The Charms of Old School D&D

Well, D&D 5E / One / Mc D&D is a dumpster fire of epic proportions.

Good. Hopefully we'll see people trying lots of other games, old and new, instead of drinking the Koolaid about "the world's greatest RPG."

On Twitter, someone asked about the charms of older D&D. This is how I see them:

1) Affordable 

2) Manageable rules as player & DM 

3) The oldest RPG, no claims to greatest 

4) Powers that be were gamers, not suits 

5) Established good time, not threatened by other games 

6) No backstory or other ego crutches, PC personality came out during play

Honestly, I'd play or even run old D&D if the stars were right.

Until then, I'm happy to play, blog about, or GM other fare.

Good luck D&D lovers.

Sometimes, things need to fall apart to fall into place.

Thoughts on D&D and WotC-Hasbro

So, as you can tell, I am pretty much over D&D. When I started this blog in 2013, the OSR was well established and had gone from a reaction to the 3E glut and shocking 4E paradigm shift to a creative force in its own right. I was delighted to have access to retroclones like Swords & Wizardry, as well as all the crazy free blog materials and quality indie published materials (ASE, Death Frost Doom, and Barrowmaze come to mind). Bloggers were generally open minded and friendly. Roleplaying seemed to be entering a new golden age.

That said, I quickly moved away from ye olde game, hosted the first non-D&D blog challenge in 2014, and found my interest much higher for BRP / Chaosium games, especially the old Stormbringer game. In the early OSR days, blogs for Traveller, 007, and Villains and Vigilantes among others, were easily found, and just as accepted.

But gradually D&D overtook the blogosphere, and the OSR became a D&D echo chamber. Then WotC hired OSR names to recreate 5E along old D&D lines and co-opt the very movement that had opposed their corporate product development.

Along with this came incidents of sexism and homophobia that tarnished the open nature of the OSR. At the same time, the corporate marketing push to brand D&D as 'The Most Popular Roleplaying Game in the World' became insufferable and inescapable, and I joined a Facebook page called I'm Begging You To Play Another RPG, where I was both able to indulge my anti-corporate gaming snark with likeminded folk, while finding out about killer indie games like Lasers & Feelings, Bluebeard's Wife, and Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Add to that the success of scandinavian-produced games like Mork Borg and Aliens, and it seems like another golden age.

But D&D Inc. seems to be in a dark age. Although I feel no pity for the corporate overlords, I do feel lots for the old gamers who see 'their game' being warped beyond recognition, as well as the new players who have (literally) bought into the newest edition's focus on builds and character concepts linked to race + item + joke or pun, and are being asked to pony up for lower quality materials or a whole new edition. 

This year seems to be a crisis for WotC D&D considering its recent missteps. I have recently become active on Twitter, and based on some interactions I have had there, here are my thoughts on the D&D dark ages and the way ahead.

1. The Failure of Spelljammer

As I tweeted on the failure of 5E Spelljammer and WotC's apology, "How the hell can you fuck up Spelljammer?" Spelljammer and Planescape were the pinnacle of 2E gonzo settings, and both worked well, unlike Maztica or Al-Qadim, which arguably misfired. This is a huge corporate misstep and shows two things:

1) WotC does not understand D&D

2) Hasbro does not care about the legacy of D&D

Once again, these old games are available in PDF form and easily run with a retroclone. Failing to produce a quality product for the current edition is a serious shot to the corporate foot. 

2. The D&D One Announcement

On the heels of the Spelljammer debacle came the announcement of D&D One, a supposed new edition that would be backward compatible with ALL previous editions.

Once again, this is pure corporate horseshit, and people aren't buying it. I tweeted my thoughts on the matter, and got a massive response:

Hasbro needs to realize that their job isn't to develop D&D - they lack the love, the creative freedom, and the incentive to do that. instead, all they have to do is make D&D available in print, POD, or PDF, let 3rd person parties develop materials, and shut up. They do need to implement some form of quality control or repeat the 3E glut's excesses, but otherwise, shut up, steward materials, and let the money roll in.

3. The Race Problem

Now comes the WotC announcement that they won't refer to 'race' anymore, but use 'species' instead, which is stirring up some gamers. This again is corporate strategy - there is no such thing as bad press, as Barnum once said. 

