Roleplaying Evangelism -- The Kids Are Alright

I recently wrote a post responding to the "Dead Game" statement in Things We Think About Games. The post, and the original comment by Will or Jeff at Gameplaywright, discusses what it really means for a game to be dead and what it takes to keep a game alive. The short answer is that a game is alive as long as people are playing the game.

The longer answer is that games are truly alive as long as anyone is actively promoting participation in the play of the game. A game that is only played by one group during one play session a year isn't dead for that group, but it is dead for all intents and purposes. A game that is played by very few people, and has no support products (like A Penny for My Thoughts), but has Fred Hicks pounding the pavement in support of the game online, at conventions, and at friendly local game stores, is very much alive. Goblinoid Games purchase and promotion of Starships and Spacemen are keeping that game alive, even if it never sees the promised revised edition.

The whole "Old School Renaissance" movement is about keeping games alive and promoting older games/older styles of play to keep them alive. Some of what the OSR movement does is that it re-introduces gaming to players of a particular generation and gets those people to start gaming again. Some of what they do is bring new gamers into the hobby who are looking for less expensive, and more DIY, entries into the hobby. A lot of the advocates of OSR have particular ideas of what gaming means. These ideas reflect their tastes in the style of content as much as the style of narrative.

For someone like Ron Edwards, the creator of the excellent Sorcerer independent role playing game, the playing of role playing games is a kind of counter culture activity. For him the counter culture that saturated popular culture is a quintessential part of the D&D experience. In his essay "Naked Went the Gamer" in Fight On! #6, Edwards states that the SF/F culture that appealed to him "ran more underground, more enthused about bloodshed and pulp driven plots, and the associated science fiction was rebellious and rude as in Dangerous Visions." In particular, he was attracted to two aspects of the gaming hobby and the subculture it represented to him. These were the monstrous and the naked. I won't go into any real details here, you should read the essay yourself, but a brief synopsis of his point is the following. In the 70s, popular culture itself was a kind of counter culture that celebrated the monstrous and the naked. That the overall culture of the 70s and early 80s was such that nudity in role playing games, or in society in general, wasn't shocking. For him the gaming company's "flinched" when responding to the heightened cultural conservatism of the mid to late 80s. To quote:

D&D went Disney while GURPS shed Metagaming's zesty illustrations. Rolemaster, Rifts, and the Hero System were born eunuchoid and stayed that way. T&T and Tekumel remained marginal, and the latter's Book of Ebon Bindings vanished. Even the Arduin Trilogy, of all things, cleaned up its art. RuneQuest content floundered and was eventually scrubbed to nothing by Avalon Hill. Role-playing publishing became monster-ly and naked-ly cleansed, in as stunning a victory for the coalition of censors as anyone could have imagined.

Before I go on to criticize Edwards view of this as the ideal state of gaming, I would like to say the following. He is right in asserting that the gaming hobby, as a whole, shouldn't run away from doing "adult" themed products. No individual company should feel compelled to Disney-fy their content. I am with him when he argues that we should defend the works, like the dreaded D&D Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry from those who want to argue that its cover is exploitative and that the product encourages devil worship. Roleplaying products should not be written with the intent to "not offend." They should be written to appeal to an audience.

And here is where I differ from Ron in my gaming experience. I don't view the Jeff Dee and Bill Willingham illustrated D&D Basic Set as a watering down of other material. I see it as material directed at an entirely different audience. In this case, that audience was 11 year old me. The 70s weren't merely counter culture, porn chic, Disco, Punk, and Caligula. They were also a time of uncensored Richard Scarry, of Atari, and of Star Wars. The 80s weren't just an era of cultural conservatism and Moral Majority backlash. They were a time of the Atari 2600, Transformers, GI Joe, and -- yes -- the D&D Cartoon. They were a great time to be a child, not the least reason because TSR and other gaming companies began looking to children as a way to expand their business. I was one of those children and the games they presented to me, especially the Moldvay/Cook line of D&D products were like manna from heaven to my imagination. For the child who adores Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as well as Edith Hamilton's Mythology, the "Basic/Expert" D&D products were ideal introductions to a hobby -- regardless of Ron's belief that these were "flinches." Not all young people like Karl Edward Wagner or Heavy Metal, some prefer Manly Wade Williams and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

These people need products too.

Edwards makes the logical mistake of associating all appeals to children in rpg content with flinching from facing criticism from cultural conservatives. Certainly, changing Devils and Demons to Baatezu and Tanar'ri in the 2nd Edition of the AD&D game was such a flinch -- and it has been properly ridiculed -- but Pacesetter's Universal Pictures Monsters inspired Chill is not, nor is Hero Games superhero game Champions. He also makes the Pauline Kael error of believing that all gamers share his opinion of whether the role playing hobby, and the old school, are quintessentially counter culture. That is hogwash. The role playing hobby is both culture and counter culture, it has room for all.

