The Obligatory Open Letter to Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) Regarding Dungeonand Dragon Magazines

Dear Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro,

Like most of your fans, I read your recent Ampersand column where your revealed some of what we have in store for us this year with regard to your Dungeons and Dragons line of products. There were some things that I liked -- Heroes of Shadow is going to be a hard back -- and there were some things that were disappointing -- the end of miniatures sales -- but I was grateful that you gave us some hints as to what are going on.

I understand that you are a corporation and as such have to worry about things like Net Present Value and Return on Investment. I know that you want the best for the product line for all stakeholders -- investors, employees, and consumers -- and that this can lead to some decisions that consumers may find confusing. I also understand that you are dealing with the changing modes of product delivery that are emerging in the new century. I know that you value me as a fan, but that as a publicly traded company you cannot always tell me everything that is going on.

When you let the Paizo license to publish Dragon and Dungeon magazines expire, it disappointed a lot of people. I wasn't as shocked. After all, Paizo had been positioning themselves as a competitor in this particular market segment and it isn't really good business practice to give an emerging competitor more money. I was also impressed with your initial digital offerings. Over the past couple of years there have been inconsistent months, but that is true of any magazine. I would like to see more published submissions and less staff writing, but I wonder if the internet (and companies like Open Design) haven't diluted the pool of possible quality submissions. There are some excellent gaming companies, and gaming support companies releasing products and that has to affect the number of submissions you are receiving.

I also have to say that with the focus on adapting your online content delivery model, which included your recent cancellation of the online version of Dungeon and Dragon magazine, I wonder if you aren't overlooking an opportunity.

I think it is important that you generate revenue and provide content for gamers, and I am perfectly content to have that content delivered through your website absent the magazines themselves as digital Wizards products. Over the past two years, Dungeon and Dragon behaved less like magazines and more like web content updates as it was. You have the numbers on single article vs. issue downloads and I am sure made a rational decision based on that data. Digital products work differently than print ones. With a print product, you get everything at once. With a digital one, you update it continuously. I can see favoring digital over print, or "print behavior" digital. So I fully understand why Wizards will no longer be collecting Dungeon and Dragon articles into "digital issues."

That doesn't mean I don't have a recommendation. I do.

While it would be foolishness of the highest order to license the two magazines back to Paizo, a major competitor, have you considered licensing Dungeon and Dragon magazines to another provider? I think that Goodman Games or Open Design could do a bang up job producing the magazines as print magazines. Licensing them out again wouldn't affect your bottom line, we'll still subscribe to DDI with its product offerings. I'm liking how the new Web Based Character Builder is developing -- it isn't "there" yet, but I love where it is heading and can see how well it is integrating into your other tools. The official updates adventures and rules on your website will be read regularly by me and other subscribers to your online service whether or not the content areas are called Dungeon and Dragon.

So let someone else use those names to publish magazines that support your material. Let fans submit to a company that is more agile and "closer" to the customer. As hard as you try, as a major corporation we'll always feel distant from you. We'll love your products and your employees, but most of management will be alien to us. Let the magazines find a new home that is friendly to you, and that can do some grassroots promotion for you in ways that a large corporation cannot.

Just an idea.

I'm looking forward to seeing your upcoming products this year and from what I've read of the "Mistwatch" article I'm happy that you've moved the Nentir Vale Gazetteer into the digital world.

Christian Lindke

In Memory of Robert E Howard -- Jan 22, 1906 to June 11, 1936

When I saw the first Conan movie (1982) I had never heard of Robert E Howard. Even after that movie inspired me to purchase a couple of Conan paperbacks at the local paperback exchange, the name of Conan's creator was unknown to me as the books I purchased were of the pastiche variety. It wasn't until the Christmas after I had seen the film when my parents bought me the Dungeon Master's Guide and I read Gary Gygax's famous "Appendix N" that I remember encountering the name. I quickly found copies of Conan stories that were written by Howard, though the editions also contained some "co-written" stories, and I could instantly see a difference between the dark prose of Howard and the more juvenile writing of the imitators. There was something more to the Howard stories (as I have written before). They weren't the immature wish fulfillment tales of a lusty and violent young man in a loincloth of some of the imitators. Contrary to the Schwarzenegger portrayal, Howard's Conan was cunning, quick witted, joyful and somber.

It wasn't long before I was hunting down everything I could find written by Howard. Eventually, I stumbled upon my favorite Howard character Solomon Kane. The wrathful puritan's tales combined horror and action in a way that sparked my imagination.