Not using the term race is pure pinkwashing - corporate wokeness for profit. Branding WotC as 'sparkle trolls' misunderstands the corporate scamjob they are trying to foist on gamers - they care as little about this as most OSR gamers. 

However, living in a world as racist as this one (I'm native and now foreigner in Japan, so I know that of which I speak), I don't think saving the word race is a hill worth dying on. As I suggested on Twitter, why not use 'folk' instead? 'Species' is such a modern, scientific word, and totally takes away from the suspension of disbelief needed for fantasy roleplaying.

4. How to save D&D?

So, if you love D&D of whatever edition, you must be asking yourself this question. Here is my suggestion:

D&D is not roleplaying. You like getting a party together and dungeon crawling? There are TONS of other games that give just as good experiences, and are better suited to individual tastes. Google 'alternatives to D&D' and you get 

THIS

AND THIS

AND THIS

(I'd play Dungeon World or Heart / Spire myself. I played a game of Ironsworn a few years back and it literally mopped the floor with most D&D games I had played before).

As for Hasnro-WotC D&D next, I think Feist says it better than I ever could:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F2k1zwDymw

Rereading Epic Pooh

I just reread Michael Moorcock’s 1978 polemic “Epic Pooh,” in which he excoriates JRR Tolkien and his contemporaries for sentimentalism.

(You can find the copy I read here, although I think this is updated since it references JK Rowling)

It is a rollicking read, and I always find myself chuckling as I go through it. Not that I agree with it 100% - I think Tolkien’s works are massive influences on fantasy in general and the human imaginarium in particular.

(But I would rather have my toenails pulled than reread LotR. Not so for Corum or Elric.)

Here is how Moorcock sees Tolkien and other works of ‘High fantasy’:

Prose of the nursery room

To soothe and console

Mouth music

Lacks tension

Coddles & befriends the reader

Tells comforting lies

Soft

Success due to its comforting tone

Sentimental, distanced

Avoids implications

Lauds the petit bourgeoise in the face of Chaos

Heroes accept the status quo

No symbols or allegories

Self-serving misanthropy

Sentimental myths to make war bearable

Anti-romance (ie no saga)

Use sentimentality and infantilism

Fearful, backward-yearning

Equate good taste with restraint

Civilized behaviour means conventional behaviour at all times

Happy ending as policy

Fantasy of escaping death

Satisfies ancient desires (ie cheat death, fly, use magic to fulfill wishes)

And since the majority of D&D’s DNA is from LotR, you can see how it has gradually come to take these faults as virtues - how kewl powerz and challenge ratings have nerfed any lethality, and thus tension, in D&D.

Although I think Moorocock gives Tolkien too much credit as an ideologue, he does have some points. LotR and connected books were always a slog, understandable considering Tolkien was a linguistics major, and not a creative writing or even a literature type. The prose and action falters often in LotR, but I give it a pass because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Conversely, Moorcock is both a literary type and a renaissance man with multiple interests - see Hawkwind and his contributions to music. After excoriating Tolkien, Moorcock goes on to describe his preferred type of fiction:

Epic, dignifies death

Vigorous and careful writing

Respects the reader’s intelligence

Large vocabulary, talented writing, good plot structure

Echoes greater writing

Clear & vibrant, with pace & verve

Style is robust, elegant, and considered

Whether you agree with his thesis or not, it is an interesting examination of the state of fantasy literature in the 20th century.

How does this reflect on Stormbringer?

As noted, Stormbringer has always kept a level of lethality. However, the published scenarios often fall short of the high criteria of writing Moorcock has set.

Basically, although D&D included Moorcock’s works in the original Deities & Demigods, D&D has since bought more into the high fantasy of LotR than the pulpy saga of Elric. And I would argue that this is partially because the storytelling standards are much lower.

What Constitutes A Move?

So I read this post about hating story games because Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) uses playbooks and moves HERE. I gotta say, although I don't know PbtA well, I think there is a lot to unpack in this post and the argument it makes.

Basically, the OP was appalled that a PbtA gamemaster defused a player's stated intent to 'Kick Ass' by making them choose between fighting a monster OR getting to their vehicle. The cited problematic exchange is as follows:


Alan, the Keeper: “The flayed one is racing you to the car,and it looks like it’s going to get to you before you can close the door. So Mark, what do you do now?”Mary, playing her hunter Mark: “I kick some ass*!”Alan: “What are you doing?”Mary: “I’m going to smash it out the way with my baseballbat so I can get in the car.”Alan: “That sounds like you’re not really getting into afight: what’s most important? Killing the flayed one or gettingto the car?”Mary: “Oh, yeah, killing it I guess. I’ll stop running andjust start smashing it on the head.”

