Games That Define Us- Great Khan Edition

Obviously, since this is an OSR blog, I feel like I should open with D&D/AD&D. I saw the ads for the Holmes Basic Set in "Boy's Life", the Cub Scout magazine and I was hooked, it took me something like a year to find a store that sold that D&D boxed set, sometime in early 1980. My next D&D purchase was the AD&D Monster Manual, then the Cook/Marsh Expert Set, followed by a Christmas present of both the AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide, this set the tone for some confused rulings over the years as a DM, since I was playing a hybrid of Holmes, the X half of B/X and AD&D, but over the years I started to fall more in line with AD&D orthodoxy, with a few exceptions. Then, in 1985, I pre-ordered Oriental Adventures and it has been almost an obsession ever since.

Chess- Chess had to make the cut here because it is one of the first thinking man's board games that I ever learned. I learned how to play when I was in second grade, just because it was one of the quite games on the shelf in my classroom we got to play during recess time when it was raining or the weather was otherwise too bad to go outside and play. I really didn't learn the game until high school though when I played regularly with my principal, who was a ranked player, and occasionally I'd even win. My real claim to fame though is that I once played chess against a guy who had played against Bobby Fischer, I met him through my buddy Darryl's dad. Totally got my ass handed to me, it was worth the experience.

Risk- Ah, Risk, the game of world conquest. You taught me that the Ukraine was gigantic and the names of other exotic places. You were wrong about the Ukraine, but I guess a game produced during the cold war wasn't going to give Russia it's due, right? This game taught me two things, basic strategy and the importance of luck. Play with good strategy, take a few chances, and hope your luck holds; I was Risk champion of my dorm. On the other hand I have been beaten by people that had NEVER played the game before, so there you have it.

Axis & Allies (The Game Master edition from the 1980s)- Axis & Allies wasn't the first in this series that I played, that honor goes to Conquest of the Empire; which we also played quite a bit; but Axis & Allies we played more and better. Axis & Allies was the better game right out of the box, even it's recommended optional rules made sense. By the time Axis & Allies hit the scene, I was already a veteran wargamer, but this managed to take a lot of wargame elements and make them accessible to the masses, like a gateway wargame.

Dawn Patrol- This should come as no surprise, since I am currently engaged in a new Dawn Patrol campaign, but it was my first and is still my favorite aerial combat game. I bought it because TSR put it out, and I was a young TSR fanboy at the time, it's taken me this long to get good at it.

Star Fleet Battles- I never really understood why this game got a bad reputation as highly complex to the point where you needed a PhD in Mathematics to play it. I am not a math guy, and I have played a lot of SFB, if filling out the energy allocation sheet is too hard for you I advise going back to remedial 4th grade math. I bought the Commanders edition boxed set the year I turned 14, since my birthday is in July I don't remember if it was before or after I turned 14. I taught myself and my friends how to play, we made a few mistakes along the way in learning, but we had it down after a few games; it says right on the box "1,2 or more players Ages 12 and older". Sure it got a little more complex with each additional boxed set (or module, which I never bought), but it was building on knowledge that you had already mastered.

Up Front- The Squad Leader card game, picking on Avalon Hill title to add to the list was really hard to do, then I remembered the one we always played when we had extra time on our hands, it's quick to set up and play, even when you build you own squads with the point buy system, and it is one of the only games that I have that'll bring Lance and Darryl into the same room, although maybe not anymore, we used to have tournaments. Up Front is one of the few games I don't mind losing just because I had bad luck. Theoretically Multi-Man Publishing has the rights to it now, as part of the Squad Leader line, and they were considering making it a CCG, which would make me want them all to suffer horrible curses, but I would like to see a new edition. I have Up Front and it's official expansions Banzai and Desert War, but the cards have seen a lot of wear over the years.

Koei's Genghis Khan- Yeah, I know, it's a little odd to add a NES game to the list, and this title is really representational of all the Koei titles that were turn based war/administrative games from Nobunaga's Ambition through L'Empereur and including Romance of the Three Kingdoms; but my alter-ego here being the Great Khan, obviously I was going to pick Genghis Khan. I actually still own a NES and a copy of that game, I never play it, the battery inside it is shot so it doesn't save and I can't see leaving it on for the days that would take to complete the game. Darryl and I used to play the hell out of this game together too, in multi-player mode, usually one of us would pick England and the other Japan, since the four playable countries were Mongolia, Byzantium, England and Japan, we wanted as much space as possible between us before we had to start fighting each other.

