, for inventing a sop to throw to emo gamers everywhere), where we are told that infighting politics have left the Drow in chaos, but once again the GM must flesh out the details and figure out how to involve the PCs in the strife.5. T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil. The first part of this adventure, The Village of Hommlet, remains one of the best introductory-level modules ever written. Despite the dungeon c
rawl feel of the moathouse, it all made sense, was well scaled to a low-level group of adventurers, and was near a village full of interesting and meaningful NPCs. The long awaited temple, however, left me feeling robbed. The setting was a complete mess. Once again there is a lot of implied political tension among the baddies, but there are no hooks to get the players involved. This is a common complaint of mine, and I realize that it sounds like I am pining for more programmed adventures, but I'm not. It is possible to create a complex setting, as Gygax and Mentzer did, with plenty of options for PCs to pursue, without having to resort to boxed text. What I wanted was some sense of how PCs were supposed to involve themselves in these intricate plots. What might prisoners know? Under what circumstances would the characters actually be approached by NPCs to take a more active role in the temple's power struggles. And how on earth are they ever supposed to learn of the role of Zuggtmoy, which will provide the climax to the adventure?4. Dark
Tower. Heaven knows how this stinker from Paul Jacquays warranted not one but two 3rd edition revisions. Judges Guild provided us with some fascinating wilderness settings with some exquisite maps back in the day, but their weak area was creating dungeon adventures (there are a few exceptions, like the cool Book of Treasure Maps). Dark Tower was long considered the best of the bunch. It had a plot behind it, which to be fair was explained far better than Gygax ever did with his modules. However, the setting is a hopeless mishmash of monster encounters and NPCs who seem to have no relationship to other folks who live fifty feet away. Some encounters are played for laughs (like the Giant Gay Gnome who gives out belts and the room of Mind Switch) while others are supposed to be played for bone-chilling intensity. PCs are supposed to gather artifacts to defeat Set's plot, yet they're pretty much in the dark as to what they need to do and why.3. H1 Bloodstone Pass. I had high hopes for this one. I came to D+D from wargaming, and I read with excitement the Battlesystem rules when they came out. For the time, they were a pretty good set of medieval rules, and they made a decent effort to incorporate the fantasy element. H1, though, was a disappointment. In an effort to weave the Battlesystem rules into an adventure, we get a tired Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven retread. The players must make all the right choices in the preliminary encounters, or they will be seriously undergunned when the bad guy forces arrive. The opportunities for roleplaying are severely limited, and the setting amounted to a village and the uninteresting camp f the opposing army. Authors Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson had to contrive all sorts of reasons why our party of high-level adventurers couldn't just sneak into the camp and whack the leaders, like they have done in all of their adventuring careers up to this point.
2. WG4 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. "WG4", I believe, was an early spelling of "WTF". Once again, Gygax gives us a garrison full of humanoids, an implied sinister plot, and a perplexing resolution to the end. While the setting is cool, this baby must have made countless GMs pull their hair out. Somehow, players were supposed to know to dress in unholy robes (yeah, let's hear the good cleric's apology for that one), light candles that are hidden in the upper levels and don't appear to be candles, than perform the right juju to open a gate to the (admittedly cool) cyst in the center of the earth. If they do not find the right written clues (and being a Gygax module, that is entirely likely), the PCs will wander around pointlessly until they get bored.
1. S1 Tomb of Horrors. Yes, Gygax makes it yet again. I have heard that, as a GM, he used to cackle maliciously whenever he killed off a PC. He must have been in stitches when he ran Tomb of Horrors. This module exists for no reason other than to kill PCs and make their players feel helpless and impotent. There must be a half-dozen instances where a character can die with no chance of saving themselves. As usual, Gygax presents challenges that can be overcome with the correct knowledge, but then he gives players no chance to acquire that knowledge. Take, for instance, the encounter with the demilich, assuming players make it that far. Gygax gives several means by which a player might hurt the undead villain, but then denies the players the means to do so. The pregenerated characters that come with the module do not have access to the spells or weaponry they will need to defeat Acerak. Unless, of course, a mage loads up on a half-dozen or so Shatter spells. You know, just in case. This module works well as a joke, if player go in knowing that they are going to be killed in nasty ways. Otherwise, it's a very very bad joke.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Why isn't real life more like this?