To me, 'Kick Ass' just means attack, and I wouldn't have asked 'What are you doing?,' which prompts the player to split their intent between 'smashing' the monster and 'get into the car'. 

The OP states their problem with the exchange as follows:

"Why can't the PC try to bash the monster out of his way and get into the car? Is their some in-story reason for this? Doesn't sound like it - it just sounds like the game master is forcing the player into an action to keep to the structure of the rules. This is what I mean when I refer to structure getting in the way of story."

A few things here.

First, the very idea of 'moves' in RPGs is problematic. On the one hand, the use of conjunctions by the player (smash SO I can get to my car) and the OP (bash the monster AND get to their car) imply that TWO moves are happening here, so the GM's response by making the player choose has its own logic. On the other hand, as a person who did karate in Japan for years, there is no such thing as 'clean' one for one moves in combat. Fighting for your life is messy, and you can end up on the winning (or losing) side and have little recollection of the flurry of moments that got you there.


Second, I don't see much difference between PbtA's moves and D&D Feats. Both use pseudo-narrative set moves to simulate and create a vibe at the expense of player choice.  

The OP continues, "So, in the name of abiding by the simplification of player action down to a set of "moves" (as they're called in Powered by the Apocalypse games) the rules - through the above text, if nowhere else - advise the game master to force a player to change his character's action?"

I dunno, this sounds exactly like 3e on D&D Feats in the few 4e games I played, which were a limited selection of 'kewl powers' that did the same amount of damage as everyone else's powers, but stifled how I could use my character. This stood in big contrast to the D&D and CoC games I played in the 80's and 90's, where the sky was the limit for action choice, but you had to abide by how much you could reasonably do in a round, and also accept the chance of failure if your intended action was complex.

This difference implies that the way a game system structures combat shows different ways of managing a move, a difference reflected in the OP's suggested solution to the problem, which is as follows:

"In Call of Cthulhu for example, the Keeper could just tell the player: "You'll have to make an attack with the baseball bat - if it hits, it won't do any damage but the path to get into your car will be clear. If not, you'll be stopped and stuck fighting the creature." The decisions are all up to the player at this point - instead of forcing her into a situation where she had to revise her action to stick to the structure of the rules, the game (by way of the Keeper) has given her the options and let her decide on the course of action."

This solution simply exchanges the unfavored choice (fight OR get to car) their own favored choice (hit to escape OR failing that have to fight), but doesn't do away for the logical necessity for choice. The fact that the OP has switched to a system (CoC) that has neither moves like PbtA or Feats like D&D also implies that system is not the problem.

This brings us to the real issue here: the different way games are designed to handle action, and how this impacts on player and GM expectations for combat.
This difference in expectation (as inculcated by the system you're used to) was brought to my attention when I GMed Swords of the Serpentine, a Gumshoe fantasy RPG and story game last year. One player was an inveterate D&D DM, and had made a bog standard D&D thief in a game that doesn't reward that type of character (ie there is no money in the system, or link between XP and gold). The PC was hanging over the side of a boat sneaking up on pirates,when the player stated "I want to swing up, land on deck, throw a few shrikes, draw my sword and jump into battle."

"Ummm, no" I replied. Half the players were incensed I was blocking the player's (very D&D) kewl moves in a supposedly empowering story game, while the other (older) half were on my side that the chain of actions was preposterous considering the situation.

First, we have the 'Pathetic aesthetic' of old school games vs the rule of cool of newer games. When I played OD&D back in the 80's and 90's, it was one move a round, a very literary way to represent action, and understandable considering the literary inspiration (Tolkien, Moorcock, etc) most of us based our imaginings on.

Later D&D editions switched to cinematic mode of action, with multiple actions and feats, which I surmise reflected the growing popularity of and exposure to video games. My little 4e experience was like playing a CRPG on paper, and as frustrating for a grognard like me as it was fun for the twenty somethings sitting at the table with me.

So just as both story games like PbtA and traditional RPGs like D&D can have shorthand moves or feats that limit choice, both new and old games can either allow multiple cool actions or limit to one based on whether they are emulating modern sources such as video games, or older inspirations such as pulp fantasy novels.