Talisman- The 2nd edition before it got completely crapped up by the people at Games Workshop and used as yet another way to promote their Warhammer franchise, although this was sneaking into this edition too. This was a go-to game for us if we wanted to play something fantasy, fun and easy to teach/learn. I had, I am pretty sure, every expansion for this game that was released in the US except Timescape, we drew the line there. I always wanted to play in a D&D campaign set in this world, minus the out of place and silly characters. The board evoked a place that was both real and medieval, yet mythic at the same time. The only real drawback to this game was that it could get tedious after having died several times and starting over. I have played the new Fantasy Flight Games version, and while it is much, much nicer than the last Games Workshop edition, the 2nd edition still holds my loyalty, the FFG version is like a more polished, prettier version of my old 2nd edition, but it loses something in the transformation.

Warrior Knights- Have you ever razed a city to win a game? My old gaming group got in touch with the designer to ask him a few questions about the rules and our interpretations and we discovered we were doing the entire political phase wrong, apparently we were supposed to spend all of our votes on a single action. We didn't. We played a much more corrupt and Machiavellian version of the game than had been considered by the designer. We bought and sold votes, forged alliances to screw over whoever was in the lead, and fought over who would hold the wool concession. Games Workshop did a great job with this one, I hear that Fantasy Flight Games has put out a new edition, but, in the words of Lance, who has played it "It sucks. They screwed the pooch on this one". He tried it several times, just to try and get accustomed to the rules changes and that was his ultimate opinion; then he taught his Tuesday Night Gaming Group how we played the old GW version and they had a blast with it.

This was fun, maybe I'll do a part 2 that includes the games I cut from this list.

D&D 5th edition Wishlist

OK, I know I said yesterday that I'd not speculate on what WotC was going to do with D&D and that I'd just get back to my own business, but my contrary brain wouldn't stop thinking about it, so here it is.

Point One- Ditch the full color, expensive art on every page; black & white line art can be just as evocative and it's easier for kids to afford or for parents to buy for their kids when the book is $20-25.00 rather than $40+ . I also would prefer an art direction that takes us stylistically back to a more realistically medieval look rather than dungeon punk, but I may get out voted on that. That said, feel free to mix it up some too, David C. Sutherland III, D.A. Trampier, Tom Wham and Jean Wells all got art credits in the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual, David C. Sutherland and D.A. Trampier got them for the 1st edition Players Handbook, David C. Sutherland, D.A. Trampier, Darlene Pekul, Will McLean, David S. La Force and Erol Otus got them for the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide; I could go on and list the art credits for various other old D&D and AD&D books , modules and supplements I have, but I think my point is well made- Stylistically these various artists vary quite a bit within the same products and that's OK; all of them can represent D&D.

Point Two- Get rid of the instant gratification. People, even the kids you have been trying to attract get bored when you hand them everything they want on a silver platter. D&D was designed for long term campaign play. Sure, one of the biggest complaints going into 3rd edition was that nobody ever got to play high level characters because campaigns never lasted long enough, dropping the amount of XP required to level alone should have fixed the problem, you didn't need to amp up the amount of XP everything was worth too. I get that nobody likes being 1st level, but everyone feels a sense of real accomplishment when they make it to second, third, fourth and so on under the old rules; now everyone knows that they are going to level pretty much every time they play and it steals the sense of accomplishment from the players and replaces it with a sense of entitlement.

Point Three- Put the danger back in. This goes hand-in-hand with the last point. Since 3rd edition the PCs have been pretty much gods walking the earth, and the encounter scaling system doesn't help this problem. If there is no danger, no real fear of death and failure, then there is no real sense of accomplishment for the players there either. I am not familiar with 4th edition myself, but I have heard stories from my players who tell me that the power levels of PCs are even higher, and therefore worse, than they were in 3rd edition. Get rid of at will, per encounter, per day, per whatever powers; these are still supposed to be people adventuring not superheroes.