Come on, we've all had that fantasy where we're walking through a crowded place, and suddenly our life turns into a big musical production number.
Or is it just me?
Monday, March 30, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
Duty and Honour: A review
A few months back, Omnihedron Games released Duty and Honour, a roleplaying game set during the Napoleonic Wars. The inspiration for the game is clear: the Sharpe novels and movies, the Matthew Hervey novels, and their naval analogues (Hornblower, Aubrey, &c.). The period is so rich with potential, I'm surprised that no other game has tried to capture the fiun and excitement of the source material. Well, there's GURPS Napoleonics, but the strength of GURPS is in creating games with a feel of gritty realism. To make GURPS work for swashbuckling, you would have to de-GURPS-ify it.
Anyhow, kudos to Omnihedron for giving Mr. Sharpe his place in the gaming pantheon. And Duty and Honour takes its place in the cutting edge of narrative-style role-playing games. Rather than fall back on level-based or point buy systems, the author, Neil Gow, has opted for a collaborative storytelling approach. Like in Spirit of the Century, players and gamemaster work together to craft the characters, their backgrounds, and the plot. For gamers who grew up in the wargaming/D+D tradition (like myself), this can seem odd and alien. It moves the roleplaying dynamic from an adversarial one to a co-operative one. The rewards one takes from a session of Duty and Honour are very different than those one would take from an old-school game: satisfaction with a good story rather than triumph in an accomplished goal. I can see purists on both sides of the divide claiming that theirs is the worthier approach, but, honsetly, both goals are worthy. Even the most hard-core wargamer might want to give Duty and Honour a look, just to see the potential of the tabletop gaming medium.
The mechanic of teh game is simple and elegant, and it reminds me of a drinking game called "Egyptian Rat Screw." The GM and the players each have a deck if cards. The GM flips over a target card, and the PC has a number of chances to score a success. If you match suit, it is a basic success, if you match number, it is a superior success, and if you match the specific card, it is a perfect success. Skills (like Courtesy and Skullduggery) provide the base number of cards flipped, but these can be modified by traits (like Family Connections or Disciplinarian) and Reputations (social connections, like with the Horse Guards or with the Contessa Villahermosa). The mechanic is quick, simple, decisive, yet open to narrative interpretation to keep the story moving along. Wargamers, who want to factor in modifiers for wind direction and last nights spoiled salt pork, will hate it. But the same mecanic works with all manner of situations, from storming the breach in the city wall to seducing the French colonel's beautiful (honestly, are there any ugly women in Sharpe's world?) wife to convincing your captain that your homicidal sergeant is a greater threat to the unit than the French hussars.
Unlike Spirit of the Century, where it seems like the GM has little power to force events, the GM in Duty and Honour has to take a more active role in adjudicating game actions. Players and GMs collaborate in establishing missions, which are basically the set pieces that will make up the story. Together, they establish the rewards for success and consequences for failure. Everything else is up to the GM, from establishing the difficulty of specific challenges the players must overcome to throwing in the plot wrinkles that will frustrate the characters and challenge the players. One challenge GMs must face is keeping all players engaged at the same time. The rules suggest a mix of ranks, from lowly privates to privileged captains. If one scene revolves around a masked ball, it can't all revolve around flirting with elegant ladies on the dance floor. The GM will have to find interesting things for the low-born characters to do at the same time.
One aspect of the rules that takes this situation into account are the skirmish rules, which come in simple and advanced forms. Again, wargamers will be disappointed, but there are enough period tropes represented ("Form Square!" "Deploy skirmishers!") to keep the history junkies happy. Officer characters are responsible for giving orders and keeping discipline, while the rank and file must succeed at their tasks in order to help the officer's command check. The back and forth dynamic works well. Everyone feels valuable, despite the disparity in rank. Getting tabletop enlisted men to show respect for their fellow gamer-officer, well, that's a different challenge altogether.