Regardless of system, players and GMs need to agree on the mode of action (literary or cinematic) and either choose systems to match this or tweak their system to do what they feel is right.

Trapped in D&D World

Imagine yourself transported to a fantasy setting. We all have. Would you survive?

This premise has been around for ages. It is the main concept behind John Carter of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Since the advent of roleplaying games, it has turned into its own genre. It starts, of course, with the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, co-produced by Marvel Studies and TSR in 1986.

A tale of involuntary LARPing

Six school kids are transported to the world of Dungeons and Dragons, and adventure about aided by the Dungeon Master, all the while searching for the way back home to our real world. Certainly, it fired my junior high school imagination, and I have since found and read the unproduced final script online. The stories are realist fantasy with no tropes representing game mechanics.

Then there is The Realm by Guy Davis and Sandy Schreiber, a 1986 black and white indie comic (Arrow/Caliber) that postulated the same situation, but didn't pull any punches in terms of violence, nudity, or characters embracing evil. This puts it in the same realist fantasy category as the previous entry.

I had this issue, filled with cartoon blood & boobies

A few years back, I stumbled upon the amazing webcomic Penultimate Quest by Lars Brown, a story about characters from our world trapped in a "dungeon that never ends"

Down the rabbithole

PQ adds both a loss of memory trope to the mix, as well as RPG mechanics such as respawning. Additionally, it is drenched in metaphysical ambiguity, with characters not knowing if they are in reality, a possible purgatory, or hell. Finally, PQ leverages the power of comics to present kinetic and showy action panels, which are a refreshing change from D&D's non-lethal combats and The Realms half anime, half SCA-inspired action sequences.

Now I see the Japanese have made their own version, Hai to Gensou no Grimgar (Grimgar of Flies and Illusions).

Grimdark Fanservice

It is much the same as PQ, with characters starting as amnesiacs finding their way as adventurers. When one character says, "This is not a video game," others ask what that expression means, implying that the longer they stay in the game setting, the more their link to the real world grows tenuous. Grimgar adds to the mix a 'weight' to combat that has drawn attention from film critics (HERE). In its realism of violence and monster motivation to survive, Grimgar has a lot in common with the grim fantasy of Goblin Slayer, which also wallows in fantasy tropes without the 'trapped in D&D' trope, unless the clicking dice sound at the end of episodes is a clue to some future revelation.

Finally, cartoonist Olan Rogers has recently launched The Lion's Blaze, the story of 4 young people trapped in the eponymous arcade game, who have to stay there to revenge and resurrect one of their number who is slain by the game's antagonist (watch trailer HERE). Game mechanics are front and centre here, and the 'stuck in a literal game' limits the reality of fights while the low modality of the artwork and amateur voice acting makes this into pure cheesy fantasy fun.

Interested in trying this genre in a game? Here are some system-free ideas on how to do it:

JOCK
Pros: Bonus to physical strength and endurance, bonus with weapon from sport done
Baseball: Club
Hockey: 2 handed sword
Wrestling: Unarmed damage
Cons: Not very bright
Classes: Fighter, Knight, Barbarian, Noble

NERD
Pros: Bonus to intelligence and knowledge rolls. Able to make a weapon based on science done:
Chemistry: Gunpowder
Physics: Arbalest
Biology: Poison
Cons: Not very strong or healthy
Classes: Wizard, Sage

OUTCAST
Pros: Stealthy, cunning, knows where things are
Cons: Not overly social
Classes: Ranger, Thief, Acrobat

PREP
Pros: Knows social rules, always looks good
Cons: Jack of all trades, but master of none
Classes: Cleric, Knight

THE KID
Pros: Always gets kidnapped instead of killed, good at befriending monsters
Cons: Not really good at anything but getting into trouble or making allies
Classes: Any, but does them badly

Dungeons & Manga #2 - Knowing D&D Part Two

OK, let's jump right back into the action. While in part one we saw that the introductory section of the book Knowing D&D began with dynamic action scenes to capture the reader's attention, its latter half is all action art.

This second half of the text is a"replay", or the transcript of a play session. Replays are HUGELY popular in the Japanese TRPG scene, and the rationale seems to be 1) it is fun to read through someone else's session as a fictional account and 2) you can learn to run a game or play in one by reading replays.

