D&D Next: What Replaying Warhammer Quest Taught Me Regarding Nostalgia, Fun, and Expectations

For the past twelve years, I have been playing roleplaying and board games with roughly the same group of people.  We have a couple of core members and have had a couple people wander in and out of our group, but by and large it is the same group of players.  The group has a high level of commitment from the players, so much so that one of the group regularly plays via Skype even though he has moved 6 hours away.

While the majority of our game play consists of two D&D campaigns -- one 3.5 and the other 4e -- I like to bring in some board game play, playtesting, or one-shot adventures from time to time.  Sometimes this corresponds with one of the unwritten rules of our group.  For example, when someone new joins the group at some point we will arrange for that player to experience some Moldvay/Cook Basic D&D goodness.  It is one of the two gaming rituals our group has. 

The first -- much to Steven Schend's dismay -- is that all new members of our group must watch the video that accompanied the TSR Dragon*Strike game.  Players who can endure that video and laugh will likely fit in well with our gaming group.  If you haven't experienced the 33 minutes that is the Dragon*Strike video, it's kind of like The Gamers only it wasn't trying to be a comedic look at the hobby.  As I mentioned earlier, the other is that that player will eventually play in a Moldvay/Cook era adventure.

The first time I ran a Basic D&D adventure for the group, I used the Keep on the Borderlands module.  The players prepared themselves for adventure and started off toward the Caves of Chaos.  On the way, they encountered a mysterious hermit.  Within 5 minutes -- real time -- the entire party had been killed by the hermit and his pet mountain lion. 

Last year, I ran another session.  This time I used one of the "Black Box" era modules, The Eye of Traldar.  I selected the adventure because the black box era modules were more narrative and story oriented than some of the early D&D adventures, and because I thought it would be less lethal than Keep.  The player's rolled up their characters, a fighter, a cleric, an elf, and a magic user, and we discussed their character backgrounds.  As this was a black box adventure and it took place in Karameikos, I pulled out my Karameikos Gazetteer and we added backgrounds for all the characters and created a back story describing why this band of merry adventurers were adventuring together.  This done, we began the first encounter of the adventure and rolled initiative.  Within seconds the magic user was dead, and the other characters started to worry.  The magic user's player experienced immediate and serious disappointment.  He had taken the time -- about half an hour -- to come up with a background, only to see that character killed off in a random fashion.

Needless to say, this was not a very satisfactory experience.  It's one of the reasons that, as much as I love the Mystara setting, I don't run a Moldvay/Cook campaign.  Character death can come seemingly at random, and that can be a serious downer for some players.

A similar thing happened three weeks ago when I pulled Warhammer Quest off the shelf and set it up for the group.  We were down two players, so the four of us made for a perfect WQ party.  We set up the game, made our characters, and started our cooperative dungeon crawl.  At first, we were having a good time.  We were all laughing at some of the absurd encounters and marveling at how hard the game was.  We were also experiencing some pretty bad rolls.  Then we hit one hallway and the world fell apart.  Our wizard rolled a one in the power phase, creating an additional foe, on repeated occasions.  We were swarmed by hostiles, and our Elf was brutally murdered.  It was a disappointing end to what had been two-hours of enjoyment until that point. 

Like The Eye of Traldar and Keep on the Borderlands, Warhammer Quest is an adventure game with a default setting of Hard.  In fact, it seems that this is the default setting for many of the games of the early rpg era.  No one would say that Call of Cthulhu is a storytelling game of heroic achievement and guaranteed success.  Paul, over at blog of holding, has a recent post describing the design philosophy and play philosophy of some designers during that era.  To quote him:

 In OD&D, there's no guarantee that things are fair. One of Gary's and Rob Kuntz's favorite stories, says Mornard, was Clark Ashton Smith's The Seven Geases, in which (spoilers ahead) the hero survives a horrible death at the hands of seven different monsters only to die meaninglessly slipping from a ledge. That was one of the seminal texts of D&D, said Mornard, and one of the stories it was designed to model. "The story that D&D tells," said Mike, "is the story of the world. Heroes aren't invincible."

The thing is, that I don't really like that kind of game.  I don't like whimsical and meaningless deaths for player characters.  This is especially true for games where character creation is a long process where significant narrative choices have been made.  The player quickly becomes attached to the character, and to have that character "meaninglessly slipping from a ledge" is unsatisfactory to most players.

