Some great reading

If you haven't been reading austrodavicus's phenomenal Old School Renaissance is Dead posts, check them out post-haste. I'd like to thank Tim Shorts of Gothridge Manor for bringing them to my attention with his Newbie Blogger Award, as they are probably the best codification of why I'm involved in the whole old school blogging community. The idea that a group of people can be united by a common interest rather than a common distaste, enthusiasm rather than nostalgia. After all, I wasn't even BORN when all of these games were in their prime and I'm still writing about all of this stuff, right? So thank you, austrodavicus, for putting a lot of thought and effort into pinpointing what keeps a lot of us going.

In more clerical news, Fistful of Coppers is going to be a little more sporadically updated in the next few weeks. I've got about a half dozen big projects due at graduate school and as much as I enjoy writing stuff up for this blog, time is unfortunately not a luxury that I have at the moment. Hopefully I can start putting some of these ideas that I've had bouncing around in my head onto paper in the future, but right now I need to focus on putting poster projects and book talks onto paper. I love writing this thing, but unfortunately I'm not getting graded on it.

Old School D&D My Way 2: Old School Harder

Posting has unfortunately been a bit sporadic recently, as my girlfriend is visiting for the first time in what seems like months and I try and spend as much time as I reasonably can with her when she's here. Still working over ideas for games with my friends, as I've had impassioned pleas of "When are we going to play some D&D?" to "When are we going to kick off that Feng Shui game that I was excited about?" All this plus ongoing schoolwork and reading 5 books a week for Resources for Young Adults. I'm conflicted. :)

A few of you folks may remember a post that I did before I disappeared off of the face of the earth called Old School D&D My Way, which I think captured a lot of what I've been trying to accomplish with my D&D musings. I was born in the tail end of the 80s and came into gaming well after the majority of people who are revisiting old-school games from their youth. I've become much more exposed to the influences surrounding early edition D&D in recent months, but at the time I thought that immersing myself in thematically appropriate material would help me get old school D&D better than I did.

In retrospect, it was a bad decision.

Though I did add some personal elements to my Swords and Wizardry game, mostly the quasi-Western setting, I really didn't feel like I put enough of myself into it. I just got so inspired by other people's stuff that I thought a patchwork assemblage of their work would somehow result in a great game for me. Now I know that's not the case and I'm going to try my damnedest to put together a D&D game that I feel is mine.

In the coming weeks, I'll probably be using Fistful of Coppers as a public forum to work all of this stuff out. I hope that some of you will find it interesting.

Kids These Days

This one's been coming for a while, folks. I'm pretty sure the same ground has already been tread by many other bloggers, but as both a gamer and someone who's going to be working with kids professionally some day, I just really needed to get this off of my chest. Bear with me.

One of the most common complaints that I've seen throughout the Old School blogging and forums community is about the monolithic 'Kids These Days.' They're too soft to accept that they automatically die if they touch the big demon face. None of them have the attention span to dedicate to 4 hours sitting down at a table without going crazy from digital withdrawal. Video games have spoiled them and now no one can use their imagination to play real games. Tabletop role-playing just isn't bright and shiny enough to drag them out of their technologically induced haze.

I'm sorry, but fuck that.

Back when I was in elementary and middle school, me and my friends were big old nerds. We played Magic, read Tolkien and Expanded Universe Star Wars novels and made our own comics set in both these worlds and our own. And before any of us got our hands on a codified rules system, we were doing our own story telling role-playing games. But we were also on the fringe of our age group. We were a minority of kids interested in fantasy and imaginary play and it stayed that way for a long time.

Right now, the most popular books for kids in America are a series of 7 fantasy novels starring a trio of young wizards fighting against an overwhelming evil while still trying to maintain grades at a magical academy. In the 13 years that the Harry Potter books have been in print, they have sold over 400 million copies, better than every edition of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit published over a combined 70 year period. There are hundreds of fantasy series available for kids and teens at every library and book store across America.

On top of that, kids actually have an existing framework for what role-playing games are, thanks to console and computer RPGs. Even across cultural lines, the Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda are pretty universal. Kids as young as 6 already have an idea of how hit points, initiative and experience work thanks to Pokemon, the most popular portable game ever made. Even the most recent book in the popular children's series about cats beating each other up, Warriors, has a miniature Lone Wolf style 'Adventure Game' written into the back.

