Seven Years for Seven Stars

Forty years ago, I came up with what I thought would be a great concept for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, an epic quest for an emperor's lost 7 years. The idea was inspired by a fairy tale by Henry Beston, titled "The Lost Half-Hour." In the fairy tale, the final boss is defeated by a man's Lost Patience, which takes the form of a magical grenade. I intended to simplify it to a Lost Temper, which would still be explosive, but would be easier for a modern audience to understand. I tried to run the campaign, and got through about 6 or 7 sessions, but the party kept running away from all the plot hooks I tried to dangle in front of them, and I eventually gave up on it. The idea stuck with me over the years, and I kept thinking I ought to do something with it, but I couldn't find a good hook to write it as a novel, and my experience had taught me that I couldn't maintain a long campaign as a Game Master. But then, a little over two years ago, I got in the mood to try an old-school dungeon crawl, and since our gaming group was between campaigns, we agreed to let me start a provisional fantasy campaign. I decided to try the old idea again, vastly modified since I had learned many things over the intervening 40 years. I titled the campaign "Seven Years for Seven Stars" and we began playing in July of 2021. We continued playing for the last two years, through health scares and monster storms and a system change and my own inexperience at running a long campaign, and finally, on October 2, 2023, we finished the final battle. I have spent the last 40 years thinking I would never get to tell this story, but I finally have. I am very thankful to the people in my group who let me finally get this out of my system.

Big Game Wednesday - Aversion Therapy

Last week, I discussed Gary's short-lived attempt to run a by-the-book AD&D campaign. After he quit running, I decided that I was one of the few members of the group who had not yet stepped up to run D&D and decided to try my hand at it. However, my campaign wasn't going to be by-the-book like Gary's, not by a long shot. Nor would it be the same extended ultra-killer Monty Haul power trip dungeon crawl of Paul's game.

No, my game would be closer in spirit to what Homer had done, in trying to bring the flavor of his favorite novels to the gaming experience. I've mentioned before that I'd had a very ambitious plan for my first V&V campaign that I never came close to fulfilling. Well, this time would be different. I had more time and experience under my belt, and I had a better idea of how I wanted my games to run. And I already had a campaign world in mind.

I had actually tried to start the campaign a couple of months before, as a Dragonquest game. Dragonquest was a roleplaying system put out by SPI, the wargaming publisher. SPI published lots of games that simulated battles in the Civil War and World War II, but also put out some other odd games in other genres, like the mini-game classic, "The Creature That Ate Sheboygan" and even a game based on the prime-time TV soap opera Dallas. Dragonquest was their version of a role-playing game, with the rules written in numbered sections, just like their wargame rules, for easy reference.

I hadn't played Dragonquest much, but I liked the many ways in which it was different from D&D. Everything was rolled on 10-sided dice, which was simple. It emphasized a wide range of skills that D&D didn't include. Magic was not a Dying Earth-style fire and forget system, but a point-based system that split magic into several different disciplines, so that you could never know exactly what spells a given wizard might know.

So at some point during Gary's campaign, I announced that I was going to start a Dragonquest campaign in the evenings, but for many reasons, it didn't happen. Instead, I decided to make it easier on everybody and stick with a rules system we were all familiar with.

This was going to be a huge, epic campaign. The idea was that the party of adventurers would start out low-level nobodies, like any other D&D game. But, influenced by Raymond Feist's D&D-adapted novel Magician, as well as game-mastering advice absorbed from the many Champions books I'd been accumulating and an interview with the brilliant Aaron Allston that I'd read somewhere (The Space Gamer, I think), I decided to put my players on an epic quest.

Actually, several epic quests. They would start out as adventurers from the same village sent on a quest to solve the mystery of a poisoned spring. Then they would have a few more adventures to season them and spread their fame, including at least one adventure that would gain them the attention of a high-ranking noble. Then they would travel to the capital of the Empire, where they would come to the attention of the Emperor himself, who would send them on a quest to recover his lost seven years, which would put them at odds with corrupt nobles, evil clerics, anti-paladins and an ancient demon.

The first adventure went very well, if a little too quickly. The players were sent to discover the source of the poison tainting their village's water supply. It turned out to be blood from a wounded Gold Dragon that was causing the problem. The characters drove away the Lizard Men harrying the dragon, then went on a long journey in search of the rare Snow Lily to make a healing potion for the slowly-seeping wound. The search was supposed to take several sessions, but they did it in one. I didn't have nearly enough side-quests set up, and the ones I did, they didn't really follow.

That should have been my first warning.

Weeks of game time went by in one long afternoon-evening-night session, and when it was over, everyone agreed that they'd really enjoyed themselves. The next game, I set up another not-quite-as-epic quest for them to follow--a horde of Wemics (lion-centaurs), nomadic tribes from the plains, had gathered under a single leader who had discovered a royal seal from the ancient kingdom . The Wemics were threatening war against the Empire in a bid to set up a new kingdom in the plains. The characters were sent in as a sort of special ops force to steal the seal. Think of the Seven Samurai infiltrating Sitting Bull's camp and you're in the ballpark.

It was crazy, suicidal, but I had decided I was going to run things more like Champions than D&D. The characters were the heroes of the story, and it was my job as the DM to help them achieve coolness, not try my best to destroy them. So I fudged a lot, and made much out of the Wemics drunken confusion to keep the players from being overwhelmed, and everybody agreed it was intense, but fun.