Geoff Engelstein describes why this is true in a recent article on The Dice Tower podcast entitled Colonoscopies and Game Design.  In the podcast, Geoff discusses the psychology of pain and how people who experience pain -- say the pain of a colonoscopy -- will evaluate how much pain they felt by taking an average of the most pain they felt and how they feel at the end of an event.  If the moment of most intense pain comes at the end of a event, or play of a game, then the experience will be negative.  If the end of an experience is pleasant -- even though the moment of highest pain was the same or worse -- the over all experience will be viewed as a positive one.  It's funny how the psychology of the mind works isn't it.

What this means for those old games where death comes easy and the default setting is Hard, is that whimsical death's can still occur but that they should occur as part of a process and not as an ending.  It also means that if whimsical death is a possibility, one should not be encouraged to come up with detailed backgrounds for characters as those are a part of the playing process too.  If 30 minutes of game play are taken up with coming up with a background, and those 30 minutes are followed by 30 seconds in which your character is brutally cut down, then that isn't a very satisfactory experience.

Whatever direction D&D Next goes, I think that it needs to keep in mind this part of human psychology.  If death is to be whimsical, then find a way to make death a middle part of the process.  Encourage multiple characters like Paranoia or make character creation so quick that new characters can be inserted instantly.  You won't get very "narrative" games with rich character development, but you might get some fun ones where players vent out their own secret desires.

Personally, I hope that D&D Next falls somewhere between 3.x and 4e with regard to ease of death.  One might add more specific "knock out" rules, or rules for defeat without death, but I would be disappointed to see a return to a game set on Hard.  Those already exist, as do games on Easy.  I want to see a game set on Normal where death is a possibility, but where it isn't the only or primary signal of a failed endeavor.

AD&D's Appendix N? What About the Moldvay Appendix?

As James Maliszewski-- author of the excellent science fiction role playing game Thousand Suns -- has pointed out, the Appendix N that Gary Gygax provided on page 224 of the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide has "now become a widely used shorthand for the literary origins of RPGs."  James' site often includes discussions of the appendix, its influence on the early days of the hobby, and from time to time he even reviews books and authors featured in the Appendix. 

Given that he has taken the time to review the Carnelian Cube, a book that fellow Appendix N advocate Erik Mona has found "wanting," it is my hope that James will someday review the Kothar series by Gardner Fox.  Though if that doesn't happen I might just find the time to do so.  Having endured a couple of Lin Carter's Thongor books, I figure they cannot be much worse.  That said, Carter at least has the virtue of being one of the best editors in SF/F history even though his Thongor stories fall very short of the best of Sword and Sorcery fiction.

If I were to say that the influence of Appendix N extended beyond the gaming table and that many of the works therein are also seminal works of Science Fiction and Fantasy, I don't think there would be many who disagree.  The Appendix includes luminaries like Leigh Brackett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.R.R. Tolkien, Manly Wade Wellman, and Robert E. Howard -- and many others beside.  But the list is also incomplete.  There is no listing for Clark Ashton Smith, for example. 

But this is not the only list of recommended reading that the Dungeons & Dragons games have provided their readers.  No indeed.  The Erik Mona edited Pathfinder roleplaying game, or as I call it D&D Golarion, has it's own Appendix 3 which features a list of recommended reading.  It is a longer list than Gygax's, and a good one.

My own favorite "Appendix N" is a combination of the "inspirational source material" provided by Tom Moldvay on page B62 of the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons Basic and in the module X2 Castle Amber.  While others may have based their youthful Fantasy purchases on Appendix N, I based mine almost entirely on the Moldvay list.  It should be noted that Tom Moldvay was assisted in the creation of his list by Barbara Davis who was  Children's Librarian at the Lake Geneva Public Library.  Davis eventually became the Library Director from 1984 to 1996.  I don't know where she is now, but I'd like to thank her for the many hours of joy the list she worked on has provided many young people.

