The 20' By 20' Room

The New History of Old Gaming

Posted by Rob MacD on April 16, 2009 at 02:58 PM

I was going to post this on my own site, and I will in a day or two, but I thought I'd put it up here first--in part for old times' sake, in part to see if anybody is still reading here, and in large part because it belongs here. "You dance with the one that brung ya," Ronald Reagan used to say.

Two of the pieces on this site (by which I mean this site) that I'm most proud of are my essays on the secret history of roleplaying games: Dungeon Master Zero, on the eccentric Indian fighter, pyramidologist, and Anglo-Israelite who brought refereed wargaming to America, and R&D, on Cold War simulation gaming at RAND. One of the things I'm least proud of is that it's been two years and I haven't completed what was to have been a trilogy of posts, not to mention a long-promised article for Jonathan Walton's journal PUSH. The idea for the trilogy came when I read that David Wesely's Braunstein, a seminal proto-roleplaying game from 1968, was inspired by three books: Charles Totten's wargame Strategos, the RAND Corporation's Compleat Strategyst, and Kenneth Boulding's Conflict and Defense. And it seemed to me that each of those three books could tell us something unexpected and as yet untold about the roots of the roleplaying hobby and maybe something about geek or gaming history more generally.

 

But a funny thing happened on the way to my third post: two years went by. And in those two years, the whole landscape of information available on the history of roleplaying has transformed. A renaissance in “old school” gaming, that is, gaming that tries to emulate the feel or philosophy of the hobby in the 1970s, has brought with it a new interest in the early history of tabletop rpgs.

Continue reading "The New History of Old Gaming"

Indie Press RevelATION

Posted by Jim Henley on November 20, 2006 at 08:17 PM

Holy Crap! Here's an excerpt from the e-mail confirmation for my recent IPR order:

iimhenley@gmail.com
	date			Nov 17, 2006 10:39 PM
	subject			Purchase Confirmation

Purchase Description Mortal Coil  (Quantity: 1) Breaking the Ice  (Quantity: 1) octaNe  (Quantity: 1)

See that date? That was this past Friday night. LATE Friday night.

The package was waiting for me when I got home from work TO-DAY.

That's better than "next business day" service. That's practically teleportation.

THAT Doesn't Happen Every Day

Posted by Jim Henley on October 28, 2006 at 01:58 PM

I just stumbled upon Malcolm Sheppard's blog, Shooting Dice, yesterday. I found it so compelling that between then and now I read

The whole.

Goddam.

Blog.

That has never happened to me before.

My Bruce Baugh's My D&D Year

Posted by Jim Henley on September 23, 2006 at 08:06 PM

One of the more enjoyable blogojournospheric endeavors to follow right now is Bruce Baugh's series, "My D&D Year," which as of today is up to 20 entries with approximately, one assumes, 360 or so pending. Bruce is using Rules Cyclopedia D&D, which can be had in PDF for a mere six bucks from RPGNow. He inspired me to buy it, if not to try to run it. And he's got me thinking of fast, easy and fun hacks to go with a dungeon-crawling game.

1. Frex, a la Dogs in the Vineyard, it should be possible to generate stats for an NPC fairly quickly if you roll eight dice at once and read them off in order three at a time. For instance, a roll of 6-1-4-3-5-5-4-1 could become

Str = 6 + 1 + 4 = 11
Dex = 1 + 4 + 3 = 8
Con = 4 + 3 + 5 = 12
Int = 3 + 5 + 5 = 13
Wis = 5 + 5 + 4 = 14
Cha = 5 + 4 + 1 = 10

and you're done with that part.

2. An alternate attribute method for chargen:
a. Each player rolls makes six (unassigned) attribute rolls and records them in a list, using the attribute rolling method of your choice (3d6, 4d6 keep 3, 2d6+6, roll 8 3d6 and drop the worst two, roll 4d20 and keep the second highest etc.)
b. Put all the lists on the table for examination. If there are four players - A, B, C, D - you have four lists.
c. The group chooses one list by consensus - for example, list C.
d. Each player uses the chosen list (C in our example) to assign attributes, placing the numbers where they will.

With the number of niches most OGL fantasy games have to fill, you shouldn't end up with most characters having the same scores in the same attributes. People will put them where it makes sense for their planned character class. The method would work especially well, I think, with Castles & Crusades "primes" system.

3. Reading my Rules Cyclopedia reminded me of the tradeoff between provisioning and mobility - do you want to load yourself down with a long list of dungeon-crawling or camping gear and leave little space for treasure little hope for quick movement or do you want to go light but risk being out of spikes or rope or 10' poles or whatever.

I don't really like the shopping and itemizing, but I like the tradeoff. So, as a house rule, how about turning Encumbrance into a kind of gadget pool? You've got your weapons and armor specified. That leaves you with a certain free carrying capacity in coins or whatever. You just say, I'm taking X coin worth of spelunking gear, paying some amount of money the Gm agrees is appropriate. Then when you need a spike or an extra torch or whatever, you roll d20 against the difficulty class of the item (preassigned); your mod is how much nonspecified Encumbrance you took on. (+1 per 50 coins? per 100? Whatever.)

Bruce has also got me thinking of my abandoned fantasy heartbreaker again. It'll run on the "Few20 Fantasy" system, which will be OGLish but designed for small play groups with limited playing time. Right now the Big Idea is that you roll Initiative, Attack and Defense as d20 plus mods - all at once. You match off dice after they're rolled, a la that famous gunslinger game we've already mentioned once in this post.