Point four- Make skills, feats & powers optional if you include them at all. Obviously I am biased against them, but I might still be playing a new version of D&D if they had made it easy to rip out the parts I didn't like as simply optional sub-systems.

Point Five- Scale back races and classes to the core four, at least at first. I write a lot about 1st edition AD&D and I sometimes lose sight of the fact that post-Gygaxian D&D has gotten way more complex and both class and race heavy than EGG was taking us when he was dismissed from TSR. 2nd edition gave us the endless series of Complete X splatbooks with their numerous kits and subraces. 3x did the same thing and called them Prestige classes instead of Kits. 4th edition, apparently, just published newer Player's Handbooks with new races and classes.

Point Six- Design the entire system first, before releasing anything. Nothing screws things up worse than having a great idea added to a game half way through it's life cycle and then making it mandatory for play. While you're at it remember to fire the first guy that says every class needs to be balanced equally with each other at every level, and then everyone that brings it up again after that. The classic D&D experience was full of unbalanced things and nobody cared, it was part of the fun. People played their characters then instead of these horribly optimized min/maxed things they use for their tactical combat game they call D&D these days. Also, some randomness is a good thing.

Point Seven- Bring back the OGL or something at least as liberal as it was. Get every other game company making product for your game again, it only makes sense, it increases your power and prestige in the marketplace when everything in the game shop says "requires 5th edition D&D to play", or has a D&D logo on it. Hell, give away the D&D license too, let other companies meet a more stringent quality control level and share their profits with you. Lucas does this with Star Wars video games, novels, comics, whatever, all it takes is hiring on a couple of people to make sure they aren't trying to print the adventure "Sex-Slaves of the Under-City" with a D&D logo on it, and if they do, you have the legal Death Star called Hasbro to back you up and destroy them

Point Eight- License official D&D miniatures from every manufacturer that wants to make them and can meet a decent level of quality control and make them all to the same scale and look like the pictures in the Monster Manual and other books, again, this could be done at no cost to you except making sure their product doesn't suck. It really doesn't matter if they are pre-painted plastic or resin or metal, as long as they meet your standard. The cost is all on them and they share the profits with you. They take the risk, you get the reward.

Point Nine- Bring back Dragon magazine as a real, print magazine. Seriously, and make it a real magazine that covers all of gaming again instead of a house organ. Back when D&D was big Dragon Magazine was the one thing that every gamer tried to get every month, players and DMs alike, it had something for everyone. But don't spend more than a third of your magazine space on previewing your own upcoming products, or doing tie-ins to recently released products, or reviewing your own products (unless you have an independent reviewer that's allowed to call you out on a suck product); cover everything in the RPG world, some board game love wouldn't hurt either and I guess I could live with card games getting some space every now and again too.

Point Ten- Don't fuck with us. You say you are going to listen, then listen. Right now you are all conciliatory, you want to re-unite the tribes under your banner. I know this is because you are weak and getting beaten in sales by Pathfinder. Your biggest competitors are your previous editions, that's why the OSR exists. I have spent more money on old TSR product in the last decade than I have on any D&D produced by WotC. If I buy new RPG product at all, my money usually goes to Kenzer & Company, the last time Wizards of the Coast got money for an RPG book from me it was $39.95 for the Saga edition core rules in 2007. I want to love D&D, not OSRIC, Pathfinder, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry or Adventures Dark & Dangerous or any other retro-clone, but you are not making it easy.

Point Eleven- Resurrect TSR. Just as an imprint, a separate division within Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast is a CCG manufacturer and it has the reputation as the company that killed TSR and D&D. TSR invented RPGs. Avalon Hill still gets to be a quasi-separate entity within your empire, and it is a good thing from the perspective that it gives a sense of continuity to the hobby of war gaming. Bringing back TSR would do the same thing I think for RPGs and it would be a show of good faith that you were going to take D&D seriously this time around.