Maliszewski has already written a brief comment about how the Moldvay list differs from the Gygax one, and argues that it represents a shift from material that influenced the design of the game to a list that might provide inspiration or entertainment for those who play the game.  To quote James, "Whereas Gygax's list was a list of the specific books and authors who influenced him in creating the game -- and are thus a window into how he saw the game -- Moldvay's list is a generalized quasi-academic survey of fiction and non-fiction that might hold some interest to players of D&D."

His language is strong, and as much as he demurs from the quote being used as a "this list is better than the other list" statement, it seems clear to me that the use of the term "quasi-academic" is somewhat loaded.

Let's just say that James and I hold similar, but not exact positions on the lists.  I agree that the Gygax list is a specific list that influenced him in creating the game.  I think the list was also one which he thought would appeal to people who were currently playing D&D.  That is to say, adults.  When AD&D was first published, the game was just beginning to escape from college campuses and niche SF/F reading circles and into the mainstream.  The Moldvay list, on the other hand, is written for a generation of emerging players.  It is written for the young. 

Both lists include some overlap -- Fritz Leiber, Robert Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and J.R.R. Tolkien.   But Moldvay's list is divided into many sections. 

There is Fiction: Young Adult, which includes Lloyd Alexander, L Frank Baum, and Ursula Le Guin. 

There is Non-Fiction: Young Adult, which includes Olivia Coolidge's Legends of the North.

There is Fiction: Adult Fantasy with Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett, Avram Davidson, E.R. Eddison, Heinlein, Jack Vance, Karl Edward Wagner, and a host of others.

Adult Non-Fiction includes Jorge Luis Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beasts and Thomas Bullfinch.

In most ways, the Moldvay list is inclusive of Appendix N.  There are only four authors Moldvay's list leaves out that are in the Gygax list.  These are Frederic Brown, August Derleth,  Margaret St. Clair, and Stanley Weinbaum. 

If you want a wonderful overview of the Sword and Sorcery field, I would argue that you should start with the Moldvay list and add the four authors that Moldvay excluded.  If your primary mission is to see the books that influenced Gygax, stick to Appendix N.

Both are good lists, but I still prefer the Moldvay.  That attachment probably stems from an overall affection for the Moldvay Basic Set, but...

Gaming and the Screenwriting/Cartooning Widower #1 -- Meeting the Cartoonist

A few years ago, my wife Jody and I decided to attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon while riding a rocket aided motorcycle.  Okay, that's not exactly true.  We decided to attempt something even more impossible.  We decided that Jody was going to become a successful screenwriter and cartoonist.  Jody applied to USC's prestigious School of Cinema and Television, and we counted the days until the rejection letter would arrive and shatter all our dreams.

That day didn't come.  Instead, we received a very large envelope inviting Jody to attend the school.  We were elated, but also quite amazed by the situation.  I think Jody best described our emotional state when we first arrived on the USC campus in order to get her a student ID card.  She said, "But Christian...no one actually gets to go to school here.  This place is for remarkable people."

There was no irony in her tone when she made the statement.  She believed it.  You see, Jody has a serious case of underestimating her own talents and worth.  In Champions/HERO System terms, Jody has around a 30 point psychological disadvantage in this regard.  On the plus side, she spent all 30 of these points on her various skills and talents. 

Last week, Jody started up a blog called "Are You Famous Yet?" where she has been sharing her thoughts and experiences as she navigates the mysterious pathways that make up the Entertainment industry, or as it is typically called in Los Angeles...The Industry.  I thought that I would spend some of my blogging time sharing some of my own experiences as a "Screenwriting/Cartooning Widower."  Jody's struggles and long hours would make for lonely days and evenings were it not for the fact that I am an avid gamer and a working graduate student.

Speaking of gaming, the idea for the title of this post and subsequent posts on the subject, come from an article in issue 54 of Steve Jackson Games' old gaming magazine The Space Gamer. 

When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Nevada, Reno it was a golden age for that schools Cartoons page.  There were two well done cartoon strips (one about college life and one about a bear), and one cartoon strip that was something quite special.  That special cartoon strip had a truly bizarre name.  It was called Nicnup, and it told the story of a group of young people as they encountered life's oddities.  To say it "told a story" is a bit of a misstatement.  It contained jokes which featured young people encountering life's oddities. 