This is why it is so important that we older gamers, who play the old school games, support efforts to attract new -- and younger -- gamers into the hobby. Without them, the games will age with us and eventually die. No one will play them or know what they are. TSR began appealing to younger players almost immediately with games like Fantasy Forest and Dungeon!, the cartoon was a natural extension of these efforts -- as were the action figures.

Who is doing more to keep the hobby alive...Ron Edwards with his inspirational, but niche, independent rpgs, or Jeff Kinney author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid who includes a chapter where the title character starts playing a roleplaying game? WJWalton has a post over at "The Escapist" blog that provides a part of the answer. Gaming needs more people like Ron Edwards, but we need also need more people like Jeff Kinney.

I like Ron's work. I often find his ideas inspirational, but the story of a young kid wanting to play D&D with his dad warms my heart and gives me hope for the future. I would also like to add that the good folks at The Escapist have had role playing game defense literature on their website for quite some time.

It's a bad thing when gaming product self-censor, but it is a good thing when gaming products are written for young audiences. The Pokemon Jr! Adventure Game is one of the best introductory rpgs ever written, and one would have to work hard to make it counter culture.

Oscar Mistakes #4325

Cliff Robertson getting Best Actor for his performance in Charly over Peter O'Toole's performance in The Lion in Winter.

Really?! Really?!

Goblinoid Games Purchases Rights to Starships and Spacemen

In 1978 Fantasy Games Unlimited released Starships and Spacemen one of the first Science Fiction roleplaying games to hit the market -- the first three were Ken St. Andre's Starfaring (1976), Metamorphosis Alpha (1976) and Space Patrol (1977) which eventually became a licensed Star Trek game.

These early science fiction games varied in quality and theme. The science fiction of Ken St. Andre's Starfaring is reminiscent of the John Carpenter film Dark Star and had rules that focused on playing the ship as a whole rather than on individual members of a crew seeking adventure as a team. The game had a humorous bent and like much humor of the 1970s might offend some readers due to the sexual nature of some of the jokes/illustrations. Space Patrol's system was inspired by Star Trek (though it did have rules for playing Laumer-esque Bolo tanks as well), so much so that Heritage Models was able to use the same system in their licensed Star Trek game. Heritage's Space Patrol based Star Trek was one of the earliest licensed role playing game properties.

Like Space Patrol, Fantasy Games Unlimited's Starships and Spacemen was inspired by the Star Trek television series. Fantasy Games Unlimited also produced a board game in the Starships and Spacemen universe entitled Star Explorer which expanded on the themes set forth in the Starships and Spacemen game.

This week Goblinoid Games announced that they had acquired the rights to publish an edition of Starships and Spacemen and they have made the original rules available in pdf format. In the long run, they plan to adapt the system to be compatible with their Mutant Future and Labyrinth Lord d20 Open Game License/Old Game Renaissance systems. This should be a fairly easy process. Like many early role playing games, Starships and Spacemen shares some mechanical qualities with the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game. For example, six of an S&S character's 8 primary attributes are determined by rolling three six-sided dice -- just as in D&D. S&S differs from D&D in its use of attributes in that it distinguishes between inborn attributes which remain the same for that character throughout play and acquired attributes which can improve over time. The game also contains "Branches" and "Subclasses" similar to the class system used in D&D. The acquired attributes mentioned earlier, expand the basic class/level system and incorporates an early skill/point system into the mix.

Sadly for Starships and Spacemen, and a number of other promising SF role playing games, Game Design Workshop had released the first Traveller rulebooks in 1977. The Traveller rules were more closely related to SF literature, having a heavy Foundatiom influence, and this combined with an ambitious support schedule led to Traveller dominating the SF rpg market for years to come. Fantasy Games Unlimited eventually dropped support for S&S and moved on to their Space Opera project which had a broader scope with regard to the kinds of SF it emulated -- everything from hard SF to Pulp.

It's nice to see games like Starships and Spacemen return from the dead due to the long tail effect and the low cost of distribution through the internet. I look forward to seeing what Goblinoid Games have to offer in the coming months. In the meantime, I will have to dig up my S&S rulebook from storage and write a review soon.

Responding to Things We Think About Games: "Pants Issues"

I remember, fairly clearly, my earliest experiences with roleplaying games. I was introduced to the Dungeons and Dragons game by my dear friend Sean McPhail. His older brothers had been chatting about this new kind of fantasy game and Sean was pretty excited about it. It didn't take long for me to become as excited about the prospect of putting myself in the place of the great heroes of the fantasy genre. What if I was able to make decisions for Conan or Elric as they encountered dangers on some perilous quest?