So now I was on a roll, but I could tell that the whole "There's this awful menace threatening the world that you can only stop by finding this one rare McGuffin" approach would wear thin really fast. So I did a change-up. The characters traveled to a nearby city for training and supplies, and I informed them that the city was going into curfew because of a visit by the Emperor's Inspector General.

The plan was that the Inspector General would learn of them through some adventure in town, and then send them off on another adventure that would gain them a powerful friend in court.

Unfortunately, as soon as Gary heard the words "lock down" in association with "Inspector General," his paladin panicked. He insisted that the party camp outside the city, then run in the next day, buy their stuff and take off. He wanted nothing to do with the I.G.

This, of course, would leave me with nothing to run. The in-town encounter wouldn't happen, they wouldn't meet the I.G., they wouldn't get the clue to the dungeon--a clue I was particularly proud of: a music box with a jeweled lid in which the jewels formed a map of the region leading to a lake, and the shape of the box itself matched the shape of the lake with the dungeon being located at the point on the shore that matched the latch on the box--and all my work would be wasted.

One of the other players (I believe his name was Robert) realized that, yeah it was a railroad, but if they didn't get on the train, they couldn't enjoy the ride. So his thief snuck into the city and broke into the palace where the I.G. was staying. And got caught, leading to the rest of the party being arrested. The I.G. then basically forced them to go off to the dungeon and bring back what they found there to prove their innocence or something, which led to hard feelings in the group and Robert's character being banished from the party by the paladin.

The players solved the puzzle, found the dungeon, cleared it out and found the item the I.G. wanted. But instead of going back to the city and gaining a powerful ally, the paladin decided to beat feet in the other direction. I had based my world very roughly on a map of North America, with the city the players had been sent away from being either Houston or New Orleans (memories fade and the maps are long lost). Gary and the others basically took off west, heading for the Rocky Mountains.

Which left me double-fucked. Not only could I not get them into my Seven-Years Quest, but I had never really filled in the map on the Western side. I had no idea what was out there. Not only that, but I had the feeling that no matter what adventure seeds I threw out there, Gary's Brave Sir Robin of a paladin would flee screaming from them. I was triple-fucked.

I think I ran one or two more perfunctory adventures, where they ran into lost temples on the far frontiers of the Empire or something, but my heart wasn't in it any more. I had designed the entire world to lead up to an adventure that now wasn't going to happen because the players didn't trust that I wasn't going to try to wipe them out, and the idea of running a fleeing fugitives campaign didn't appeal. So I let the campaign drop.

Big Game Wednesday - By the Book

As I mentioned last week, our Champions campaign was put on hold because Gary wanted to run Dungeons and Dragons, which didn't much appeal to me. Of all the systems we played, D&D had become one of my least favorites.

But Gary wouldn't be dissuaded, and we had to play something, so D&D it was. But Gary had more in mind than just running a game. He intended to run nothing but by-the-book D&D, and to pull all the adventures from TSR modules. No more mutant homebrew rules and homegrown worlds; this was going to be real D&D, baby.

The campaign didn't last very long. The party never came together very well. There were a lot of problem players, and I'm sorry to say I was probably one of them. But let me complain about other stuff first.

What I mainly learned from the experience was that TSR's modules may have had cool promo copy on the back covers, but they weren't great adventures. A lot of situations were very obvious to experienced gamers (or at least to me), and there was a lot of railroading (I'll give the perfect example later).

My first character was a paladin, for whom Lawful Good did indeed mean Lawful Asshole. In our first adventure (which was probably The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh), the first chapter of a lizard man trilogy of adventures, the party was exploring an abandoned house. And as we came across stuff in the house that was obviously only there to fuck with us (abandoned clothes in the closets, a dead body on the floor), the paladin pronounced that we were not there to rob the house, nor to loot from the dead.

Some of this was simply principled Lawful Good roleplaying. But another part of it was based on the fact that I'd been looking at the Monster Manual fairly recently and been struck by the monsters that only existed as a means to dick with players for being players.

See, aside from the mythological monsters like the dragons and demons and hydras, or the monsterized versions of real animals like giant rats or giant spiders or even dinosaurs, there was a class of monsters specifically designed to fuck with players' tactics and players' stuff. There were monsters designed to look like normal floors and ceilings. There was a monster that looked like a treasure chest, that would bite your hand off if you tried to open it. There were Disenchanters and Rust Monsters, who would target your weapons and ruin them.

And in the case of our adventure, there was something in the closet where the clothes were--maybe some kind of worms in the fabric, or maybe a slime in the shadows, I don't remember--whatever it was, the clothes weren't tempting enough to go near them and risk attack by whatever. So the paladin said, "Leave the clothes alone."

Our greedy thief, though, played by club president Janice (an annoying woman who always played a greedy thief and insisted on holding all party treasure until it was divvied up), grabbed the clothes and got attacked. My paladin then refused to heal her, on the grounds that she was paying the consequences for her own greedy actions.

When, a couple of rooms later, the same thing happened with a corpse on the floor and rot grubs (another pretty obvious trap), the paladin was quickly wearing out his welcome. Overall, the adventure seemed pretty obvious and dull.