Anyway, on to the art. In this part, instead of explaining every image, I will instead present them with questions and let you try to guess what exactly is going on.

First image - where is the best place to start an adventure?

Next, who invited a snake to this disco party?

Make the 1/2 HD mooks jump!

Uh oh, the TPK heavies just showed up...

Where does this lead to?

 Who best to find their way in the darkness...

A reward for bravery.

Splitting the spoils, making plans...

A summons!

These guys good or bad? Depends how they're shaded...

Taking the block.

Not alone!

About those goblins...

Who does your hair, Baal?

Bette Davis eyes?

Always a damsel somewhere...

She didn't see that coming...

Which edition theses guys playing? BECMI by the ads...

Anyway, so much for Knowing D&D. Excuse the photo quality, but my tablet camera at 2am is about all I can muster these days.

I'd like to thank all commenters - I didn't expect any response, especially any so soon or thoughtful. Good to know there are other people with the same interests out there in the nebulous space of the OSR.

Next in the series - scifi TRPG style, or Furries in Space!

Dungeons & Manga #1 - Knowing D&D Part One

Not having the time to compose the long (winded) discursive thoughts on games I used to, I thought I'd start a new series of posts that would require less time to write for but also provide something interesting for gamers until I can get more time to think and compose. I've turned to my fairly extensive collection of Japanese RPGs, most of which are fantasy games, to present what I call 'Dungeons & Manga', namely manga-style art used in Japanese TRPG books. Whereas English RPGs and D&D in particular took some time before accessing professional artists, Japanese game designers had access to the immense pool of relatively inexpensive manga artists in Japan.

Today, I will be looking at 1987's D&Dがよくわかる本、D&D ga yoku wakaru hon, loosely translated as Knowing D&D Well, or more simply D&D for Beginners. This book is much like a Japanese Judges' Guild resource, and the series it is a part of includes extensively written and illustrated guides on dungeons, monsters, and other RPG accoutrements.

First, the cover (below) presents a whimsical reversal of position of PCs and the dragons they are supposed to be gunning for. It reminds me a bit of the old Dragon magazine comic where adventurers sit around playing an RPG in which they take on the role of office workers. It also shows a high degree of self-deprecating humour, which is still evident in Japanese TRPGs today, but I feel somewhat lacking in self-important western RPGS. Anyway, here it is:

Moving inside, we see that Japanese gamers knew what captured goblins were good for. This is not surprising given the velocity with which unchi rolls downhill in a vertical society...

From the bottom of the dungeon hierarchy we soar to the top. Next stop, dragons!

With the reader's appetite whetted with images of adventure, the tone shifts to tongue-in-cheek comic art to present the classes. There's the fighter:

The top panel is captioned "The fighter is D&D's superstar!!", while the bottom states "However, they are none too smart..." and show the wizard saying "Hey, get back to work!" Unsurprisingly, the next picture is the wizard:

The mage's thought balloon reads "For MU's, choosing the right spell decides your fate." Below that the wizard mumbles "Without magic, I'm just an average human..." and chooses from a golf bag with the words "Fireball", Levitation", "Lightning", "Phantasm" and one other illegible spell name. Next, the cleric:

The cleric thinks "Clerics can't use bladed weapons!" while the elf behind quips "Razors are OK, right?" The bottom caption reads "They have the power to protect the party from undead and injury!" Whereas individualistic westerners might cringe at being in a support position, group-minded Japanese players would instead find supporting the party a worthy and attractive role. In contrast, next up is the thief:

The upper panel reads "The party uses me as a treasure detector..." while the bottom is captioned "The highly dexterous thief also levels up quickly." The thief himself quips "I aim to be guildmaster!", interestingｌｙ using the Japanese term 大親分　（o-oyabun, or yakuza chief) to anchor the character in Japanese culture. Moving on to the elf:

The female elf has been a Japanese fantasy trope since Deedlit of Lodoss War, and that archtype is here. The caption on top reads "Elves can fight, use magic, are intelligent, and long lived...". This totally fits the critique of elves as a token instead of individual characters that appeared on Playing D&D with Pornstars, perhaps implying that this simplification is even stronger across cultures. The bottom reads "But their advancement is also incredibly slow." This same simplification is seen with the dwarf:

"Dwarves are small but tough!" reads the caption, evoking Gimli to an almost painfully stereotypical degree. The humouruous bottom quip "Because we eat minerals (just joking)" lightens this image, but unintentionally adds an explanation for dwarvish miserliness and mining that I would add to any mythos I used in game. How about the hafling?