So why do people think that Kids These Days aren't primed and ready to enjoy tabletop RPGs? Probably because Kids These Days wouldn't want to play their kind of RPGs.

So let's not dismiss kids off hand because they wouldn't want to inch their way down a dungeon corridor. Role-playing games are really born out of the creative influences of their time and as a result, games made today are more likely to attract kids born today. Instead of bemoaning the fact that their D&D isn't like my D&D, complaining instead of participating, we could be showing kids how cool tabletop role-playing is in a milieu that they're interested in. I can't fathom a middle schooler picking up a Jack Vance or Fritz Lieber paperback today, but if your campaign world was influenced by Avatar: the Last Airbender and One Piece, you'd have a line of kids out the door who are ready for adventure.

Let's cast a wide net, folks.

Motherlode: Five Point Plan

Alright, Scott, you're on.

Since most of the stuff that I've been using for the Motherlode game has come from other blogs that I've read over the past few months and not in-store purchases, I'm going to choose five (5) things to game with from there. As said before, we're using Swords and Wizardry. I really like the streamlined Saving Throws and the way that Ascending AC and To-Hit bonuses are already worked into the text. As someone who started out playing D&D in 3rd Edition and is running a game for people who've all played 3rd Edition, it's a good place to start for that base old-school feeling, but with some tweaks that make it easier for me and my players to accept.

So, without further adieu...

1) Beyond the Black Gate's Thief Class: Probably my favorite iteration of the old-school type thief class. The single Thievery percentile skill both simplifies the classes' multiple skills issue and helps 1st level Thieves feel a bit more useful.

2) Jeff Rients' Deck of Stuff: I love this fucking thing. The random items that they drew helped my players flesh out their character, whether it was giving them a flavor (like the wheel of stinky cheese convincing Joe that his half-elven magic-user was 250lbs.) or was something that they could use in a pinch (Mike's silver dagger, which he hurled into a crossbowman when he realized that he didn't have any other ranged weapons)

3) Jeff Rients' Carousing Rules: Because that's the kind of silly shit that I want to encourage in this game.

4) Tales of the Rambling Bumbler's Super-Simple Combat Maneuvers: Literally, the best way I've ever seen to adjudicate called shots, knock downs and the like.

5) Trollsmyth's Shields Shall Be Splintered: Makes having a shield totally awesome.

And to top it all off, liberal application of my newly acquired copy of the Moldvay Basic box set.

Everything else, from here on out, is going to be pure me.

Old school D&D my way

In the past few months, ever since I started looking at earlier versions of Dungeons and Dragons, I've been immersed in reading the opinions, examples and modifications of dozens of bloggers, forum posters and retroclone authors who all seemed to be having a blast with what they were playing. Having never played an edition of D&D before 2nd, I took all of these examples to heart and tried to make my eventual campaign as much like the games I saw Jeff Rients, Zak S, James Maliszewski and Al Krombach playing.

It didn't go so well and I think I know why. There wasn't enough me in it.

I have still never run a dungeon crawl or a sandbox campaign. I know that for many of my fellow bloggers, these are the types of games that they grew up on and what they associate with D&D. A person who never stopped playing B/X or 1e or an old hand returning to a game that they loved would be able to wing a fun, old-school romp because they know how it goes. They'll remember what they loved about these games, be it the exploration aspect, the fact that death could be around every corner or the game worlds that they almost lived in. When I ended up running it, I tried to play a game that I had never played before like a person who's been playing it for years, if not decades. Needless to say, it didn't feel right.

So what do I like in my role-playing game experiences? I'll have to think on that. The games that I've run with the most success have mostly been westerns, cyberpunk and modern supernatural hunting. I'll have to think on it before deciding anything concrete.

So we played some Swords and Wizardry last weekend

And I'm still not really sure how it went.

I had told my friends at college that I wanted to run a really informal pick-up D&D game for anyone who wanted to play. Last Saturday, I drove up to Oberlin for Labor Day weekend with a bag full of dice, the Deck of Stuff that I'd put together and a half-finished, randomly-generated dungeon map. The following day, I was able to get a nice chunk of folks together for the game, including my girlfriend Jamie, who's been incredibly supportive of this whole D&D kick since I started this summer, my good friends Mike, Ethan and Joe (who all worked with me on the noir radio drama that we did at college) and a new freshman named Daniel who I'd never met before.