The next week, we went on to the next module in the series (I'm guessing it was Danger at Dunwater), a visit to a half-submerged lair of lizard men. And this was where things started to turn sour. We found out the location of the lair and went there. And then, the group spent over an hour debating how to go in. Not how to open the door; it was unlocked. Fearful of ambush, they spent an hour debating in what order to enter, what spells to cast, which way to face once inside.

Finally, I'd had enough and declared, Wang Chi-style, that I was going in, alone if I had to. Denise, a new player who was also losing patience, had my back and followed me in. The rest of the party trailed along, feebly protesting that we couldn't just go barging through without checking for traps and shit first.

But I was sick of the whole lot of them. So we walked in the front door and were attacked by... absolutely nothing. We explored a few rooms, got hit by a couple of minor traps, and found a guy dying on the floor who managed to say, "Metamorph," before breathing his last. When Chuck asked me what I thought that meant, I said without hesitation, "Activation word for a magic wand." I had never played nor read the adventure, but that was just so freaking obvious...

This goes right to the heart of one of the problems with D&D in its traditional form. On the one hand, D&D was a game with a high mortality rate, in which you were expected to play your best game, using all your knowledge and resources, to survive the obstacles set in your way by the DM. And this is still the philosophy of the "Old-School Revival" players, who never cease to bleat about how character death is a necessary component of good gaming, because without the imminence of death, success is meaningless and all that twaddle. So using your wits to spot patterns in adventure design, spot potential traps, remember details about monsters and items, those are just necessary components of good play that will keep your characters alive.

On the other hand, as a player, you had lots of knowledge of the game that your character would not have. So, for instance, my paladin would not necessarily be an expert on wands, so he should not have known about activation words, in the same way that he should not have seen the dead body on the floor and thought, "Obvious trap" due to the existence in the Monster Manual of creatures like rot grubs. In modern gaming circles, like the "Happy Jack's" podcast, this is called "metagaming" and frowned upon. But of course, if you don't do it, you die. It makes as much sense as the Democrats' continual insistence that they are pro-jobs while simultaneously being anti-business, which is to say, none.

Anyway, we found the wand, which came in handy, because we had to go underwater to get to the final encounter area and the wand was what enabled us to get there. It was a good final battle, although we probably missed a lot of stuff, because I rarely lingered long in a room before moving on, and the other players didn't dare leave me to my fate, since I was one of the only strong fighters.

At some point, the paladin ran into trouble, and Janice's cowardly thief abandoned him to his fate (as revenge for all the humiliations he'd visited upon her, I'm sure). So I created a cleric called Akbar and ran him, but Akbar was soon just as impatient and even more metagamey than the paladin had been.

We went to this town where there had been a murder of a theater owner or something (checking Wikipedia, it appears to be the murder of a baron in an adventure called The Assassin's Knot. There were rumors of an assassin's guild, and clues pointed to a local temple. So we did some investigating, and at one point, a witness asked to meet us at a certain place and time to tell us all about it.

Well, of course, my spider-senses started screaming, "Plot device," because it was obvious to me that our witness would never make it to the meeting. So I convinced the party that we had to covertly observe/guard him all the way from his home to the meeting place, so we could actually learn what he had to tell us. And of course, because the module demanded that he die without telling us what he knew, Gary contrived to have him disappear from view behind an obstacle for just an instant, and be killed in precisely that spot. One dead witness, no suspects.

At that point, I was pretty much disgusted with the entire adventure, since there was no way we could take it off its rails for even an instant. So I went into the temple, forced a confrontation with the head priest in which I got him to show his hand, then agreed to leave town for the duration of the adventure. Then I sat things out while waiting for everyone else to actually clean things up.

The campaign didn't last very long after that. The TSR modules just weren't much fun, though we were a little excited to see what was going to happen with a new series of modules that had just started coming out, called Dragonlance. It was going to be a series of 12 modules, but only one or two had come out by then. So Gary's campaign went by the wayside.

It did have two significant outcomes, though, at least for me. Number one, it resulted in me eventually running my own D&D campaign for a brief while. And number two, it got me laid. So I will never complain too much about it.

Big Game Wednesday - It's the Law

One day, Paul suggested we try an experiment with a new product that had been put out by a company called Iron Crown Enterprises (I.C.E.). It was called Arms Law, and it was basically a substitute combat system for D&D.

One of the silliest of D&D's silly rules was Armor Class, at least on the face of it. Basically, in D&D, armor made you harder to hit.

When you think of it in wargame terms, it makes perfect sense. Remember that the kinds of miniatures wargames that D&D evolved from featured highly abstract combat. When you roll to hit, what you are really rolling is whether you hurt your opponent. Armor protects you from damage. Therefore, whether you dodge the blow or whether it glances off your armor makes no effective difference; you're still taking no damage.

Except that in terms of flavor, it makes a ton of difference. If armor poses no trade-offs, such as protection vs. maneuverability, then there is no reason for anyone not to wear the heaviest armor they can find at all times, hence the need for artificial restrictions on armor wear by character class. You're trading one convenience (armor's damage absorption folded into the To Hit roll) for one PITA (armor restrictions by class).