All of the wonderful cliches of the genre are represented: the homicidal sergeant, the scheming hussy, the feckless officer. Hopefully, there are enough Sharpe fans out there to make this game take off. A naval supplement is in the works which should reach those hardcore Aubrey fans. Certainly, there are a lot of similar periods (American War of Independence, American Civil War, Wars of the Colonial Empire) that would lend themselves to the spirit of the game with only slight changes to the rules.
Anyhow, kudos to Omnihedron for giving Mr. Sharpe his place in the gaming pantheon. And Duty and Honour takes its place in the cutting edge of narrative-style role-playing games. Rather than fall back on level-based or point buy systems, the author, Neil Gow, has opted for a collaborative storytelling approach. Like in Spirit of the Century, players and gamemaster work together to craft the characters, their backgrounds, and the plot. For gamers who grew up in the wargaming/D+D tradition (like myself), this can seem odd and alien. It moves the roleplaying dynamic from an adversarial one to a co-operative one. The rewards one takes from a session of Duty and Honour are very different than those one would take from an old-school game: satisfaction with a good story rather than triumph in an accomplished goal. I can see purists on both sides of the divide claiming that theirs is the worthier approach, but, honsetly, both goals are worthy. Even the most hard-core wargamer might want to give Duty and Honour a look, just to see the potential of the tabletop gaming medium.
The mechanic of teh game is simple and elegant, and it reminds me of a drinking game called "Egyptian Rat Screw." The GM and the players each have a deck if cards. The GM flips over a target card, and the PC has a number of chances to score a success. If you match suit, it is a basic success, if you match number, it is a superior success, and if you match the specific card, it is a perfect success. Skills (like Courtesy and Skullduggery) provide the base number of cards flipped, but these can be modified by traits (like Family Connections or Disciplinarian) and Reputations (social connections, like with the Horse Guards or with the Contessa Villahermosa). The mechanic is quick, simple, decisive, yet open to narrative interpretation to keep the story moving along. Wargamers, who want to factor in modifiers for wind direction and last nights spoiled salt pork, will hate it. But the same mecanic works with all manner of situations, from storming the breach in the city wall to seducing the French colonel's beautiful (honestly, are there any ugly women in Sharpe's world?) wife to convincing your captain that your homicidal sergeant is a greater threat to the unit than the French hussars.
Unlike Spirit of the Century, where it seems like the GM has little power to force events, the GM in Duty and Honour has to take a more active role in adjudicating game actions. Players and GMs collaborate in establishing missions, which are basically the set pieces that will make up the story. Together, they establish the rewards for success and consequences for failure. Everything else is up to the GM, from establishing the difficulty of specific challenges the players must overcome to throwing in the plot wrinkles that will frustrate the characters and challenge the players. One challenge GMs must face is keeping all players engaged at the same time. The rules suggest a mix of ranks, from lowly privates to privileged captains. If one scene revolves around a masked ball, it can't all revolve around flirting with elegant ladies on the dance floor. The GM will have to find interesting things for the low-born characters to do at the same time.
One aspect of the rules that takes this situation into account are the skirmish rules, which come in simple and advanced forms. Again, wargamers will be disappointed, but there are enough period tropes represented ("Form Square!" "Deploy skirmishers!") to keep the history junkies happy. Officer characters are responsible for giving orders and keeping discipline, while the rank and file must succeed at their tasks in order to help the officer's command check. The back and forth dynamic works well. Everyone feels valuable, despite the disparity in rank. Getting tabletop enlisted men to show respect for their fellow gamer-officer, well, that's a different challenge altogether.
All of the wonderful cliches of the genre are represented: the homicidal sergeant, the scheming hussy, the feckless officer. Hopefully, there are enough Sharpe fans out there to make this game take off. A naval supplement is in the works which should reach those hardcore Aubrey fans. Certainly, there are a lot of similar periods (American War of Independence, American Civil War, Wars of the Colonial Empire) that would lend themselves to the spirit of the game with only slight changes to the rules.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)