I had no idea who drew the strip, but I read it religiously in every issue of The Sagebrush.  It was the primary reason I read the school's paper.  It was a great strip that seemed to be getting better every issue as the artist better learned the craft.  I had no idea who the artist was, only that this person was named Jody Lindke.  (For those of you wondering, I took my wife's last name.)

One day I was sitting watching NFL in the television room of one of the dorms, I was waiting to see my friend Rich, when I see this friendly looking young woman carrying her bicycle up to her room.  I quickly ask if she would like to watch the game with me and she said yes.  After taking her bike back up to the room, we watched the game and chatted.  Mostly, we chatted.  I was quite smitten by this young woman named Jody and made arrangements to chat with her again in the near future.  Several more discussions later, I was inviting her to play in a Champions superhero campaign that I was running for some other friends.  She asked what day we played and I told her Monday.  She said she would be delighted to come but that she had to make sure she met her deadline first.

"Deadline?...hmm...?"  The words sounded important, but I made no connection at the time.  It wasn't until after a couple of weeks playing that I finally figured it out.  Jody was running late for the game, so I walked up to her dorm room to see if she could make it and that was when I found out she was the illustrator of Nicnup.  I was surprised.  Here I have been the friend of the best cartoonist in the school paper for over a month, and I had no idea that Jody and Jody Lindke were the same person...even after hearing references to this mysterious "deadline" thing.  I guess I'm pretty dense.

Anyway, for the next few months Jody would either show up on time or be late as the muse hit her or she struggled through coming up with a new idea/joke and therein lies the root of screenwriting/cartooning widower-dom.  The creative muse.  Coming up with ideas is difficult, more so when you are trying to come up with an idea that has the potential to entertain millions of people -- quite a few more than the thousands she entertained with her cartoon strips.

In the years since graduating, Jody no longer plays in my gaming groups.  She likes the people I game with, she likes the hobby, but the time she needs for her creative efforts has multiplied a hundred fold.  When we were in college, I could count the number of times she had to stay up all night to finish a cartoon on my fingers and toes. 

In the time since, I have lost count of the number of all-nighters Jody has experienced in the advancement of her career.  But there is one that comes to mind more vividly than any other.  It was the first "mix-week" she experienced at USC.  Twice each semester, student films have their sound mixes completed in a mad dash cram called "mix week."  During this time, the sound designers, sound department, and TAs work for a full week without ever coming home.  Near as I can tell, they work the entire week without any kind of sleep whatsoever. 

The frantic nature of these weeks, as well as film school in general, made for a pretty lonely marriage experience.  Pre-film school, we were a couple who essentially dated every night and had massive movie marathons every weekend.  During film school, I was lucky to see Jody for more than 5 minutes on some days.  I imagine that this kind of grueling schedule could put a strain on a relationship, but it didn't strain ours.  I made sure to visit Jody on her campus as much as possible, and I had my gaming hobby to fill in the lonely hours while she put her nose to the grindstone.  I was working full-time and in a Grad program, but I was the one with "oodles" of idle time in comparison to Jody.  I never felt resentment that Jody "didn't want to spend time with me."  It was pretty clear every time that I saw her that she would much rather spend time with me, but the demands on her time were severe. 

I was also lucky that Jody didn't resent my gaming time.  Yes, there was some minor resentment for the tabletop gaming I got to do.  That was spending time with other people after all, but there was absolutely no resentment for the hours I spent playing Final Fantasy.  Or as Jody calls it, "the walk around on the very big map and do nothing game."

The key thing I had to focus on was to make sure that my gaming time lined up with her busy time, and that I was free as often as possible during her free time.  Let me stress that this free time was not a lot of time, and that whatever time there was had to be spent doing more than watching a 30 minute sit-com.  There was often a week's (or two) worth of discussion about the world.  There was the need for hugs and quality time.  I made every moment count, and I think I managed to let her know how deeply loved she is in my efforts to cram a weeks worth of marriage into 45 minutes.

Film school was good practice for Jody's time in the "Industry Agency" trenches.  Those were days when she not only worked long, but in an environment that isn't exactly conducive to self-esteem.

I learned a lot about marriage during film school, about what is really important.  Communication and letting your spouse know your care are vital.  When your spouse is working ridiculously hard, it is important to recognize the fact and to sympathize.  Don't think they are doing it because they want to be away from you.  That way lies madness.