So the dudes at I.C.E. came up with Arms Law, and looking at the ads, it seemed really cool: detailed charts for every weapon with more realistic To Hit and Armor rules and extensive critical hit tables. Paul picked up a copy and we grabbed some characters and tried to run an encounter.

Arms Law basically consisted of a booklet printed on cardstock, with every page perforated so you could tear it out and hand it to a player. On every page was a table. You can see a sample to the left (and as always, you can click it for a larger version).

This is a To Hit table for a broad sword, with lots of tiny numbers in 20 columns. And looking at the table, you can see the big differences between Arms Law and D&D. The 20 columns across the top are armor classes, ranging from 1 at the right (naked skin) to 20 at left (full plate, with overlapping plates to protect joints). But Arms Law handles hit resolution and armor very differently from D&D.

Number one, attacks are rolled on percentile dice, which gives a wider range of possible results, and there are percentages far above 100 on the chart, which is due to Arms Law using an early version of "exploding" dice. Basically, if you roll a critical success (96-00), you roll again and add the result to your first roll, continuing until you roll something less than 96.

So say I'm attacking some native dude in a loincloth and little else. In D&D, I would roll on a chart that correlated my level against his armor class and told me whether I damaged him or not. With no armor protection, he would be much easier to hit (even though it seems counterintuitive for a guy with no restrictions on his movement), but if I hit him, I would do the same range of damage as if he were wearing a full suit of plate armor.

Arms Law took a more realistic and more detailed ("crunchy," as the kids today like to say) approach. Say I rolled a 38 against my nearly-naked opponent. Unless I had huge bonuses to hit from level and expertise and magic pluses, I would miss, because I do no damage if my roll is below 80. On the other hand, if I were fighting a guy encumbered with a full suit of plate, I would hit him for one point of damage, possibly more with pluses. But if I managed to roll an 80 against my naked opponent, my damage would start at 8 points, while the same roll would only do 4 damage to a fighter in plate.

Basically armor made you easier to hit, but harder to damage, which just felt right. Also, the better your roll to hit, the more damage you did, so there was never the disappointment of making an awesome roll to hit (which we house-ruled as double damage on a natural 20) only to roll a one for damage.

The other big difference in Arms Law was the use of critical hit tables. Say that with bonuses, my roll ends up being 92 against my loincloth-wearing opponent.The To Hit table gives me a result of 12BP. The letters indicate a critical hit, meaning that after I apply my damage of 12, I go to column B of the Puncture table and roll again. I roll a 56 and discover that I have wounded his thigh, doing 3 extra damage, plus bleeding damage of 2 per round, plus he's stunned and unable to parry next round. The results go all the way from a piddly point of extra damage to instant death plus a bonus against your next opponent.

"Cool," we thought, and started playing. And soon, the problems became obvious.

Number one, although the rules were very detailed for man-to-man combat, there was very little in the way of rules for fighting monsters. Monsters fought by slightly different rules in D&D, based on hit dice, not level, and we quickly learned that Arms Law just didn't handle them well. There was a footnote in the book that I.C.E. would be coming out with a future companion product known as Claw Law that would handle monster combat, but that didn't do us any good at the moment, did it?

Another problem was that the Arms Law charts didn't scale. Like Arms Law, D&D had twenty armor classes (ranging from 10 to -10), but unlike Arms Law, the D&D charts had an easily discernable pattern that made it easy to scale them. What if you had a set of magical armor that was better than plate? The rules gave vague suggestions, but no hard and fast answers. Or what if you had a lot of bonuses and rolled really well on your exploding dice, so that your roll ended up above 200? The charts only went to 150, which limited you to 8 damage against a fully armored opponent (yes, you got a column E critical as well, but it still felt like your roll of 200 was being wasted somehow).

Also, the rules for determining pluses very infuriatingly vague (which made sense given that the product was supposed to be for use with any system). For instance, in D&D, characters of high level hit much more easily than characters of low level. How to account for this in Arms Law? See rule 5.24, presented here in its entirety:

A combatant judged to be at a certain level of experience may be given an offensive bonus by the referee.

That's it. That's the whole rule. There's no table or guidance to suggest what that bonus should be, just an indication that a bonus might exist (a completely different rule on another page suggests 5% per level, but you really have to hunt for it).

So in the end, we abandoned the Arms Law experiment. The tables were unwieldy, the monster combat was awkward, and the conversion rules were too vague. I.C.E. eventually brought out more supplements (Claw Law, Spell Law, and Campaign Law) to produce a full game system called Rolemaster (which was also the basic system I.C.E. used for Middle Earth Role Playing, or MERP).

I bought the Rolemaster boxed set in the mid-80's, thinking it might be fun to see if Arms Law worked better as part of an integrated system. But by then, I no longer really had anybody to game with, so the box just sat with my piles of other old games, with the books occasionally taken out and thumbed through, but never actually used. An experiment that failed.

Big Game Wednesday - Montrosities and PITAs

As much as I loved playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons when I first started, eventually it started getting on my nerves. Because the game had evolved from miniatures wargaming rather than being designed from the start as a role-playing game (understandable, since the category didn't really exist before D&D), there was a lot of abstraction built in for game balance purposes that didn't make a damn bit of sense from a roleplaying standpoint. At the same time, its reliance on detailed charts and special rules for different types of actions made it incredibly specific in weird places.

