White Box to the Rescue!

Sunday morning, I woke up with the feeling that someone snuck up on me while I slept and poured a gallon of quick-dry cement into my head. I awoke feeling completely uninspired, not the best way to start the day when you’re facing your regular Sunday gaming group in a few hours. I had intended to whip something up for my play test game sometime between Saturday and Sunday morning, but never got around to it. I’m sure many referees know the feeling. And when even my morning constitutional failed to get the blood flowing and the creative juices juicing, I wasn’t looking forward to the game.

Getting ready to leave the house, I contemplated my options. I could grab my Labyrinth Lord book and Stonehell and adjudicate another delve through my homebrewed megadungeon, but I wasn’t up to dealing with all the baggage that Stonehell has accumulated with my regular group. I could snatch Zombies!!! off the bookcase and turn the day into a board game session, but having spent Saturday night doing that already, the idea didn’t have much luster. Finally, at wits’ end, I grabbed my OD&D White Box set and tossed it into my backpack.

With a half-hour drive ahead of me, I started quickly patching together a few ideas for what to do with White Box. About half-way to the game site, Ronnie James Dio started telling me about a rainbow in the dark over the radio and I was getting into the D&D vibe. A few ideas percolated up from my reptile brain, and I pulled into the driveway with a fuzzy grasp of a new dungeon in mind.

We were down a player, but one of my regular player’s wife and another mutual friend were at the house, preparing to head out to do some shopping. I pitched the idea of doing an OD&D game and not only was my usual players up for it, but so were the two ladies. It seems that White Box can trump a shopping trip if presented with the right degree of enthusiasm!

A half-hour later, index cards had become character sheets, a few minis rustled up for marching order, and the five-strong party entered the Gloomcroft, a series of ancient halls dug under the mountains by the giant ancestors of the kobold race. In the four-hour session, chambers were explored, monsters fought, killer pollywogs outwitted, puzzles solved, and a new word (“widdershins”) was learned. One of the PCs was slain by a stirge-crow mashup monster, but the party exited the dungeon with a few gold coins, a jeweled holy symbol, and a magical cloak. Much fun was had by all and everyone is raring for another trip into the dungeon as soon as schedules allow.

The session reminded me of two things that I truly love around the gaming table. The first is a mixed gender group of players. As we all know, men and women think differently, our thoughts colored by our experiences, upbringing, and genetics. After almost two years of an all-male gaming group, which is actually a bit of an anomaly for me, having three men and two women at the table was a great pleasure. At the risk of feeding into stereotypes, the ladies used brainpower, taking clues from the campaign world to think around problems rather than booting in the door and hewing down everything the party encountered. The guys were awestruck on a couple of occasions by the questions being asked and the useful information those query revealed. I think everyone’s play experience was improved by having a mixed group and some valuable lessons learned in the process.

The second pleasure was having players relatively free of the expectations and preconceived notions that long-time players fall prey to. One of the ladies had some experience with RPGs through her husband, but the other had played in just a single session of Vampire: The Masquerade. With White Box D&D, a lack of experience with RPGs is beneficial. The novice players didn’t feel constrained by what was written on their character sheets—or rather what wasn’t scribed on them. Experienced players sometime fall into the trap where if they don’t have a skill or a feat or a power that says explicitly that “You can do X” they can’t try it at all. Novice players seem free of such constraints and that makes for a perfect fit for bare bones OD&D.

I’m looking forward to the next time I can break out White Box and play. I hope this spur-of-the-moment group has more adventures together and that we get the opportunity to build upon this world I threw together at the last minute. Many mysteries presented themselves yesterday and the freedom I experienced running White Box is very, very alluring. There are few better ways to spend a chilly Sunday afternoon than with simple rules, a few dice, and good friends.

Gamers Grow in the Dark

From today's Daily Illuminator over at Steve Jackson Games:

Light + Heat - Dark

Like many kids, my early experiences with RPGs took place underground -- in a basement. In Michigan, basements are common, and excellent places to spend the (relatively) hot summer days.