Instead, pick up a book, a hobby, or a "long map game" to pass the time, and use that time to think about how you are going to maximize the little together time that you are going to have together.  May I recommend quick jaunts to Culver City or Monrovia for dinner, or a nice hike at Griffith Park, or a brisk walk on the beach. 

When your spouse is trying to get a paying gig in a creative field, it's important to remember to be the net/parachute.  Don't resent any work you have to do to support them, financially or emotionally.  Because your loved one is taking the rocket jump across Snake River Canyon and they are scared enough without having to worry about how things are going at home.

Reverb Gamers #14

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #14: What kinds of adventures do you enjoy most? Dungeon crawls,
mysteries, freeform roleplaying, or something else? What do you think that says about you?

My preferred game is something that crosses heavy roleplaying and a mystery. Our long running 3.5 D&D game is about urban investigators solving supernatural crimes for the city watch in Sharn. It's even inspired our 4e campaign about the same thing. In a roleplay/mystery I can develop my character and solve a puzzle simultaneousy. I like to tell stories about interesting characters and places but I love a good mystery. Mysteries in RPGs can be tricky though. If finding a clue is based on requiring specific steps be taken by the PCs the threads can go unpursued. Gumshoe does an interesting thing and guarantees that each scene reveals a clue but it's up to the players to role play how that find them. I think I may need to play more Gumshoe.

12-Sided Die: Should You Be Game for this New Webseries?

Earlier today, the team @12sideddie blasted the internet with a solicitation of their new gaming themed web series 12 Sided Die.

12 Sided Die is a web series directed by Daniel Murphy and written by Curtis Fortier that is aimed at the table top gaming community. According to the show's website, the show is:

A hilarious new web-series about romance, geeks, and graph paper.

Our hero: Curtis Foster, Permit Processor by day, Level Fourteen Wizard Warrior by night.

If theres one thing Curtis loves most on this Earth, it's playing a rousing game of "Swords and Swordsmen" with his friends Chris and Eric.

Sadly, the group is growing older... Eric is newly married, Chris is a father, and the time between games is growing larger with each passing day.

So, on their eve of their first game in over six months, when the stakes have never been higher, Curtis is convinced that nothing can get in his way.

Except, perhaps, a surprise distraction of his own: his neighbor Cynthia.

But is the show hilarious, and does it really capture geek romance?

The answer to this central question is maybe. The first episode of the series (embedded below) suffers from a significant dose of what I like to call "pilotitis." This is the slight awkwardness that many pilot episodes suffer from which fails to capture the full potential of the idea underlying the show, or the talent of the creators and performers of the show. A good historical example of pilotitis is Star Trek. The show's original pilot was pretty bad, but by the time they reworked the show for the second pilot the show's potential really shined through.

12 Sided Die has a good concept. It's a show about gamers and romance, but it is also a show about the difficulties of balancing a hobby with real life. Anyone who has played games, or had a passionate hobby, in their post-college/high school years understands how difficult in can be to find the proper balance in time to meet all your obligations and still find time for your hobbies. For example, I love playing board and role playing games. I also love running around the park with my wife and daughters, the allure of spending time with History and Mystery (our 3 1/2 year old twins) is a pretty significant obstacle to making time to play games. I am thankful that the girls really like the people who come over to game twice a month, and even more grateful that my friends like spending time with the girls. To be honest, if they weren't willing to let the girls "watch" us play it would be a deal breaker. History and Mystery would win out in the battle of hobby vs. family and which provides more joy. That said, my group does enjoy having the girls come around and the girls love to play with our "little men." It's that kind of tension, though other tensions as well, that underlie the dramatic/comedic conflicts of 12 Sided Die. Just add a dose of 30 something and single/looking for a relationship, and you've captured the show perfectly.