For instance, the rule for characters knowing skills (other than the central skills for their character class) consisted of one table in the Dungeon Masters Guide accompanied by one paragraph that basically said, "Just use your judgement on whether the skills apply to any situation and how." The entire section took up less than half a page.

On the other hand, the rules for contracting diseases (which the DM Guide suggested be consulted for every month of game time) were very detailed and took up a page-and-a-half. I don't know anyone who used those tables as written, because they were PITA rules--Pains In The Ass, for both the characters and GM.

Role-Playing Rule #4: PITA rules serve no purpose. They'll either be ignored or drive players to a different game.

Or there was the entire central concept of character classes and levels. The idea that your profession would determine what kind of clothing you could wear, or what weapons you could wield, was silly. Just as silly was the idea that you could only get better at, say, lock-picking or learning spells by killing monsters and taking their treasure (because monsters and money were the only things that gave you experience points). And then your character would suddenly get better at everything, all at once. Yes, there was a section in the Dungeon Master's Guide that said you actually had to travel to your mentor and take a month off in game time to train, but nobody really gamed that out cause it was another PITA rule. In practice, the process was compressed to a house rule that said "you can't level until you leave the dungeon."

So we would go in, clear two or three rooms, get wounded in combat and leave to heal up and get more spells (more about that later). Go back in, clear another two or three rooms, leave to level. Rinse and repeat until dungeon is clear. It might take you over a year of game time to clear one really big dungeon.

And then there was combat. Holy crap, where do I start on combat? Well, as I said last week, combat and movement took place on a grid of one-inch squares, with each square equalling 10 feet per side. Only one character could fit per square; the rationalization for this was that you needed all that room to swing a sword. But that meant if your party of six characters ran into a group of, say, six orcs, you'd need to be in a room that was 1200 square feet to accommodate the battle. That's almost as big as my house.

But, you say, you'd really need that much room for 12 guys fighting with swords. Fair enough. But that sort of scale meant that you'd routinely encounter dungeons with 20 foot wide corridors to allow the characters to walk two abreast. For mapping purposes, corridors and rooms were huge, never cramped or claustrophobic as you'd expect in a subterranean chamber. And the scale tripled, from feet to yards, when you went outside. Each character occupied a 30-foot by 30-foot square outside.

If you picture it on a football field, it looks pretty ridiculous--one guy with a sword standing on the 35-yard line, let's say, swinging a sword at an orc on the 45- yard line. You could say they were actually toe-to-toe on the 40, but say the fighter was also being attacked by orcs on either side; the closest they could approach would be 15 feet away.

This is explained away in the rules by saying that, since combat rounds are one minute long, each round actually contains a flurry of effort on both sides accompanied by lots of moving back and forth and such. That's right. You could only take one attack per minute. If you were to game out a boxing match in AD&D, each fighter would only be able to roll three punches per round of the fight.

It just seemed as if, the longer I played AD&D, the more it seemed completely made up of arbitrary rules and ridiculosities and complex tables that nobody ever used.

Armor didn't make you resistant to damage, but harder to hit.

Stats ranged from 3 to 18. Why? Because that was the range for three 6-sided dice. If you were a fighter, you could have exceptional strength over 18. But you couldn't have a strength of 19, oh no. You had to roll percentile dice to come up with a strength between 18/01 and 18/100. WTF?

A 10th level character could take roughly ten times the damage a 1st level character could. Once again, it was abstractly described as your being so experienced in combat that you could avoid attacks that would have killed you previously or something like that. And it certainly seemed in keeping with the fantasy genre, where heroes in battle were invariably described as "bleeding from a dozen minor wounds." But it just seemed silly, especially since there were no penalties for being wounded. You could have 176 hit points, like Marshall (my high-level bald bard from Paul's Rainbow Road campaign), take 175 points worth of damage and still operate at full-capacity indefinitely on that one remaining hit point.

Then there was all the bookkeeping. Reading through the Players Handbook and the DM Guide, it's clear that Gygax saw the game largely as one of resource management. You had to buy food and supplies and pay upkeep on your castle or whatever. Spells required material components to cast, and if your DM wanted to be a dick, he could require you to hunt down or purchase every single component and keep a record of every one you were carrying and mark them off when consumed.

So say your party is in a dungeon and along comes a wandering party of ogres that you have no chance of beating. So the magic-user casts a Dancing Lights spell down the hall to create the illusion of a bunch of torches as a distraction. In order to cast that spell, he'd have to look at his character sheet to confirm he actually was in possession of a bit of phosphorus, or wytchwood, or a live glow worm, cast the spell and mark it off.

Except that that would never, ever happen. In my years of playing AD&D, I don't think anyone ever cast a single Dancing Lights spell. As far as I know, no one in the entire history of AD&D ever used the spell. Why not?

Because of the stupidest stupid rule of all, the rule that stated spell-casters had to select their spells before the adventure and could only cast the selected spell once. The rules explained that each spell had to be memorized before use and would be forgotten once the spell was cast. A third-level magic-user, say, can only memorize 2 first level and one second level spells. That's it. That's your entire wad. That plus the puny dagger which is just about the only weapon your character's class allows you to use. There's no way you're going to waste a slot on fucking Dancing Lights, especially since you have the option of memorizing a good spell more than once, which makes even less sense than the rest.