Now I live in Austin, and the heat index has broken 110 degrees far too often recently. (This summer is falling short of last year's "100 days over 100 degrees," but it's still miserably hot.) Why don't I have a basement now?

And does Central Texas' general lack of basements have an impact on the frequency of gaming in the area? Based on the number of gaming conventions (and my own wildly unscientific analysis), areas where basements are common seem to have more gamers than areas where basements are rare. Any opinions on why this is? Tell me your theory on Twitter (@sjgames) or our forums.

-- Paul Chapman

Growing up in the suburbs, many of my early gaming sessions took place down in the basement. This was simply because it was the closest we kids had to our own private creative space. It was a place were our mothers could be certain we were safe beneath their feet without the need to constantly check up on us. That is, until things got quiet down there. That's when they knew we were up to no good.

The advantage to playing down in the basement was that you didn't have to worry about rain leaking through your treehouse roof or the wind carrying off your 24th level magic-user when the breeze got stiff. I'm pretty certain that there's a percentage of gamers who, lacking a basement, made do with the family garage for the same reasons.

The basement (and garage) as a private creative space goes far beyond the realm of gaming. It's not surprising that these same venues served as the spawning ground for countless teenage bands in later years. In my own case, I later kicked out the jams in the same place that I once guided my friends through hours upon hours of dungeon adventure.

Signs of Life

Somehow, it got to be Thursday and I never finished all those posts I was working on for this week. Uff da. So, for want of more complex and well-thought out material, I’ll leave you with these recent moments of satori:

1) Roleplaying gamers are probably unique in their irrational tendency to argue that the rules of their games are not sufficiently” realistic” (and I include wargamers and other fans of simulation games amongst the roleplayers in this case). Imagine how many of the hoary old chestnuts of debate (alignment, wizards with swords) would no longer be fodder for arguments if gamers simply remembered that they are playing games, and that games, by their very nature, have artificial rules and limitations imposed upon them. I very much doubt that, over on the Monopoly forums, there are debates raging about how “I should be able to move farther on my turn because my piece is the guy on the horse. That horse has got to move faster than the iron!” or “I’m the car. Why can’t I just run over the dog and take Bill out of the game completely? That’s not very realistic!”

2) One of the unforeseen benefits of running a campaign that draws primarily on pulp sword & sorcery tales as inspiration is the ease of stocking dungeons and creating wilderness encounter tables. No longer do I find myself having to choose between kobolds, goblins, xvarts, or jermlaine. Instead, I just try to picture Elric, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or Conan fighting a certain creature. If I can, that beastie makes the cut. If I can picture Conan as depicted by John Buscema & Ernie Chan fighting it, I know for certain it’s the right monster to use. There’s not going to be a lot of pegasi or chimeras lurking in the Watchfires & Thrones campaign.

Speaking of Watchfires & Thrones, for those of you interested in such things, the recap of last Sunday’s game is live over at the Archive of the Rotted Moon. I may squeeze in real post on the SoTPR before the weekend depending on what I accomplish today. If not, please enjoy yourselves, friends, and happy gaming!

Just Roll the Dice

Boy howdy, can I pick a good time to take a break from the blogosphere and the intertubes or what? Maybe I'm not the only person who needs to walk away from the computer and concern themselves with other things for awhile, neh?

So what are you doing for International Traditional Gaming Week? I'm breaking my online fast for a brief minute to tell you what I did before I return to my Fortress of Solitude. I spent four hours playing Labyrinth Lord today with five players and ten PCs. We then got the opportunity to teach a kid and his father about retroclones and give them the links to some of the free PDFs available online. Now said kid wants to come play with us next Sunday. All of this while clutching his soon-to-be-forgotten copy of the 3.5 Players Handbook in his hand. Not a bad way to "put butts in chairs," which is really what this whole week is supposed to be about, correct?

At the risk of embarrassing one of my players, who'll remain nameless because I didn't ask permission for what I'm about to do, wouldn't you rather be hanging around with these guys than getting riled up online?