Character creation was where we first started having problems. I'd gone for the 3d6 for each stat, can switch scores around method and as a result, a couple of my players were incredibly unsatisfied with their characters (nothing above a 12 and a 6 at the lowest.) I tried the lines of reasoning that I'd heard over this: that stats weren't as important in old-school D&D and that they're not what defines your character, but it still chafed them to feel like their characters were somehow behind the curve. Both of their characters were behind that Raggi Curve (more penalties than bonuses), so I let them reroll to much better results.

However, the resulting characters were hilarious. A fighter with a Constitution of 6 carrying a bizarre assortment of cheap weapons and a mule. An ogre fighter who ended up spending all of his money on a set of ring mail. A 250 lb. Half-Elven magic user (who pulled the 'Wedge of very stinky cheese' from the Deck of Stuff). A dwarven cleric of Granitenose, who entreats his believers to keep what is theirs and acquire more. A goblin thief who was probably the best prepared character I've ever seen in terms of random equipment. We started out in a tavern called the Irish Deer in the mining town of Motherlode, a rough and tumble place filled with what looked like Aragorn stunt doubles. There, the PCs bought a map to the ancient ruins of Myrmidia from a slightly dodgy Cut-me-own-throat Dibbler type and ventured out into the wilderness to find the caves, complete with a passel of 6 henchmen hired by the Magic-User, courtesy of the Meatshields! hireling generator.

Turns out that the only thing the map led to was an ambush courtesy of a group of bandits that the swindler was in cahoots with. In the combat that ensued, one of the Magic-User's men at arms was killed and the dwarven cleric nearly got it with a well-aimed crossbow bolt. However, the party managed to pull one of the bandits off of the cliff by his foot, hurl a warhammer across a chasm into a crossbowman's face and utterly dismember the rest of the bandits, thanks to the ogre's stick full of nails (and ridiculous damage bonuses) and the surviving goblin man at arms, who must have taken a level in badass at some point, because he ended up killing three guys and taking 1 hp's worth of damage in the process.

Naturally, everyone wanted revenge, so they returned to Motherlode in search of Holsten, the snake-oil salesman, eventually chasing him to Looter's Row. The fighter kicked down the door to the house, only to be hit with a crossbow trap that fortunately didn't take much out of him. The group entered the house cautiously It was then that the bugbears came out of hiding, wielding crossbows and doing the standard thug threatening. Once again, combat ensued, with another hireling falling to their death at the bugbear's hands and the Magic-User flinging his Sleep spell over all but one of the goons, who decided that discretion was the better part of valor and fled. The party entered Holsten's basement, where the sneaky little bastard escaped into a hatch in the floor.

The room search went well and it didn't go well. Our ogre fighter smashed open the locked chest next to our forger's workstation and got hit with a poison dart trap. Even with a bonus against poison, he failed his save and started taking damage. He was incredibly upset by this turn of events and particularly at me for putting it there. I honestly didn't know how to react. As the cleric carried him off to the local Church of Antra to help slow the poison, the rest of the team continued the search much more carefully.

Once all of value could be looted from the workroom, everyone made their way down into the hatch, torchbearers first. What they found was the corpse of their erstwhile swindler surrounded by spiders, who attacked first and poisoned the cleric. I don't know why I chose the spiders, given the negative reaction I had just gotten from the poison issue, but it happened anyway. Once the spiders were dealt with, the PCs brought the cleric to the Church of Antra again, where the priestess was decidedly less than happy that two poisoned folks had been brought before her within five minutes and charged them accordingly. And with that, the game was over for the night.

I'll try and post more later tonight on my reactions, but it's been a little difficult dredging up this stuff and I'd like to take a little time to think.

Bullet Points: An armor issue

As you probably know, there wasn't much armor worn in the Wild West, cinematic or otherwise. Aside from the admittedly awesome ending to A Fistful of Dollars, I don't think I've seen a western where armor figures in.

Naturally, this is a problem for a D&D-based Western game.