In recent years, I have read a good deal of Howard's fiction as more publishers release collections of his writings. Recently, I have been paging through Del Rey's The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard and came across a story that is wonderfully Poe-esque. In honor of Howard's 105th birthday, here is a sample of "The Touch of Death."

Old Adam Farrel lay dead in the house wherein he had lived alone for the last twenty years. A silent, churlish recluse, in his life he had known no friends, and only two men had watched his passing.

Dr. Stein rose and glanced out the window into the gathering dusk.
"You think you can spend the night here, then?" he asked his companion.
This man, Falred by name, assented.
"Yes, certainly. I guess it's up to me."
"Rather a useless and primitive custom, sitting up with the dead," commented the doctor, preparing to depart, "but I suppose in common decency we will have to bow to precedence. Maybe I can find some one who'll come over here and help you with your vigil."
Falred shrugged his shoulders. "I doubt it. Farrel wasn't liked -- wasn't known by many people. I scarcely knew him myself, but I don't mind sitting up with a corpse."
Dr. Stein was removing his rubber gloves and Falred watched the process with an interest that almost amounted to fascination. A slight, involuntary shudder shook him at the memory of touching these gloves -- slick, cold, clammy things, like the touch of death.

The story proceeds from this opening to a perfectly rewarding Twilight Zone style resolution. The tone has been set.

I often wonder at what tales Howard would have written had he lived beyond the age of 30. Sadly, we can only speculate.

Interactive Gamma World Character Sheet and How Even When They Do Some Thing Awesome WotC Drops the Communication Ball

One of the best games of 2010 was Wizards of the Coast's latest edition of Gamma World. The game not only demonstrated how adaptable the 4th Edition D&D rules were to new settings, it also ably demonstrated how easy those rules are to learn. I have raved about Gamma World in the past, discussed how it makes an excellent superhero game with very little modification, and included it in my top ten games of 2010.

Wizards of the Coast has done a bang up job with the game, provided excellent follow up products, and allowed for an engaged fan base to create aids and material for the game on their boards.

Oh...they also created an excellent interactive character sheet that can make characters for the game that is fully updated to include the latest supplement.

You might have missed the article announcing the tool. I know I did. I found it one day when rifling through the site as I am wont to do from time to time.

The character sheet was released online on 12/21/2010, right about the time that Wizards became very quiet about their plans for 2011 and when products were falling off of their Product Schedule.

There was little fan fare and the fan base was spending so much time scrutinizing every Twitter post by Wizards employees in speculation regarding the fate of D&D. So much so that they missed this awesome tool. Fans have every right to complain about the new Online Digital Character Creation tool, but they have no excuse to have missed this spot where Wizards got it exactly right.

Well...exactly right except for the effective communication part.

The product isn't behind the pay wall. It includes all the character types from both rules booklet and it's web based without the need for unique plug-ins. It's exactly what players of Gamma World need...

Okay, it doesn't save the characters and isn't downloadable, but I don't care. It's awesome and I can make 20 Gamma World characters in less than three minutes.

I wish they had promoted it a little more boldly.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG in Playtest Phase

This November Goodman Games will be releasing their Dungeon Crawl Classics role playing game. Goodman Games describes the game as "an OGL system that crossbreeds Appendix N with a streamlined version of 3E." I have enjoyed reading the Dungeon Crawl Classics line of adventures that Goodman has published, and will be purchasing the game when it comes out.

One of the things I find most interesting about the game is that it will be using all the "weird" Zocchi dice -- like the 24 sided die. It reminds me of my friend Ron's idea to create an rpg that only used 12 sided dice for resolution. His reason for the idea? He liked d12s. Apparently the folks at Goodman Games like the "weird" dice, and incorporating them into game play sounds plain fun.

The game is currently in playtest.

I am envious of all those who are playtesting the game. I'll just have to pre-order it and count the days.

BTW, this book has a cover I can appreciate.

In My Mailbox Today -- The Wildside Press Robert E. Howard Reader

For the past few months I had contemplated purchasing The Robert E Howard Reader from Wildside Press. I have purchased some of their Howard publications in the past, in particular Gates of Empire and have been quite happy with the purchases. Wildside is one of the many excellent smaller SF/F publishers and are the current publisher of Weird Tales, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine and Adventure Tales.