My parents, noting my interest, made an 11 year-old me very happy at Christmas time when Santa brought me a Moldvay/Cook Basic Set, a Fiend Folio, a Deities and Demigods, and a Player's Handbook -- as well as several LJN D&D themed toys. The fact that this particular combination of books didn't contain all the rules necessary to run a campaign of my own didn't matter, they contained enough information to light my imagination afire. I made scores of characters and put them through the wringer that is Keep on the Borderlands. To be fair, I played Keep as if it were a strategy wargame and the characters I made were squad members, but I had a great time.

Then came the day when Sean and I were invited to play in a session of D&D at Sean's house with some of the older "kids." It was an absolutely eye-opening experience, both positively and negatively. My imagination ran wild with the possibilities and my youthful mind painted the scenes as clearly as if I were watching them on a movie screen. It wasn't that he Game Master provided ample descriptions of the locations, he hadn't, it was that my mind was able to fill in the blanks. Sean and my inclusion in the adventure came unexpectedly, so I didn't have any of my own characters and had to borrow one of Sean's. He gave me the choice of Aragorn or Gandalf, I chose Gandalf. How could I not? I was to play the great wizard Gandalf, who I had read about with such admiration. The fact that Gandalf was a first level Magic User with only one spell didn't affect me at all.

What did affect me was how poorly the Game Master ran the session. You see, he did the opposite of so many good Game Mastering techniques that the session Sean and I participated in was an almost ideal lesson of what not to do.

First, the game master informed us that he "didn't need the rulebooks" as he had them memorized and that as DM he was "God" and we would have to accept any decision he made regardless of how it represented our understanding of the rules.

Second, the game master didn't need to have any materials to help him run the adventure. He had memorized that as well, or rather he felt that he was perfectly capable of "winging it." He wasn't. Most people aren't unless it is in a collaborative rpg effort like Octane! or The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries. These games work very well when the players wing it because the world construction is shared and the mechanics work to minimize arbitrary decision making. Or, as is the case with Octane!, the rules specifically discuss the disadvantages of arbitrary decision making. "Winged" adventures are more susceptible to capricious/vindictive GM behavior, or the feeling by players of the GM being vindictive.

Third, he viewed the game as a competition between the dungeon master and players. For him, the dungeon master "wins" D&D by killing off the players. Combined with the two techniques above, this creates the potential for what is possibly the worst gaming experience imaginable. In this case, much to my inexperienced dismay, it led to a violation of Things We Think About Games maxim #023:

In a tabletop roleplaying game, the characters are all wearing pants.

This is true even though none of the players informed the gamemaster that their characters were putting their pants on.
Issues such as these -- things that any person would do without comment -- are collectively "pants issues," and players in any sane game may always assert that they have done such things if it ever becomes important.

So what was Gandalf's "pants down" moment? I'm glad you asked.

After some time adventuring a dark and forbidding dungeon, and dispatching some horde of nasties or another, Gandalf, Aragorn, and their friends discovered a chest filled with treasure. Each character fixated on the item most interesting to him/her. For me, I mean Gandalf, that item was a magical scroll containing some arcane mystery. I shouted out immediately, "I read the scroll to see what it is." Thus was my fatal error.

Never mind that Gandalf had used his one spell, yes he only knew one spell as a first level magic user as this was the days before bonus spells for a character's high intelligence, Magic Missile during the earlier combat. In those days, casting Read Magic was a necessary part of deciphering a spell or spellbook. Gandalf hadn't memorized the spell and shouldn't have been able to read the spell. Gandalf, being more cautious of the dangers of untested magic than an 11 year-old, would also not have jumped out of his chair and yelled "I read the scroll!" You see, Gandalf had a high Wisdom score (14 or higher, though I don't know the exact number) -- much higher than 11 year-old me.

Gandalf would have known to take precautions. Never mind the fact that he would also know that he couldn't make anything of the scroll until he rested a day, memorized Read Magic, and only then would he be able to begin the process of unraveling the scroll's mysteries. He would have done those things, but 11 year-old me didn't and was merely excited by the mysteries of magic.

Then I heard the phrase most 1st and 2nd edition players are loath to hear, "make a saving throw versus petrification/polymorph!"

Uh oh!

Sitting at the far side of the living room, in a shadowy corner far from the prying eyes of the sinister and vindictive dungeon master, I could have pretended to roll dice and replied "I succeed!" Instead, I rolled the die and looked down with horrified eyes as the die roll was far beneath the value necessary to make the saving throw.