All of which is a very roundabout way of saying that it wasn't long until I was looking around for a different game, just for a change of pace.

More about that next week.

Big Game Wednesday - Monty Haul

Last week, I mentioned that I got the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks for either Christmas or my birthday. I should mention that my good Christian parents weren't thrilled to be getting me the Dungeon Masters Guide with the big demon on the front cover, but they didn't say no, so it was cool (and okay, if you want to be pedantic, the cover illustration is not, strictly speaking, a demon, but "an efreet on the Elemental Plane of Fire" according to a note on the foreword page--I wonder if they added that note specifically to deflect Christian attacks--whatever, it didn't work).

In fact, at that time, I think I got more objections from some other players of the game than from my parents. Because there was a sense on the part of some gamers at the time, and encouraged, I think, by TSR, that players shouldn't look behind the curtain too much. Players should only have the Players Handbook and limit their knowledge to playerly subjects while leaving the nitty-gritty system knowledge to the DM.

And having sat in on some games in which the players knew the rules better than the DM and were able to rules-lawyer him up one side and down the other, I can see their point. But in the end, I think it's better for everyone to know the rules. What you lose in mystique, you make up in fairness and ease of play.

ROLE-PLAYING RULE #3: It's good for everyone to know the rules.

When I was reading through my old Elementals comics in preparation for the Vault a few weeks ago (remember, Bill Willingham was a gamer and game artist before he became known as a comics artist and writer), I ran across this jab right in the old memory banks:


Wow, does that bring back memories.

Remember, I said last week that Dungeons and Dragons had evolved from miniatures gaming, so we played with painted lead miniatures. And before the introduction of Battlemats to the market, the way we handled issues of scale was to use dominoes. Dungeons and Dragons handled movement on a grid of 1" squares, with each inch representing 10 feet of length.

Well, dominoes were basically made up of two 1" squares stuck together. So you could line up dominoes to form corridors, with each domino representing 20' of real space (the miniatures were therefore not to scale, but given the degree to which everything in the rules was abstracted, this was not a big deal).

This was the way we played Scott's game, and the way we played Paul's. So my standard game backpack load for a while there was Players Handbook, DM Guide, character sheets and other random papers, box of dominoes, box of miniatures (I used the box my checks had come in when I opened my checking account at Bank of America and stuffed it with cotton), and almond jar half-full of dice (which would eventually give way to a proper velour dice bag).

And though (as I mentioned last week) I didn't like Paul much when I first met him, I soon came to really enjoy his game, and eventually considered him one of my best friends.

Paul's game was incredibly different from Scott's. Where Scott's game ran pretty much according to the standard rules, Paul added lots of custom elements that he and his friends had developed over years of gaming in Nebraska. He used the infamous critical hit and fumble tables from the Arduin Trilogy. He had extensive custom tables of monsters and magic items, and seemed to create new ones almost every week.

And his adventures had a really huge scale to them. My first character in his campaign was a bard. I don't remember how our characters got together, and it didn't matter, because the campaign was about 30% dungeon exploration, 70% combat, and 0% roleplaying at the tavern or whatever. We ended up on this massive adventure exploring the Rainbow Road, a solid rainbow that arched into the sky, then split into separate paths for each color. Each path led to a different destination where we had a different HUGE combat encounter: vs. demons and dragons and demons riding dragons. At one point, we had a massive rooftop battle against the player characters from Paul's Nebraska game, which was so incredibly memorable that we could recount it turn-by-turn years later (my only real memory of the battle now, other than how narrowly we won, is that Ian's character got hit with a "quivering palm" attack by a high-level monk and spent the next few rounds just sort of sitting out the fight, saying, "Guys? I'm going to die pretty soon here. Guys?").

So Paul's game was pretty high-power oriented. And because of that, some folks described it as a "Monty Haul" campaign. If you don't know who Monty Hall was, he hosted Let's Make a Deal, a game show which didn't require you to do anything special to win a big prize. You didn't have to answer trivia questions or beat out other players. He would just give you something, then try to tempt you with something else.

So the term "Monty Haul" arose in gaming to describe D&D games in which players got loads of unearned experience points, treasure and magic items. And in one sense, you could say Paul's games were very Monty Haul--you got tons of treasure and experience points, and huge amounts of magic items. And because Paul wanted us to play very powerful characters at high levels, we leveled really fast, and death was rare. Which is to say, somebody died virtually every game, but we always got brought back, thanks to large number of wishes and other resurrection-enabled items. Because it would suck for everyone--you, your fellow players, and the DM--if a 16th level character died off permanently and you had to try to bring a first-level character into this maelstrom.

But I don't think I'd say our loot was unearned. We had to fight hard for the stuff we got, and if we thought we got really cool stuff that made us uber-tough, that feeling only lasted until the next week, when we met the really nasty stuff waiting for us. We played in Paul's campaigns for almost two years, until he faced a player revolt over items that made us "critical-proof," after which we began facing enemies with the special ability to "critical critical-proof." That stretched some players' ridiculosity tolerance a bit too far, so the game kind of dissolved a few months before Paul graduated and another game-master took over.

But damn, there were some good times in there.