What struck me as particularly interesting about the Reader was its ecumenical approach to Howard scholarship. The book features writings about Howard from Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Robert M. Price, and the pariah of many modern Howard fans L. Sprague de Camp. In fact, the book is dedicated to de Camp (I can see James at Grognardia cringing as I write this).

As much as I disagree with de Camp's analysis of Howard's psyche as pure psychobabble, I have always admired his promotion of Howard's work and I was impressed that the Reader included and acknowledged him.

There was only one thing that kept me from ordering the book day one...

It has a horrible cover! It's worse than a Baen books cover, and that's not easy folks. What would your average plane/bus/train passenger think I was reading if they saw it?

I finally overcame my hesitation. After all, if I can admit to being a Hellcats fan how bad can walking around with this book be?

Looking at the contents, I am impressed so far. There is just one thing that keeps grating against my nerves. In the introduction of the book, and on the back cover, it says "A century after Robert E. Howard's death, it is evident that this amazing Texan achieved something unique in the annals of American literature." Conceptually, I agree with the sentence. Factually, I am irked. Robert E. Howard died in 1936 -- 75 years ago. The book was written for publication in 2007 -- you can still buy the author's Lulu version -- so it is intended as a Howard Centennial book. This is great, and I'm sure the writer meant "a century after Robert E. Howard's birth," but the lack of editing/review irks me.

I'll let you know how the book holds up as soon as I can get my mental nitpicker to take a nap.

Adventure Gamebooks as RPGs Part 1 -- Fighting Fantasy's Warlock of Firetop Mountain

Inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and Tunnels & Trolls role playing games, as well as the Choose Your Own Adventure series of interactive novels, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone released the first of their trend setting series of Fighting Fantasy Adventure Gamebooks The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in 1982. The first American edition of Warlock was published in 1983. The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were the first time that a publication featured both a fully usable set of rules for role playing game play along with a fully interactive solo narrative adventure.

Flying Buffalo was the first company to publish "solo adventures" for role playing games -- and there are quite a few excellent adventures in their Tunnels and Trolls line -- but their adventures required a copy of the Tunnels and Trolls role playing game in order to actually "play" them rather than just read them. Given that some of the early T&T solos were fairly straightforward dungeon crawl style adventures, they play significantly better than they read. They are filled with humor, but lacked an extensive story. This was the result of the adventures' format and not the skill of the writers. Later T&T adventures become more narrative as the marketplace developed and the format adapted to enable more in depth stories to be told. It should also be added that Flying Buffalo's adventures were primarily written for "existing" gamers who were familiar with D&D's genre conventions -- as they stood in the mid to late 70s.

The Choose Your Own Adventure series had entertaining interactive narratives aimed at younger readers. They featured exciting adventures where readers could travel through time, explore vast wildernesses, or investigate haunted houses. They could also be extraordinarily frustrating as certain narrative paths ended with annoying authorial fiat. When/if the reader encountered certain villains, they were doomed. The books satisfied the puzzle solving obsessions of young minds, but the lack of any game rules made the books feel less "alive" than they otherwise could have.

The Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks took the best elements of T&T's solos and combined them with the puzzle solving fun of the Choose Your Own Adventure series. The books sparked a mini-craze that lasted until the early 90s.

The internet is full of fan sites dedicated to the memory and recent resurgence of the Fighting Fantasy series and the Gamebook genre in general. Let me just say that I am a big fan, but that the purpose of the "Adventure Gamebooks as RPGs" series of posts -- at least I hope it will be a series -- is to look at the rules in the gamebooks themselves to see how they work as a rules set.

I hope to answer the following question in each post, "How much fun would this particular rules set be as the foundation for a campaign?"

I am starting with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for a couple of reasons. It was the first book of its kind, and was thus an innovator in the field. It also eventually inspired two separate complete rules sets for group table top gaming -- Fighting Fantasy Introductory Roleplay and Advanced Fighting Fantasy which has a new version coming from Arion Games later this year. These stand alone rules sets will be reviewed as a part of the series at a later date.

How good are the rules in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for a regular table top role playing game?

THE RULES

The rules set in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is very simple to understand and implement, perfect for the new gamer. The game uses two mechanical systems to resolve the challenges facing characters. An opposed roll system is used to resolve combat, and a statistic test is used to determine the success of non-combat actions and one in combat action.