"Haflings are hard to hit" promises the caption, and the character breaks the fourth wall to counsel " You have to be strong, dextrous, and tough if you want to be me!" Here ends the cutesy art and manga style realism returns for the equipment section:

Chainmail, shield, platemail, and leather are all here.

Hand axe, shortsword, battle axe, and two-handed sword as well...

 Mace, crossbow, bow, dagger, and club...

Ending with lance, spear, war hammer,  halberd and sling. What, no katanas? Oh well, now on to character sheets:

For those of you that can read katakana, yes they have named the thief 'Darth Vader' and the wizard 'Ben Kenobi.' If that seems like a jr high D&D camp type of thing to do, remember that they are coming from another culture, and so are not much different from the L4R players who call their PC Musashi or Nobunaga. Similarly, the fighter is Pendragon and the elf is (wait for it)... Legolas. Sigh, there was also a cleric named Rasputin, but my tablet ate the photo, so I shall spare you.

That's it for this installment, tune in next time for the dynamic action scenes accompanying the sample adventure!

If you liked this post or have any suggestions or questions, leave a comment.

I'm Baaack + Class Based Dystopias

Let's see...

The PhD thesis is in.

4 years, 289 pages x 6 copies. Just printing and assembling it took a day.

Next up, work put me on a sabbatical till April. I've signed an NDA and am happy to close that chapter of my life.

If any of you are thinking of doing a PhD, let me say this:

Think again.

Especially if you are married. That supportive spouse will come to resent the time you spend away, and hate how absent minded and unhelpful around the house you've become.

Super especially if you are working to pay your way through. Your job performance will suffer, coworkers and supervisors will hold your feet to the fire more than workers not doing a PhD. If you can, keep it on the QT.

So anyway, back hopefully to blogging, gaming, and generally enjoying life more than I have in recent memory.

Here's my inaugural post as a free man and doctor of philospohy. Very in keeping with my thesis on discourse:



Class Based Dystopias

Ever wonder why there are still kings and queens in the D&D world. If player characters are so powerful, why don’t members of the 4 classes rule every nation?

(PS: I know many D&D products have PC classed NPCs as rulers, this is just a thought exercise with delicious implications).

The answer is that the power corrupts and makes their society inherently unstable. Any nation ruled by a player character class is a dystopia that ultimately comes to a bad end.

Each of these societies has characteristics which can be divided into the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Ruler: Cleric.

Government: Theocracy.

The Good: Priests cast a level higher! Pray sincerely and miracles happen!

The Bad: You’re either with us or against us. Priests of other gods cast as one level lower, save at - 1 vs holy magic of our god.

The Ugly: Inquisitions, burnings, holy wars. This type of nation usually ends when the witch trials and inquisitions get out of hand and people leave the cities, where they are retaken by vegetation in a few years. Or else, they pick an illogical religious war with neighbors, who band together to wipe the floor with them and place a secular or at least non-fundamental regime in their place.

Examples: Berserk by Kentaro Miura

Ruler: Fighter.

Government: Dictatorship.

The Good: Can levy double army size. Arms and armor can be had at rock bottom prices.

The Bad: Violence is always the answer. Everyone is armed or guarded and ready to thrown down at any moment.

The Ugly: To the victor go the spoils, to the loser go pillaging, rape, mass mutilations or beheadings. This type of nation usually ends when the great leader is bumped off by another, or when neighbors band together to send an army or a group of murder hobos to take out the dictator and replace them with a non-PC class figurehead.

Examples: Game of Thrones (? dunno, haven’t seen TV since I started the degree…)

Ruler: Thief.

Government: Kleptocracy.

The Good: Anything can be bought, for the right price.

The Bad: Watch your purse every second.

The Ugly: Assassination is the solution to every problem. Usually such a nation ultimately devolves into a nation of beggars living in the ruins of once nobles cities as thieving skills are not passed or as teachers are strangled or poisoned off.

Examples: Nadsokor (Elric series), Thief Town (Adventure Time)

Ruler: Mage.

Government: Anarchy.