Big Game Wednesday - Advance and Be Recognized

When I got to USC, I discovered that there was an official Wargames Club, so I joined. I showed up the first day with my Basic Dungeons and Dragons Boxed Set, only to discover that no one there played Basic D&D. They played Advanced D&D, which was split into several hardcover rulebooks. So I ended up sponging off of other players until either my birthday or Christmas, at which time I got my own set of books. There's my Players Handbook on the right, scuffed and frayed from a few years of hard use.

My first character was a cleric. Not by choice, necessarily. In AD&D, you rolled up your stats randomly and used the stats to determine what kind of character to play. I scored highest in Wisdom, so it was Cleric for me. I don't remember anything else about him, not even his name.

Our Dungeon Master was a guy named Scott, a New Wave-y guy who introduced me to KROQ (at the time, a tiny little independent station out of Pasadena playing weird-ass songs I'd never heard before) and tried to talk me out of registering for Selective Service. He wore this bracelet out of homemade chain mail that he kept adding to until it almost covered his forearm. And because he was literally building the chain mail around his arm, he couldn't take it off. After a few months, the skin underneath the chain was black from corrosion and dirt that the shower wouldn't rinse away.

We would meet in the basement of one of the buildings on campus at around 11 a.m. every Saturday and play until we felt like stopping. When I started, Scott was the only DM, so we would quit around 6 p.m. or so. But at some point, another player named Paul (whom I hated on first sight, because he was so loud and boisterous, and I was so not) started DM'ing a game in the evenings, after Scott was done. So we would often not finish until the middle of the night, or sometimes until after the sun had come up on Sunday.

Scott and Paul ran very different games. One thing they had in common, though, was that there wasn't much actual role-playing to be had.

Which was par for the course with AD&D in those days. You have to understand, Dungeons and Dragons evolved from miniatures wargaming. In those early days, if you were playing, say, a Napoleonic miniatures game, you would use a miniature soldier painted with an authentic historical uniform. But that one figure would represent a number of soldiers: one figure representing a company or a battalion, for example.

The big innovation that Dungeons and Dragons (or actually its predecessor, Chainmail) brought to miniatures wargaming was that one figure represented one person. But functionally, characters in D&D weren't meant to be any different from the different types of units used in miniatures wargaming, which was why you had character classes. Thieves were recon units, fighters were infantry, magic-users and clerics were artillery. The emphasis of the game was on the dungeon as tactical challenge, not as some sort of fictional second life. That evolved later.

So it wasn't any surprise that the mindset in those early days was often DM versus players. Monsters and traps were deadly, and the players had to be super-sharp to keep from being killed off, because the entire game really revolved around combat and tactical challenges. I have an issue of The Dragon from 1983 that has an 8-page article about how to survive in D&D, with a ton of suggestions, both tactical and non-, about courses of action to take to keep the DM from killing you off. Because it was just assumed that that was what the DM would try to do.

And it was a pretty accurate assumption. Take, for instance, setting up camp. One of our guys, a Chinese dude named Homer (who ended up being one of my best friends, but whom I lost touch with fifteen years ago), tried to tell Scott that a series of actions we took when setting up camp would be our Standard Operating Procedure every time we set up camp. But if you didn't specifically state that you were doing it that way every time, Scott assumed the characters had gotten lazy and sloppy and blown off their precautions, because he wanted to be able to ambush us and catch us unprepared. If at least one character didn't die in every combat, the DM just wasn't trying hard enough. Wasn't giving enough challenge.

Now keep in mind, the other phrase you always heard in those days was "The DM is God." And in the sense of controlling everything in the world other than the characters, that's true. But the DM couldn't just arbitrarily kill players left and right and expect the players to stick around. So he had to kill them every chance he could, but it had to look fair.

I came to hate that mind-set. The game is meant to be fun for both players and GM. That's why they play, after all. So that was probably my second big realization in the course of playing RPG's.

ROLE-PLAYING RULE #2: The players and GM aren't opponents.

The GM may play the opposing forces, but his goal is not to beat the players. The goal should be for everyone to have a fun and satisfying gaming experience--challenging, but not necessarily adversarial. The GM doesn't lose when the players win.

Of course, there was a flip side to the killer campaign. I'll talk about that next week.

Big Game Wednesday - Role-Playing 101

So in the perhaps over-optimistic belief that I'll have the time to do this, I'm launching a new regular feature: Big Game Wednesday, in which I take an Out of the Vault approach to role-playing games. Every Wednesday, I'll feature a different game (or related publication or object) from my collection and speak about it both on its own terms and how it relates to gaming history or my own philosophy of role-playing. I'll try to go easy on the war-stories, although I'm sure there'll be quite a few.

I'll try to keep it interesting.

So as I've said before, my introduction to role-playing games was the Basic Dungeons and Dragons Boxed Set, which I bought in late 1980 (could it really be almost 30 years ago? am I really that old?)

But the story actually started before that, in high school. I vaguely remember reading an article in Time or something that referred to Dungeons and Dragons as a new game that was a new favorite of geniuses. Sometime later, I saw some friends in school with the books and wondered why they had them, cause D&D was a game for geniuses, which these guys surely weren't.

And I'm sure it's just my low self-esteem talking, but that article actually intimidated me away from the game. I had been exposed to some traditional wargames at that point. Another classmate had told me he thought I'd be good at them, so I bought Starship Troopers, an Avalon Hill game adapting the Bug War from the Heinlein novel.