Lionel Price Will Not Write the Great American Novel

Yesterday, I took a break from the sword & sorcery genre and ventured down to my FLGS for Cthulhu Day.Despite a late night with my regular gaming group, it had been too long since I played CoC and I looked forward to Sanity shattering horrors and a high body count. I was not discouraged on either count.

I arrived promptly at 11 AM to make sure I snagged a spot in one of the CoC sessions, and spent the next several hours playing Lionel Price, a burly writer who was quite convinced most of the shenanigans of the scenario could be explained away as the actions of a rampaging bear (later amended to “a bear and a boa-constrictor working together”). Alas, poor Mr. Price’s bear theory proved to be horribly wrong and I became the first PC casualty of the game.

It’s been far, far too long since I played Call of Cthulhu, but the mechanics are so simple to remember, I was back in the swing of things in minutes. If I had any difficulty at all, it was that I was hesitant to rely on the use of skills to resolve anything. I kept asking probing questions or double-checking the scant evidence we accumulated to see if we overlooked something critical instead. It’s been so long since I played a skill-based RPG that I kept forgetting you were supposed to use those things once in awhile. No matter though; skills wouldn’t have saved me from the tentacle/maw combo that ingested our budding writer.

The scenario we played was entitled “Engine Trouble,” and will be appearing in an upcoming publication from Miskatonic River Press. The scenario’s author and MRP President, Tom Lynch, acted as our Keeper for the game. I won’t say much about the story other than it started with a blocked bridge, a corpse, and a thunderstorm, and progressed quickly downhill from there. It was surprisingly combat-heavy for a classic era CoC game, which surprised me. Reexamining it, however, I see that that was probably for the best for a one-off game store run, but I’m still more used to slow, methodical investigation followed by sudden violence, insanity, and death when it come to CoC.

However, my main problem with the afternoon was not the scenario, the TPK that it ended in, or the more violence than expected. Instead, I was unlucky enough to have to endure the session with the type of gamer I detest more than any other you’d care to mention: the pedantic loud-mouth.

I’d rather sit next to the socially inept gamer who smells like cat piss than have to play with a PLM. To make matters even more unpleasant, this particular PLM is one of the owners of the store – a fact which had escaped me up until today. I’d seen him in there from time to time before, but took him to be one of the usual social flotsam and jetsam that accumulate in such establishments.

So instead of having a great game with the four guys we had started off with (PLM was a late comer), I had to listen to this ass spout wisdom on such topic as the mechanics of a 1920’s engine and ninjutsu, and have the unwelcome revelation that he had predetermined that he’d be the hero of the scenario minutes after he joined in. A role he was so determined to fulfill that he actually shot one of the investigators (the cop) in order to get back possession of the scenario’s MacGuffin.

I had to pause here a minute before continuing because only by writing about it did I realize how much this guy grinded my gears today. I’m usually a pretty laid-back guy and I’ve been around the block enough times to realize there will always be these types of social misfits in the hobby. Goddamnit though, I hate it when stereotypes prove they’re based on fact. It’s because of people like this that I keep my participation in this hobby quiet more than anything else. It’s also one of the reasons I don’t play in more pick-up games. I hate to have to game with people like this more than once a decade or so. I take some solace in the fact that the cop shot the PLM in return, killing his character and removing any chance of him doing anything worthwhile to stop Armageddon and be the hero of the hour.

OK, moving on.

Other than PLM, I had a good time and it was nice to while away the afternoon in 1920s New England (a time and place I’ve expressed a fondness for in the past) rather than a gloomy dungeon set in a pseudo-medieval realm. Once Miskatonic River Press releases the book with “Engine Trouble” in it, I’ll probably be moved to pick up a copy of my own, if only to find out everything that was going on during that stormy autumn night along the Aylesbury Turnpike. In fact, today was enough of a reminder of how much fun CoC can be that I’d even consider playing in a semi-regular CoC game group. It sounded like there were some rumblings about getting one together at the game shop yesterday.

Unfortunately, it also sounded like the pedantic loud-mouth would be playing in those.