Point Twelve- Release the PDF library of old editions of D&D again. Removing them from being able to be legally purchased made them only available illegally, you created a piracy problem that was almost non-existent by being draconian about piracy and insisting that everyone only play the current version of the game. I didn't need the PDFs for the most part, but I know a lot of people did, that said I would not hesitate to take illegally that which you made impossible to obtain legally if I felt I needed a module or a copy of a book I didn't have and could not find at a reasonable price in the secondary marketplace.

Now, down to nuts and bolts, I would like very much for them to put out a beginners boxed set. Not like the Pathfinder box, although, by all accounts, it is very nice. I want them to do something very much like Moldvay or Mentzer Basic. Simple. Doesn't require miniatures or tokens or a battle map; just dice, pencil, paper and imagination. I think race as class is a dead concept these days, killed by time out of favor if nothing else, so I won't try and push for that. This set should include a players book and a DMs book and a beginners module like B1 or B2 or both, it should also focus on dungeon exploration and the first few levels of play, maybe 1-5.

Follow that up with an Expert boxed set. Give new DMs advice on how to take the game out of the dungeon and into wilderness exploration. Include a module like X1 and a bare bones campaign setting, D&D's the Known World AKA Mystara by choice, my reasoning I'll get to later. This should cover levels 6-15 maybe. Add in a few more modular optional rules, for more granularity if the players and DMs want to add them.

Concurrent with the release of the Expert set, I'd release the Advanced D&D Monster Manual. Every monster in it would be 100% compatible with the B/X sets, they would just have a little extra rules crunch to them that wasn't yet explained. More monster choices are always welcomed. This would probably end year one of 5th edition D&D.

Next add a Master boxed set, obviously by the time you are DMing for characters that are this level, you are probably not a newbie DM anymore, but the game focus and scale has changed and there needs to be advice on how to handle this. More optional rules should be added here, including rules for mass combat and warfare, the governing of domains and the challenges they face and what else to do with higher level characters. Have it cover levels 16+

Maybe a few months after the release of the Master boxed set, I'd release the new AD&D Player's Handbook, it would have a couple more race options and a few more class options. This would probably be where I added an optional skill system, or expanded it if it was already in the game. This is the place to add 1/2 Elves, 1/2 Orcs and Gnomes as player races. I'm not fool enough to believe we can turn back the clock to limit Demi-Humans in either class or level, but I'd make specific mention as an optional rule that some specific campaign settings have specific rules regarding those things.

Probably concurrent with the release of the AD&D PH should be the Dungeon Master's Guide, and it should be a weighty tome filled with advice and tables and all manner of rules explanations and clarifications for the DM. Use the 1st edition AD&D DMG as a guide when designing it, every one since has been lacking. I hear the Pathfinder GM book is quite good though, so maybe you all should take a look at that too. Mostly it should reinforce for the DM that he is there to keep the game moving, if he can't find a rule or there is an argument about how a rule works, it is his job to be the final arbiter; to make the judgment. The DM is not against the players, but he isn't necessarily for them either.

From here you can have a fairly robust release schedule that will keep both the publisher and the consumers, us gamers, happy. For instance, every year we can release a new monster book, this can be done for a number of years just updating the already extant monsters in the D&D/AD&D canon from OD&D up through 4th Edition and including everything from the modules and BECMI/Cyclopedia. Updating classic modules for release in the new edition, you could do one of these a month and get years worth of sales. Battlesystem/Chainmail/Whatever-You-Want-To-Call-It the tactical miniature game will always have a market, particularly if it is integrated into the rules system as a method of handling large combats, and it will drive miniature sales; done properly this can be linked to a more mass scale combat system too and then you'll be able to sell army list books for different factions in different campaign worlds. Speaking of campaign worlds, you own a bunch of them and some of them are pretty damned popular, release a boxed set for each one of them. Run a column in Dragon magazine for your old TSR worlds. I think the ones with the biggest numbers of fans are Greyhawk, The Forgotten Realms and The Known World (Mystara), but that may be skewed by my OSR reading habits, re-release them in their classic forms with the new rules. Once those classic worlds are released, put out a hard cover book for them that will cover all the crunchy rules specifics of the campaign setting for people that really want to amp it up. Region books for campaign settings, like the D&D gazetteer series could keep you going for a while too. Race books could give us sub-races, racial classes, whatever. Class books that open up options for various classes and add prestige classes or sub-classes or kits or whatever you want to call them. Remember Players Option: Skills and Powers and Combat and Tactics? AD&D 2.5, something like that could add back in some of the crunchiness that 3rd & 4th edition fans want for their games, while leaving it optional for the rest of us. New books with more spells will always be welcomed too, so a spell compendium every so often would be cool I suppose, provided it didn't screw with the power curve. 2nd edition AD&D gave us all of those HR books too, now mostly they were not great, but the premise was good