Back to the show's pilotitis. It leaps out at you from the first scene. The lighting during the play session in the opening is a distraction. The room looks unnaturally yellow, when it should be lit to look like a normally lit apartment. The problem is that they filmed a normally lit apartment, and normally lit apartments don't look like normally lit apartments on film. This scene is also a tad overacted. While Christopher Gehrman's over the top performance as the dungeon master can be forgiven, as he's playing an over the top dungeon master, Curtis Fortier's performance in this scene needs to be backed down a little. Not his "in character" performance, but his "I'm so excited about where the game campaign is going" performance, the same should be said of Eric Vesbit's performance in the scene as well. As the show progresses, the actors seem to fall into more natural rhythms and I don't see this being a problem in the long haul. It is just something that needs to be pointed out. As Hamlet would say:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue:but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

It should also be noted that the sound design is a bit off. There is an overuse of score, and the individual sound edits don't always match up with what I'm supposed to be hearing. This is particularly acute during a scene in which Curtis makes himself some "Strawberry Milk."

The show's strongest suit is in the story, it has a nicely done cliffhanger that is timed almost perfectly. This is a tale of a group who hasn't met to continue their game for almost 6-months given their current responsibilities, what happens when a new romance enters one of their lives? It's a nice touch, and well done. Kristina Lynn Bell is a nice choice for the romantic interest. I was a bit concerned with her introductory performance. Her acting to the audience "behind the fourth wall" started out a tad over the top, but by the end of the scene she won me over. The camera angles were bit off, but her performance really started to hit a sweet spot.

All of this can be written off as pilotitis, and I will certainly return for a second episode. The show as it stands did leave me wanting to see what happens next. It really left me wanting to see what happens next.   So...what happens next?!

But there was one thing that I couldn't quite write off as pilotitis, and it affected the verisimilitude of the entire show. That was the use of "made up game mechanics" that didn't quite sound like real game mechanics. I can understand, and appreciate, the desire to avoid violating other people's copyright. But in a d20 license world, there is no reason for a character to utter the line, "I'll cast my Pyro spell." Especially when one could just as easily say "I'll cast my Fireball." Heck, even in a pre-OGL world, you could have gotten away with that. This was magnified by the fact that the writers were willing to include real world references to Coke and Mountain Dew, but stumbled at the mention of concepts that would most appeal to their target audience. Don't be afraid to say D&D. Even better, if you want to have a little "geek cred" as Erik Mona and crew at Paizo if you can use the Pathfinder brand as your game of choice. If they say no, it doesn't matter. The rules are Open, just avoid Golarion specific references.

All of my criticisms are written with the understanding that these people are working really hard to provide something entertaining that they really believe in (see Jody Lindke's recent blog post on the subject).   But they are also written in the hopes that the show will address small problems and continue to improve.  There is something here.  Something that is already worth watching, for gamers, but it is something that could appeal to an even broader audience if it continues to improve on its strengths and address any weaknesses.  Entertaining people at all is hard.  The 12 Sided Die crew have already succeeded in entertaining me, now I want them to blow me away.

12 Sided Die - Episode 1: To Be Continued from Daniel Murphy on Vimeo.

Reverb Gamers #13

It's Friday the thirteenth of January. What does that mean? It means it is time for Reverb Gamers Post 13.

Who's the best GM/storyteller/party leader you've ever had? What made him/her so great? (Courtesy of Atlas Games. Visit us at www.atlas-games.com)

This question is a bit tricky. I have a few solid long time gaming groups that I have been in. How do I answer this question without upsetting someone? I could pick a GM, a storyteller, and a party leader and still upset all my other gaming friends. I could go the vanity route and say I am, but that's just not true(I've played with a lot of skilled Role Players in the short while that I've been gaming). Gaming groups are sometimes fragile things just waiting for egos, and interpersonal drama to crack them like eggs. I will try to talk about what makes a great GM/storyteller/party leader in non-specifics(I really don't want to upset anyone).

Ask open ended questions that invite collaboration from other players at the table. Everything is open and friendly even in the most tense moments of narrative. above all encourage and facilitate fun for everyone. Don't try to mash up three things together as one thing(limit yourself to 2 things). Genre emulation is hard only try it with a group where everyone is buying in.

Reverb Gamers 2012 #12

Do prefer collaborative or competitive games? What do you think that says about you? (Courtesy of Atlas Games. Visit us at www.atlas-games.com)

I definitely prefer colloboration over competition. When it comes to boardgames it's how I ended up being Design partners with Evan Denbaum. He and I formed a band of cooperative board gamers at EndGame's Boardgame Night.

I still like to win though so competition is still important to me(our first game design to be published will be competitive). I would just prefer to work with others toward victory.