The Good: Potion shops, wand & staff ateliers, flying castles, it is all here, and at rock bottom prices compared to other places.

The Bad: Mundane, non-magical folk become the underclass. Killing them isn’t even a crime.

The Ugly: Monsters, monsters everywhere. Chaotic creatures are drawn to this place, and welcomed with open arms. Eventually the Tarrasque will show up and eat the place whole, or demons will infiltrate the ruling structure and turn it into a hellmouth or warp the kingdom to some shadow plane. Within a generation it is a myth or legend become cautionary tale.

Examples: The Shadow Plane (Elric), Sigil (Planescape), Wizard Town (Adventure Time)

ROLEPLAYING SEMIOTICS

We roleplayers sometimes use words in weird ways.

Take the universally maligned ‘railroad’. In the real world, railroads have multiple tracks and bristle with straight-aways, switchbacks, loops, tunnels, bridges and dead-ends, all to get passengers somewhere quickly. Call of Cthulhu is often called out for railroadey adventures, with Horror on the Orient Express often cited as one of the worst. But ‘Horror’ takes the adventurers from London to Constantinople and back at a breakneck pace – hardly ‘going nowhere’.

Generally, a passenger has bought a ticket before boarding a train, and has acquiesced to both the length of the ride and the destination. If a gamer feels railroaded, he has gotten on the wrong train, and so it is with ‘Horror’. A passenger always has the freedom to get off a railroad, and can go whatever direction they want. They won’t travel as fast, and they might not find anything interesting. If the train leaves without them, so does the engine of the story.

That being said, I am sure there are plenty of ‘one-track railroads’ out there. In that case, it is up to the gamemaster to flesh out the adventure with sidetracks, switchbacks, loops and all other ‘Jacquaying’ options she can. But is also up to players to verify they have bought tickets on the right train, and to change plans if they haven’t.

What us gamers call ‘railroading’ should probably be called ‘one-tracking’, but this type of misnomer has a way of sticking around.

On the contrary, for all the talk of free exploration in ‘open dungeon environments’, a dungeon literally takes you nowhere. Dungeons were places where prisoners, often villains, lingered, forgotten, then generally weakened and died faster the further down they were sent. Games have inverted this, making dungeon delving freebooters into stronger and more indelible heroes as they descend deeper into the bowels of the earth. The word dungeon comes from ‘dominated place’, but most dungeons are free-wheeling environments filled with wandering monsters and fighting factions. Maybe ‘The Lost City’ and ‘Escape from the Slave Pits’ are the truest dungeons in the original sense of the word. Dungeon could also be used to mean a cell in a tower, but that usage is unheard of in gaming.

The dungeon also gives you the illusion of space and depth because you have to map and clear every square, when most are no bigger than your average mall or megachurch. In Temple of Elemental Evil, the Moathouse is barely 150 feet (30 meters) square, and the measly six floors beneath only bump this up to 200 feet (66 meter) square.

Of course, the limitations of paper width affected dungeon size, and I remember drawing a huge lost gnomish city on a meter wide architectural or navigational graph sheet I got from somewhere in my teens. But might the limitation also be conceptual? Maybe anything larger than a sheet of paper is too much for us to handle. Witness the popularity of the One Page Dungeon contest and the abortive Gigacrawler RPG of Zak S.

Why do gamers feel more free in a dungeon than an infinite open world?

What about the venerated sandbox then? Sandboxes are known for starting as nothing, empty frames that require human action to give the raw dirt that lines them form and function. They are places where children bring and forget their toys, where they fight and make one another laugh or cry, and which the next rainstorm wipes clean.

From Greyhawk to Dwimermount, the sandboxes we have seen are those already played through by others, and littered with their sand castles, battlefields, and dropped toys. Has there ever been a game that provided the raw, inchoate stuff of chaos from which players could fashion their own castles and roads, and run their toy cars and people along? Could we handle such a game if it did exist, or do we need the pegs of Hommlet and the Underdark to hang our imaginary gaming hats on? I suspect that we do, but the call of that blank space is still there, which is why we explore. I used to let players decide the name and size of every community they encountered, and only after working a few ‘Bumvilles’ and ‘Newtropias’ out of their system did they start breathing life into interesting locales.

Is roleplaying in general and fantasy gaming in particular the closest our rigid adult minds can get to the free imaginative play of youth? Is that why we love and take it so seriously?

I wonder.