Now what not to do, do not put a rule in a core book and then contradict it in a later release. That's why I said to make the entire system first. If you say that only Fighters can specialize with weapons, then don't let anyone else, even Fighter sub-classes do it, and don't give them an ability that mimics specialization with a different name. If you say in the core book that a Fighter can only specialize with one weapon, don't say in a later book that he can specialize under some circumstances with more than one. If you say that all of your martial classes are going to have their options covered in this one book, don't later release a book specifically for Rangers or Paladins. This applies, obviously, to every class and race. You should also keep to your production schedule for stuff, even if it doesn't look like it's going to sell well, you could always sell it as a PDF or print on demand, but people are going to be pissed if you said you were going to publish the "Kara-Tur Compendium" and you don't. Your word needs to be your bond if we are going to trust you again.

Follow this release schedule and between a monthly magazine, annual monster book releases, classic modules revamped for the new edition, new modules being written for the new edition, and presumably at least three campaign settings getting significant support through boxed sets, hardcover sourcebooks and gazetteers, the race and class books, historical sourcebooks, a possible line of army books for the associated miniature battle game, and more advanced player, and presumably, DM, option books I think that this could easily sustain profits through the entirety of the 5th edition D&D life cycle. Don't expect any love though if there's 5.5 in three years though of 6th edition is in less than a decade.

A wee blog post tonight

I am a little short of time to blog for the next week, because the kids are home from school for the week.

A bit of Garnia campaign recap: We have not played. Poor weather has canceled us now for several weeks in a row. That's the breaks when you live in Oswego county and it's winter. I have also consistently missed every SCA event I had planned in the same time period, it's as though the weather saves it's worst for the weekends.

Found items trove: Ashli found a tote stored in the shed out back that contained a veritable treasure trove of missing games. Avalon Hill's "Monsters Ravage America", "Blitzkrieg" and "Caesar's Legions"; Games Workshop's "Talisman" with a variety of it's supplements including the Dungeon and "Warrior Knights"; and good old TSR's "Great Khan Game" as well as the first "Star Wars Monopoly" from Parker Brothers. That tote should never have been stored outside of the house, and she didn't find the leather for strapping her new armor, but I am very pleased to see those games return. Now I just need to find the hiding place of all of my "Twilight 2000" and WEG "Star Wars" RPG stuff and I think I won't be missing anything anymore.

I have also been ruminating on a new house rule for my AD&D campaign: Variable damage based on class. I am thinking of dividing damage so a M-U does 1d4, 1d6 with two handed weapons, Thieves do 1d6/1d8, Clerics 1d8/1d10 and Fighters get 1d10/1d12. Strength bonuses naturally would still apply. Sub-classes use the damage dice of their parent class. It goes towards making Fighters the best fighters in the game. Going along with this rule is a two-weapon fighting rule. Fighting with two weapons you only roll one to hit, if you hit you roll your damage die twice and take the higher result. I have also considered a critical hit rule where if you roll a natural 20 and you need less than a 20 to hit then you move up a damage die type. I don't know if any of these rules are original as I read a lot of old school blogs. My thought here was to encourage diversity in weapon use, eliminate gamist weapon restrictions and to have a simple system.

I am also thinking through a way to eliminate armor and shield use restrictions, but I need to think on it some more before I debut it on the blog.

Hot topics today-

D&D4e makes collectible cards part of their game.

On the one hand I don't care because I don't play 4e. When the game was released I read through the PH and decided it wasn't for me, it had gone a little too far for my tastes from the game I grew up playing. So why should I care?