And it looked cool, but fuck, it was overwhelmingly complex. And this wasn't even a "genius" game. So I didn't even consider trying Dungeons and Dragons.

Until the summer of 1980, when I visited Europe with a choral group made up of high school and college students from Oklahoma and Kansas. As we were riding on the bus one day, I heard some guys having a very odd conversation narrating how they were entering a graveyard following some tracks or something. And one of the other guys was telling them what they saw. I asked them what they were doing and they said they were playing Dungeons and Dragons.

And it was like the clouds parted and heavenly choirs sang and a single glowing ray of light shone down on my head. This wasn't some weird, hyper-complicated genius game. This was like pretending to be in a movie or something, and not one of those boring ones. This was a movie with monsters and swordfights and shit, and it was actually you doing it.

Holy crap, I was hooked. I desperately wanted to play with them, but it didn't happen.

I did learn one interesting thing, though. They weren't actually playing Dungeons and Dragons. The DM was using Dungeons and Dragons for monsters and settings and encounters, but was actually using the Chivalry and Sorcery rules for combat and stuff.

Which was how I learned my first lesson about role-playing.

ROLE-PLAYING RULE #1: Nobody plays the game straight.

Every GM worth his salt customizes, house-rules or Franken-games to some extent. The only time you were likely to encounter straight by-the-book gaming in those days was in a tournament. And even today, the Happy Jack's gang have recently talked about how they adopted house rules to alter hit points and damage to speed combat in D&D 4th Edition, and how they will have to fix the broken money rules in the Savage Worlds pulp-era game they've just started playing.

Even though some games have been around for decades and have accumulated hundreds of pounds of support materials, they will never be so complete or so perfect that the GM won't have to adapt or improvise something, or change a system that just doesn't suit their group's style of play. Over the next few years, I would see hundreds of examples of that, and do quite a bit of it myself.

But first, I had to buy the game myself, which I did once I returned home. I bought the Basic set with dice included, read through the 48-page rulebooks and tried running my step-brother and nephew through the included sample dungeon, "In Search of the Unknown."

And it was kind of fun, but not at all what I thought it would be like from what I had watched the other guys doing. I needed to learn the game from other guys who had been playing a while. And I got that opportunity when summer ended and I went away to college.

Next week: Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

D&D Nostalgia

A friend of mine posted on his blog recently about his introduction to role-playing games. He mentioned specifically that when he was first starting out, one of the books he used was "Blue Set D&D rules."

I'm guessing he meant this, which was the booklet for Basic D&D. I bought this one in the summer of 1980, as part of a boxed set which also included some really crappy dice. They were not made from high-impact plastic, so they shed little plastic flakes all over the place. This was made worse because, when I joined my first gaming group (the Wargames Club at the University of Southern California), I didn't know from dice bags and carried my dice in an empty Blue Diamond almond jar. The dice rolling around against the hard glass made them flake much faster than normal, plus they stank. Within a couple of months, I got rid of jar and dice.

That was an exciting time to game, because role-playing was new, so lots of people were experimenting crazily. True, there were a lot of games that hewed pretty closely to Dungeons and Dragons' basic design philosophy, like Starships and Spacemen from Fantasy Games Unlimited, which felt almost as if they'd taken the Basic D&D Rules and plugged in the word "alien" whenever "monster" showed up in the original. Stats and combat were basically the same. Similarly, the original Villains and Vigilantes (also from FGU) felt very similar to D&D.

But there were other games coming out that were entirely different. Runequest from Chaosium took a very different approach to the issue of levels and skills. Traveller from Game Designers' Workshop was an attempt at a hard science fiction game that held the distinction of being the only game (as far as I know) that would kill off your character before you'd even finished creating him (I bought the books, tried rolling up a character, and by my third death, decided not to play it ever again). In Champions from Hero Games, you purchased your character from points rather than rolling statistics randomly; this made character creation a pain in the ass, but it could also be fun if you liked numbers, tweaking stats for hours to get a character that was powerful enough to survive and matched the conception in your head as closely as possible.

There have been three major gaming periods in my life. At USC, I gamed for about four years with a rowdy group, one of whom I still keep in touch with (and I wish I could track down some of the others). Some time after I came back to Oklahoma, I started gaming at a comic book shop in Oklahoma City, where I ran a brief but memorable Champions game, and also introduced the folks there to the joys and terrors of Steve Jackson's Illuminati.

I tried joining a D&D group when I moved to Tulsa, but it sucked; they handed me a pre-gen NPC, since they were in the middle of an adventure. The group was 4 thieves and a mage, and in the adventure, we were detectives searching for a stolen shipment of textiles. Seriously, it was dull as hell.

So I didn't game (other than occasional sit-ins here and there) for 20 years, until joining a group of friends here in Tulsa last year. Now gaming is fun again, although not as crazy exciting as it was almost 30 years ago, when the world was new, and bird and beast and flower were one with man, and death was but a dream. Also when there were a million new games with more every day, and we were itching to try them all, from Runequest (fantasy) to Bushido (feudal Japanese fantasy) to Boot Hill (Wild West) to Paranoia (sci-fi comedy) to The Morrow Project (post-apocalyptic doom).