STATISTICS

Each character is rated in three categories: Skill, Stamina, and Luck. These statistics form the "core three" for the entire Fighting Fantasy line. While future products add additional statistics or use a skill system to enhance the statistics, Warlock uses these exclusively.

SKILL represents a character's fighting skill and his/her physical capabilities. Heroes have a rating of 7 to 12 in this statistic, while creatures/non-heroic characters potentially range from 2 to 12. The rules section of the book describes SKILL as a character's ability in combat, but it becomes clear as one plays through the adventure that SKILL is a measurement of the character's competence at all physical tasks. It is a measurement of the characters combat ability, strength, and agility.

STAMINA represents how much damage a character can absorb before dying. If a character's STAMINA is reduced to zero, the adventure is over and the player has been defeated. Heroes have a rating of 14 to 24 in this area. Given that successful attacks in Warlock typically do 2 points of stamina damage, this means that heroes can typically be injured between 7 and 12 times during an adventure before they perish.

LUCK represents how lucky a character is. In many ways this is a catch all statistic used to determine if the hero can avoid some otherwise awful fate. It can be used outside of combat to determine of a character stepped on a trap, or during combat to do more/take less damage from an attack.

COMBAT MECHANICS

Combat in Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks is highly abstract, but easy to learn. The player rolls two six-sided dice and adds that result to their SKILL value. The player then rolls two six-sided dice and adds that result to the SKILL value of the player's opponent. The character with the higher result successfully attacks the other combatant and damages him/her. If the result is a tie, then no character lands a blow. As an opposed system that relies on rolls that create a bell shaped probability curve, even a difference of only one point in skill makes a significant difference whether one opponent can harm another. Kit has a nice introductory guest post at Giant Battling Robots discussing the impact of relative advantage that I'd love to see expanded.

This is one of the areas where the cracks of the game system show when attempting to translate the game from a Gamebook environment to a table top environment. The Fighting Fantasy method of generating skill (roll 1d6 and add that to 6) results in some characters with widely different abilities. This can lead to player frustration.

For example, let's say that David has a character with a SKILL of 9 and Phil has one with a SKILL of 11. Let's imagine that their characters are attacked by two Orcs who each have a SKILL of 5. David would have an 84.1% chance of hitting his Orc, while Phil would have a 94.6% chance of hitting his. At first glance, this doesn't seem like such a huge disparity due to the fact that David and Phil are both significantly more SKILLED than their opponents. A 10% difference from a SKILL two points higher seems like it shouldn't bother the players too much, but let's change the parameters a bit. Let's give Phil and David an opponent with a SKILL of 11. In this case, David has a 23.92% chance of hitting the foe while Phil has a 44.37% chance of striking the opponent. The 10% advantage has shifted to a 20% advantage. This is because the differential in target number falls within the steep portion of the bell curve meaning that a +1 penalty can have a significant impact. If the two players were to fight one another, David would still have a 23.92% chance of striking Phil where Phil would have a 66.44% chance of hitting David.

If the system used a linear die -- like a d12 -- for combat resolution, the system would be more fair to the character with a lower SKILL. As it is, it takes a good deal of luck for a character with even two SKILL points less than his opponent to be victorious.

TASK RESOLUTION

In Warlock, everything from bashing down doors to checking to see if a character can successfully balance on a beam is resolved by rolling two six-sided dice and comparing that result to the character's SKILL. LUCK checks are resolved using the same system with the addition that a character's LUCK is reduced by one each time it is checked (though the LUCK can return as the character performs certain tasks successfully).

This system suffers from some of the same downfalls as the combat mechanics when used for group play. A character with a 11 SKILL will succeed 91.67% of the time if the character must roll "less" than SKILL to succeed, where the character with a 9 SKILL will succeed 72.22% of the time, and a character with a 7 will succeed 41.67%.

One of the key pitfalls that game masters, and one imagines game designers, have to consider when running/designing a game is how the players will feel in comparison to other players. Aaron Allston's excellent Strike Force sourcebook lists rules for making sure your players don't have any fun and one of these rules is to make sure that your player's are never the best at anything. Inversely, one might imagine that one could increase the likelihood that their player's do have fun by making sure that each player is good at something that no one else is good at. Since SKILL is so central to the success or failure of a character in combat and in task resolution, players can quickly become frustrated with the discrepancies in character performance. Characters with higher stats are significantly better than their comrades. This is exacerbated by the fact that SKILL and LUCK have a linear distribution in generation, but a standard distribution in action. On a roll of one six-sided die, every number has an equal chance of coming up. This isn't true when rolling two.