More Kids, More Roleplaying

Posted by Jim Henley on September 22, 2006 at 07:24 AM

John Kim reports from the children's room at ConQuest. Very interesting stuff, especially John's experience that age has a lot more to do with how kids approach a game than gender does. This fits with my instincts about The Princes' Kingdom, though the coincidence of my own children's age/gender divide (older boy and younger girl) made me shy of being too sure about my conclusions heretofore.

Edge Cases Versus Vast Territories

Posted by Jim Henley on August 31, 2006 at 10:32 PM

Immersion discussion is back, which means bad-tempered reactions to immersion are back too.

I think one of the structural problems with character-immersion discussion is that one of the easiest ways to explain the phenomenon is to give an example of a time when, in the player's subjective experience, the character stubbornly bucked "the party" or The Plot or whatever, because it's the kind of thing that throws the features of character immersion into sharp relief. But it's only one tiny part of the internal experience of the immersive player and one end of the range of relationships immersively-played PCs have with other PCs and the GM's world.

I consider myself only a fitfully immersive player, but some of my clearest "immersion moments" pointed my character in the direction of greater harmony with the play group as a whole. In Mike's great "Loose Ends" Amber campaign, I first recognized myself as "immersed" when, in mid-IC conversation with another PC, I experienced a powerful, subjective realization that "my" war with another player-character was pointless and stupid and we really ought to find some way to negotiate its end. And this was an Amber game!

My other most immersive character experience was in Nate's Over the Edge campaign of last year. In that game, first, "my" "realization" that Mo Cleveland had to leave Al Amarja and return to the National Football League was immersive. I felt it welling from within as a complete surprise. As in that Amber campaign from years before, it was the emergent outcome of in-game events that weren't remotely conceived as decision points or conflicts or whatever's cool this month.

Even though we had planned for the campaign to end within a month, I worried OOCly that the timing of Mo's decision would leave him undramatically spinning his wheels for a couple of sessions. Then immersion came to the rescue! Using my fevered brain as his tool, Mo suddenly conceived an intense ethical involvement in a caper the other two PCs had gotten up to in Mo's absence. Suddenly my PC was plugged right back into "the party." (Is it a Party if there are three of you, and all three PCs are so dumb they make the cast of Boogie Nights look like a Mensa meeting?)

None of which is to say that immersive players don't sometimes find themselves in play groups that aren't suited to constructive immersive play, or that some players don't use "immersion" as an excuse for destructive behavior. Just as some players use the sanctity of the Party as cover for their social domination of the rest of the group, some GMs use the same concept as cover for their god complexes and some whole groups reify "the Party" collectively because they're needy and it makes a nice simulacrim of a community. There are all kinds of paths to roleplaying dysfunction. There's no reason to be defensive about healthy versions of any way to play.

Lexicon Continues To Make a Ruckus

Posted by Rob MacD on August 29, 2006 at 08:00 AM

Yoinked directly from Allan Varney's PARANOIA XP blog, because I'm lazy like that:

A PARANOIA writer who writes under the name "WJ Maguffin" (hi, Bill!) and runs the fan site FriendComputer.net ... has undertaken another project, a Lexicon game called "Ruckusball Explained."

Lexicon, designed by Neel Krishnaswami, is a roleplaying game where players use a Wiki to collaboratively create and embroider entries on some fictitious subject. (If you followed the development of the current  PARANOIA edition, you'll recall I ran a Lexicon game set in Alpha Complex, the Toothpaste Disaster.) WJ has adapted Neel's Lexicon rules to a competitive version he calls Smacktalk. Each turn, one player gets voted off the island, and the last survivor writes an entry explaining the sad fates that befell all his competitors.

And Ruckusball? "In this game, players take on the role of retired, famous veterans of an imaginary sport called ruckusball," WJ explains. "The rules, history, and traditions of ruckusball have never been written down before, so these ruckusball champions are asked to delve deep into their memories and write down those rules and whatnot. The players will be creating the rules, history, and traditions of ruckusball as they go along."

Plans for the Next Session

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on August 28, 2006 at 11:26 AM

We've been playing a lot of Dogs in the Vineyard recently, and it's been good. (In fact, the last session we had our first unambiguously no-fooling happy ending.)  Then, this morning on rpg.net, I saw a thread about whether all games can start in media res. The thread is kind of a hairball, but I started thinking about whether it's possible to run DitV this way. At first, I thought, "Nah, the players need to learn the town before they can pass judgement", but then I realized I was wrong. So the next town is going to start with the players standing in the town square, with people on their knees pleading for their lives, and then we're going to run backwards to the moment when they ride into town.

The Adventures of Cheese and Rose

Posted by Jim Henley on August 14, 2006 at 11:47 PM

All you talk about is roleplaying with your kids, Jim!

Uh, yeah. And this is more of it.

I don't want the mashup and so-far fragmentary gender discussion (fragmentary on my part) to utterly dominate consideration of Clinton's cool new game for parents and kids. So this thread will be the actual-play-in-progress thread for our campaign.

Continue reading "The Adventures of Cheese and Rose"

Who Won the Indie RPG Awards?

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on August 14, 2006 at 04:13 PM

Just like the title says: can anyone who was at GenCon let us know who won?

EDIT: And we have an answer: the list of winners (thanks Troy!)