On the other hand, 4e is the new D&D, it is what people associate me and my hobby with, so I am getting tarred by it's brush. I never liked the collectible aspect of WotC's miniature line for the same reason I never liked CCGs- I like to know what I am buying and whether or not it'll be worth my money. I don't want to have to spend $7000 so I can get enough trolls for the encounter I had planned. Plus they'll all be the same troll mini, that bugs me. I like diversity in mini sculpts.

Also with CCGs there is always some jerk powergamer with more money than sense that builds the awesome deck of always win. You know what "Gamer" card game was awesome? Avalon Hill's Up Front (the Squad Leader card game). You know why? Aside from it's innovative design, you got all the cards when you bought the game. Sure there were expansions released later, but they just added new nationalities. Citadel's Combat Cards were fun too. Sure, they were basically just an advertisement for Warhammer in simple card game format, but if you bought a deck you could play and all the cards for the deck you bought were included.

Religion in RPGs.

Sure it is always there, omnipresent in D&D. A cleric in every party. But does religion ever matter? In my experience no. I have had some players that were really into playing their cleric as, say, a priest of Thor. All anti-giant and combat oriented, cool right? Sometimes. Sometimes it just doesn't work though, largely because, in my opinion, religion in D&D is by default Catholic. That means that being a serious heathen worshipper falls outside the scope of how the class feels. It really shouldn't, there is nothing mechanical about it, it's just that, as designed, the Cleric was supposed to be like a crusader knight. Later this was superceded by the Paladin, but every cleric is still Odo of Bayeux out there wielding a mace so as not to spill blood.

As a DM I have painstakingly created a realistic pantheon of gods and religious observances complete with holy days, based on my mad anthropology and history skillz, only to have it be completely ignored as essentially campaign world flavor text. Helpful for me as DM to set the stage, not so important to the players unless there is a plot hook embedded in the harvest festival. Even clerics (usually) seem less than interested in the day to day, season to season rituals of their religion.

Why is this? I think it probably has to do with the increased secularization of our society. Nobody I play with now or have played with regularly in the past is terribly religious, so they probably don't think about it often.

Missed my anniversary

I missed my one year anniversary with this blog.

For a recap- this blog has covered 3 separate campaigns in the course of 1 year.

First was an AD&D1 campaign set in my own world of Garnia that lasted four or five sessions before ending abruptly in the middle of what was most likely the final combat encounter of the adventure when my wife Mona paused to make dinner. That was my post apocalyptic Garnia game. Oddly enough, we will be restarting this one next Sunday.

Second was a Rules Cyclopedia game where I figured the more rules light version of D&D might keep the game flow going for the kids, particularly John and Em. That didn't really seem to matter to them particularly. I held John's attention but not really Em's. Em died about half way through Castle Caldwell. Ashli died literally on the second to last hit of the last encounter because of a failed save vs. poison. John and Ash were both pretty psyched about actually finishing an adventure though. We planned to do the Castle Caldwell dungeons in the next session, but we never had another session of that campaign. I have really got no idea why that was, but it might have had something to do with either Ash getting ready to join the Army reserve or Ash training for SCA heavy weapons combat or both. We pretty much spent the summer getting in shape, training sword and shield and then moving back to my old property and cleaning it up and repairing things. After school started up again we were really busy all the time. John was in football, Ashli is in Marine Corps junior ROTC and National Honor Society and pretty active in both as well as being in the Army reserve, so we really had to wait for the weather to get cold before moving on to gaming again.

Third was my extremely short-lived Oriental Adventures/Ruins and Ronin hybrid campaign. I was looking forward to it for weeks and it really was my baby. I had been subtly prepping everyone on a diet of cool feudal Japanese stuff during our evening family TV viewing time. It lasted a total of three sessions, all in the month of December and we only made characters during the first. Two TPKs in two weeks apparently killed the enthusiasm for the mystic orient.

It's all OK though, in a year I have discovered the OSR which led me back to my gaming roots and my family and I have had some good times with gaming. This year seems to be well on track to having a D&D game every Sunday. I only wish I could connect with someone local that was into wargaming, all my old wargaming buddies have left the area. I haven't been able to get so much as a game of Axis & Allies going with the kids. By the time I was Em's age I was already experienced at getting my butt kicked at numerous AH and SPI games :)