In the early levels of Swords and Wizardry and other early D&D-based retroclones, it is heartily encouraged to buy the best armor that you can with your starting gold to give you even the slightest of defensive advantages. Hence the average starting AC for a 1st level character is somewhere between 12 and 15, depending on Dexterity modifier and available equipment. So how can a character whose armor is made of cured leather or animal hides at most compete with his medieval equivalent's chainmail and shield?

Well, first of all, the Wild West already has a shield equivalent: the duster. Obviously it can't do everything that a shield can do, but in terms of keeping bullets away from bodies, it's a better thematic alternative than any other shield equivalent, save the ol' "lucky hat" (which, rest assured, already has D&D stats prepared.)

Second, characters in Western movies are always diving behind cover, be it stables or water troughs, to avoid getting perforated and I think that ranged combat in a Western D&D will definitely involve a whole lot more cover than your average dungeon crawl. Creative use of barrels, wagons and horses should definitely be rewarded with bonuses to AC or penalties to enemy attack roles, either in flat bonuses (Partial Cover is +2, Total Cover is +4) or on a case-by-case basis. Coupled with Robertson Games' incredibly elegant Aiming and Evasion rules, I think you could run a very fast-paced, yet cinematic gunfight with these special rules.

Finally, for any characters wearing either light or no armor, adding a bonus to AC equivalent to half your level (rounded up) would help out a lot in a magic item-less economy. It makes sense thematically, too: as a character experiences more gunfights, horse chases and slugfests, they gradually learn how to handle themselves in a combat situation. Since the game is probably going to have a 10-level cap, the bonus should be enough to keep folks competitive without being completely overwhelming. Of course, players who use heavy armor would not get the level bonus. But the only heavy armor that I have so far in my equipment list is boilerplate armor ( -6 [+6] AC). And boilerplate armor looks like this:

Ned Kelly, ladies and gentlemen...

Picture of Ned Kelly's armor from Wilson's Almanac.

Because it will probably come up eventually

I'm a really big fan of D&D 4e.

I really like what Mike Mearls et al have done with the game. I like how much easier it is to run than 3rd Edition. I like how tactical and cinematic it feels and the mechanics of powers. I like the integration of Wushu-esque Skills Challenges, even though I had to go to the Internet to find a better interpretation of them. Yet the more I read Old School forums and blogs, the more I experience a certain disdain for 4e; not only a disdain, but an active desire to see it fail, as if by its collapse, people would suddenly come to their senses and realize that the fun they were having is clearly bad and would pick up a copy of OSRIC post haste. I know that the vast majority of Old School folks are honestly just trying to play and promote older games, but shit like James Mishler's utterly insulting Types Of Adventures chart (sadly non-existent now due to destruction of evidence) and the backlash against Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik playing Swords and Wizardry wrong leaves a sour taste in my mouth and a strong desire to steer myself solely towards the positive side of this scene.

There's a band called Against Me! If you're a punk fan, you've probably heard of them. They played anarchist folk-punk in basements, laundromats and coffee houses for years, releasing their records on small independent labels to pretty universal acclaim. Pretty soon, basement shows couldn't hold the average audience they brought in, and as a result, they signed to Fat Wreck Chords, one of the bigger independent labels in the country. All of a sudden, the same fans who had loved their music were coming to their shows to spit in their faces, slash their tires and pour bleach on their merchandise because God forbid a band adapt and evolve the way that they want.

The most virulent elements of the OSR remind me of all of that bottomless negativity and with us or against us antagonism that I still try to ignore in music scenes across the country. Edition Wars and smug superiority only serve to fracture a hobby that's pretty tiny to begin with, and telling someone that they're not playing real D&D because they use Ascending AC is the worst way to entice people into becoming involved. There are many different ways to play these wonderful old games that many people are rediscovering and that I have discovered for the first time. Just as these games should not be denigrated as 'outdated' or 'nostalgic', their more modern cousins should not be labeled as 'dumbed down' or 'travesties.'

On a completely different note, thanks to A Paladin in Citadel for putting me up on his blogs list and hello to the folks who've just started following Fistful of Coppers! I promise to start talking about Unarmored AC or the Kuo-Tua in the near future. :)