"I fail," I murmured meekly to the visiting DM.

"Your character has been turned into an Axe Beak," laughed my nemesis.

"An Axe Beak?!"

"An Axe Beak! Ha, ha! Someone get some rope to make a leash so you don't lose Gandalf."

And so I was punished and mocked for my excitement and wonder. I was too inexperienced a gamer, and too caught up in wanting to "play a story," to think that there were game masters who viewed the game play as a competition and who took pleasure from making players look foolish. I didn't know better than to read the scroll.

But Gandalf would have. He wouldn't, even at first level, have been caught with his "pants down." The DM used a pants issue to hose me and I have resented it ever since.

I wonder how many potential players we have lost through the decades because the person running the game used pants issues to hose the players for their own pleasure.

You Can Never Leave "The World of Martial Arts"

John Woo returns to his Last Hurrah for Chivalry roots with Reign of Assassins.

God I love wuxia films and the narrative tropes of jiang hu.

Responding to Things We Think About Games:When is a Game Actually Considered "Dead"?

In yesterday's blog post, I mentioned a couple of older games that had game mechanics that simulated or encouraged mundane activities in games devoted to heroic activities. These activities ranged from the item creation and crafting rules in Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition and DC Heroes post-character creation Gadgeteering rules to the Karma rules of Marvel Super Heroes and the kingdom governing rules of D&D's Birthright Setting. Looking back at that list, I realize that quite a few of those games are what can be considered "dead" properties. This got me to thinking about an entry in Will Hindmarch & Jeff Tidball's book Things We Think About Games:

STATEMENT 88
A game that is no longer supported is called "dead."

But that's business jargon. Don't let the state of a game line's release schedule determine whether or not you play it. Play it because it is fun.

Gamers who are active in the "Old School Renaissance" community are definitely followers of this maxim. Since the creation of the Open Gaming License, which put the mechanics of the 3rd edition of D&D into the Open community, the "Old School Renaissance" has been actively promoting the play of older role playing games. Some of the games that have benefited from this community's efforts include Dungeons and Dragons (Original, Advanced, and Basic editions -- I'm still waiting for the OSR 2nd Edition and the storm of controversy that will cause in the community), Gamma World, TSR's Conan RPG, and Marvel Super Heroes. Every one of these games has had an OSR reboot designed to introduce new players, or rekindle the imaginations of old school players, to the joys of those early systems.

These homage editions vary between efforts that retro-fit the rules set made open by the OGL and efforts that are designed under the assumption that the specific wording of rules can be copyrighted but not the underlying mechanics. Regardless of how technically correct those who design games under the second assumption may or may not be, they have all made a concerted effort to avoid use of undeniable product identity. Zefrs and 4C fall into this category and demonstrate how one can make an engaging rpg while stripping out the underlying trademarked source material.

I carefully couched my words in the above paragraph for a couple of reasons. The first is that I don't actually agree with the premise that the underlying mechanics aren't copyrighted with the other parts of the intellectual property. I would argue that those mechanics constitute the actual intellectual property and not the particular phrasing of those mechanics. Second, I think that these creators are doing us a great service. These products have been completely abandoned by their creators, with regard to the underlying mechanics, and a copyright system that doesn't take into consideration the concept of "abandonware" is in need of revision. Third, the Old School Renaissance community I was very active in during the late-nineties and early aughts took a very different approach to the issue -- and even that approach has some interesting complications.

I was a very active member of the DC Heroes online community, a community so active in the support of its game system that some of its members licensed the right to produce another game based on that system in order to keep it alive. That game, Blood of Heroes wasn't the most professional looking product with regard to illustrations, but it contained a meticulously playtested version of the underlying mechanics of the game. What is interesting is that even though Pulsar Games, a company made up of fans of the DC Heroes' MEGs system, licensed the use of the rules, they still may not have been perfectly within the law.


According to Ray Winninger, the author of the 2nd edition of the game and of a derivative work called Undergroung:

As for DC HEROES itself:

1) Our contract with DC specified that DC Comics holds the copyright on every product we released. If you check the indices, you'll note they all say "Copyright (C) DC Comics Inc." The contracts didn't specify anything like "Mayfair owns the copyright to the actual game rules, while DC retains the rights to its IP" or anything similar, just "all DCH products are copyright DC Comics-period." This would suggest that DC actually owns DC HEROES. I know for certain that DC *believes* they own all rights to the game and everything produced for it and I suspect they're probably right.