The Fighting Fantasy system is easy to learn, quick to play, but can lead to certain players dominating the group storytelling. This is not typically a good thing in a role playing session/campaign. Every character wants some time in the spotlight.

RECOMMENDATIONS

My recommendations are to separate SKILL into three categories: COMBAT ABILITY, PHYSICAL STRENGTH, AGILITY. Once this is done, you can move to a "point buy" system for the statistics rather than random attribute determination. I would think that giving the players 9 points to spend, which are added to values of 6 in each category, would be sufficient. That way if a character wants to be excellent at combat, he/she suffers in other areas where other characters can shine. Note that this recommendation is based solely on the rules as presented in Warlock and ignores rules from later books and the role playing games.

I might also recommend using a d12 for resolving tasks and conflicts. This would make penalties easier to determine for the GM. A -1 penalty to a check has a uniform meaning in a linear resolutions system where it has a dynamic nature in one with a standard distribution. If you prefer the standard distribution, that is fine, just understand that a -1 penalty to a character with an 11 isn't as significant as for one with an 8 in a statistical area. You can see why in the chart above.

Warlock lacks a magic system which means that its use is limited to low magic settings, but that isn't a disadvantage mechanically.

Overall, I think that the game has enough systems to handle most role playing necessities, but that the statistics need to be expanded to make the underlying mechanics more useful. All you really need in an rpg is a combat resolution system and a task resolution system, but I think that the task resolution system needs to be slightly more granular to take into account different areas of expertise. The ability to lift a weight is very different from the ability to walk a tightrope after all. The game would need more "stats" if it were to be translated to table top. As it stands, it is excellent for the adventure for which it was written.

New Season of "Gold" Lives Up to Its Namesake

Though I am a fan of role playing games and sf/f fiction, it was difficult for me to get the proper suspended disbelief mindset to truly appreciate the first season of "Gold -- The Webseries that Does Double Damage." I even titled my review "The Series that Does Half Damage" as a reflection of how incredible -- by which I mean non-credible -- I found the narrative of the story. I just couldn't buy into the background world rules.

It wasn't that the concept of "professional role players" was new, Steven Barnes and Larry Niven wrote an excellent series of novels that contained an incarnation of the concept. I think it was the representation of what professional gaming looked like that rubbed me as somehow false. Though the show wasn't able to cloud my most skeptical critical eye, I still found myself deeply engaged by the acting and the character based interactions of the actual story taking place.

By the time I first watched the series, they had already announced that they would be streaming a sequel at the end of 2010. I eagerly awaited the sequel, hoping that it would expand upon the strengths of the original series while leaving the more problematic aspects behind. My hopes have been more than exceeded with the new season "Night of the Zombie King."

The first season of "Gold" was the tale of a "fallen athlete" trying to pull his life back together to compete on the national stage, and as such it felt somewhat hollow at times. "Night of the Zombie King" starts with a much more mundane premise. A group of friends get together to relive their days of gaming glory and fun. "Zombie King's" premise is one has verisimilitude and nostalgic power for those of us who have been gaming for decades, and who have fond memories of playing games with friends. Where attempting to emotionally related to a professional gamer is an act of pure fiction, empathizing with someone awkwardly re-connecting with old friends comes naturally.

"Night of the Zombie King" is in all ways an improvement on the first season. As before, the actors in the series provide solid performances, but David Nett and company have found a way to make the game a more natural part of the story's environment. Additionally, by making the interpersonal conflicts of the story less grandiose, "Night of the Zombie King" has managed to make the relationships more emotionally powerful.

"Night of the Zombie King" has the same kind of mournful celebratory quality of a film like Fandango. People who thought they would never see each other again meet to finish telling an interactive story they once started together. Watching each episode brings to mind memories of the adventures I have had with my friends over the years. I can still see vividly the time one of my favorite characters faced "Beast-Man" from "The Masters of the Universe" toy line in a friends home brew adventure, the time a player character was intentionally swallowed by the Tarrasque because it was easier to hit the creature from inside its stomach, or the time a friend's superhero character (a character who thought it was the archangel Gabriel) in an attempt to intimidate a small time thug managed to manifest his aura of fear so strongly it cowed all of Europe.

These are the reasons we game, and "Night of the Zombie King" is about those moments.



BTW, if you watch the interview for their DVD, you'll see that it was filmed at my local game store.