2) Greg Gorden believes that his contract specified that he retained ownership of the DCH game system once DCH was out of print. When I was at Mayfair I looked for this agreement and couldn't find it-but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. One potential problem is that it's unclear that Mayfair could have made such an arrangement with Greg in the first place. Remember, the DC licensing agreement specified that DC would retain full and perpetual copyright over everything we released.

3) Pulsar licensed DCH from Mayfair but it's not 100% clear that Mayfair ever had the necessary rights to grant such a license in the first place (#1 and #2 above). I believe that Pulsar later made a separate arrangement with Greg.

4) UNDERGROUND uses a variant of the DCH system-none of its specific text, tables or charts. The copyright to UNDERGROUND is not tied to the rights to DCH in any way. Mayfair no longer owns the rights to UNDERGROUND.

What is technically legal with regard to underlying rules hasn't been truly tested in a court of law, even though the Copyright Office has articulated that it is only the "form" of the rules that is currently protected -- tbone has some discussion why this should disturb the freelance game designer here. Personally, I favor greater protections for the game rules than the law currently holds, but I also am a huge advocate of greater creator rights and a diminishing of the dreaded "work for hire" that pervades the industry. There is no reason that Wolfgang Baur shouldn't have some ownership, in the form of residuals at minimum, if Hasbro decides to make derivative product from Dark*Matter except that the system of work for hire is broken.

On the positive side, the Wild West nature of the protections given to underlying mechanics do mean that we don't have to wait for a company to officially declare that something is abandonware before we start producing products using a reworking of the underlying mechanics for a neglected fan base -- and that's what we are really talking about here.

In a world where roleplaying game products can be stored on servers, at close to zero cost, for fans to purchase at any future time there is no excuse for a company letting a game "die." A company's bottom line with regard to a product doesn't determine the life span of play. It does determine the "product life span," but not the play life span. It is fans, and creators working after a product has "died," who determine whether a game is truly dead. And the internet has ensured that so many games aren't actually dead.

I still receive daily digests from the DC Heroes Yahoo Group. Every day someone is reworking the rules and converting characters. Savage Worlds would likely never have gained the audience it has today were it not for digital distribution and devoted fans writing for digital fanzines. The OSR is reviving games that I actually thought were genuinely dead. I was surprised to learn that people still play White Box D&D. I think it is awesome, but I was surprised.

In a post-internet world, when is a game truly dead? Does it require distributed support, even fan support to be counted as alive or does it merely need players?

What are your thoughts?

What If 16-bit Fantasy Games Were Designed by Bitter Divorcees?

The good folks over at SF Signal posted this amusing video featuring a more cynical view of what the solution to a side scrolling 16-bit fantasy adventure might be. In the video our intrepid hero rescues the princess, but then gets more than he bargained for as the material demands of the princess continually increase. One can imagine that this is a video game level that Oscar or Felix (of the play/movie/tv series The Odd Couple might design). Though the humor is cynical and staid, the video has its charms because one can actually imagine a game designer going to great lengths to create "meaningful" relationship tasks and goals within a video game experience. Such games may already exist.

I would be lying if I didn't say that the sequence where the video's protagonist goes to work for "the man" doing a task of physical labor, in order to pay for a wedding ring for his princess, didn't remind me of Peter Molyneaux's efforts at verisimilitude in Fable II. Molyneaux's game features complex systems for relationships (including financial support/gifts), real estate, and manual labor. In fact, I often joke that the amount of time I spent playing the "Blacksmithing" mini-game in order to earn money to purchase businesses/houses essentially transformed the game into a game of Blacksmith Hero. It was great fun to watch my labor equate to property ownership, which itself equated to revenue, though it wasn't fun of the combat/conflict variety. These tasks made my Fable II experience feel somehow more real. After all, even heroes have day jobs.

Even pen and paper roleplaying games sometimes offer their equivalents of the Blacksmith Hero experience. D&D 3.5's magic item construction system was a much needed rules set for the game, but the crafting rules could be utilized in a number of ways. One could merely have the players roll the skill checks and do the math, but one could also role play out the forging/crafting experience between the rolls. The 2nd Edition AD&D setting Birthright, one of my favorite settings, had sub-games devoted to govern the kingdoms and large scale battles. These sub-games were the setting's greatest strength and its greatest flaw. Superhero 2044 is essentially a pen and paper simulation of the "patrol" patterns of the superheroes being played by the characters. DC Heroes has gadget construction rules that can be roleplayed, and included recommendations for incorporating character's mundane -- but still meaningful -- sub-plots into the campaign. Marvel Superheroes rewarded characters for keeping up with their mundane lives while combating cosmic calamities.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Do mundane mini-games add realism to a fantasy video game? Do they detract from the experience?