What RPG Have I Played Most Since August 2016? #RPGaDAY2017 -- Day 4

 
Today's answer will be short and sweet, which is similar to the reason this has been the game I've played the most this past year. Because of its easy ability to accommodate one and done gaming sessions, I've been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl Classics by Goodman Games. It's a great adaptation of the 3.x system with a lot of twists that give it a feeling all its own.

Finding Out About NEW RPGs is Easier and Harder Than Ever... #RPGaDAY2017 Day 3

In the before times, in the not now, it was pretty easy to find out about what role playing games were coming down the pipeline. All you had to do was pick up a copy of The Space Gamer, Different Worlds, White Dwarf, The Dragon, or one of a host of magazines dedicated to the role playing game hobby. Some of those magazines predate me as a gamer, but they all covered new game offerings during a portion of their run.

Prior to the existence of these magazines, it was harder to find out about new games. You had to rely on word of mouth and the distribution chain providing advertisements to your local game store. One of the figures who made it easier back in the day, according to Shannon Appelcline's excellent Designers and Dragons, was Lou Zocchi who began including advertisements for games in his own published games. This service led to him becoming one of the first distributors in the hobby. Other than Zocchi though, it was rough going in the early days, but as the industry grew so too did those magazines.

In the early days of the intarwebs, there was a wonderful GO TO location for gaming news called gamingreport.com. It had everything you wanted: press releases of upcoming games, industry insiders leaking the games they were developing, and articles by Kenneth Hite on obscure games. It was a one stop shop for all you needed to know. Sadly, it disappeared for a variety of reasons and since that time we have returned to a digital form of the pre-magazine era in many ways. We are largely reliant on word of mouth and solicitations from distributors to game stores. It seems that we are reliant more and more on our communities for information, much as earlier gamers were reliant on 'zines from their communities.

I know what you might be thinking, "but this is the internet era and there is information EVERYWHERE!" That's exactly the problem. There is information and product solicitation scattered everywhere, almost at random. There are Kickstarter RPGs, there are indie press rpgs that sell at Indie Press Revolution but not on Kickstarter, there are strong independent publishers like Evil Hat Productions who have a core fanbase that keeps up to date with their newsletters, there is io9, Nerdist, and ICV2, but as good as these sites are they are too much shaped by their editorial preferences to cover a wide portion of the industry in a useful way to consumers. ICV2 is more a service for retailers than fans, so its stories tend to have underlying assumptions about knowledge of solicitations.

The fact is that I find out more about upcoming RPGs from the independent blogs I read and my Twitter and Facebook feeds than I do from any other source. There are too many distribution methods Kickstarter, Self-Publish, PDF only (where I find out by just looking at what's new at RPGNow/DriveThruRPG more than from an informative source), traditional hobby store, large retail exclusives, the list goes on and on. There is more information than ever, but it isn't centralized and that makes it challenging for a "broad interest" gamer like me. Were I only interested in games of a particular niche, then my searches and sites would be limited, but my interests range from Apocalypse World to The Zorcerer of Zo, okay bad example because those are both indies...how about...D&D to Apocalypse World to Zombicide to Karthun to the Protocol Series to Swords & Wizardry to Rotten Capes to Hero Games to GURPS? I missed the last Rotten Capes Kickstarter because it appears that I was the only of my friends who knew about it.

We need a service/place to cut through all the noise and get to the signal. We need a new GamingReport.com or a great generalist magazine like Different Worlds or The Space Gamer at their prime, but I don't see one coming unless someone launches a Patreon for one.

The Role Playnig Game I'd Most Like to See Published is... #RPGaDay2017 Day 2

Thanks to great services like Mythoard, I've been able to read a ton of old Judges Guild Journals and issues of Pegasus where there is a lot of early work by RPG Industry legends like Jennell Jaquays. I've also seen some wonderful advertisements for products of the early RPG era. Some of those products were published, but others faded into the ether never to be seen again. I would like to see most of those games published again in some form, and I'd love for most of the fanzine of that era to be scanned and sold by their original publishers on RPGNow, but the one I'd most like to see publication some day is Judges Guild's super hero role playing game. It was to be called Supra-Sentinels.

I wrote about this and a couple of other games back in 2014. At that time, one of the game's original authors said that they were looking into revising and releasing this game. I'd love to see it happen and would be among the first to buy it when it is released.

Over at The Acaeum, one of the original authors gives some clues to what the game would be like and it makes me all the more intrigued to see it:

1.  I'd like to think our game was pretty sophisticated for its time, yet less complicated than what we saw as our main (would have been) competitor CHAMPIONS.   It was a point-building system with dice for determining actions (ie. attacks, defense, etc.)   We'd studied the three or so systems out there around the early '80s and came up with what we thought was a pretty darn good game.   We were starting to worry that CHAMPIONS would eclipse us because it was taking so long for JG to get to the point of being able to afford to publish it.

2.   We were, indeed, very close to being in print.   The game would have been out probably 9 months sooner, had I not moved out of town for a job and my co-authors sort of...didn't do much with it to put the finishing touches on it while I was gone.   By the time I moved back into town and got to work on it again, JG was already getting shaky, financially.   The advertisement got us pretty excited.   Then, they went under just as it was about to go to press.   Took a while to get the manuscript back from them, as it had gotten buried under stuff at their location in Illinois.   (This was about 1982 or 83?)  To get that close to being a published author was one of the single most disappointing moments of my life.    It taught me a good lesson about how we all have them from time to time, though.

What Published RPG I Wish I Was Playing Right Now -- #RPGaDAY 2017 Day 1

For as long as I can remember, I've been a fan of Super Hero role playing games. My entry into this particular gaming milieu was Hero Games' excellent Champions 2nd edition role playing game. I happened upon a copy and was amazed that game designers had even attempted to capture super heroes using game mechanics. At the time, I was only familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, Star Frontiers, Tunnels & Trolls, and Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. I had played all three of those games and their mechanical foundations did not prepare me for what Champions offered.

Unlike the other games with which I was familiar, Champions did not have randomly created characters and instead allowed players to build whatever they could imagine. The only limit to the character you could design was the number of points available at creation (100 points with 150 more possible if you took Disadvantages). Other than that, it was all good. During my initial Champions experience, I didn't have anyone to play the game with and spent all of my time making characters and doing some solo battles. My character builds were heavily influenced by the sample characters in the rule book and thus were typically of 200 total character points (100 and 100 from Disadvantages). This included my personal write ups for the X-Men. I was content with my view of the game, but this view was to be shattered in short order.

A couple of months after I discovered Champions my family moved to a new city, I finally encountered a group of gamers who played the game every weekend. Given that this was the Bay Area, and the game company was a Bay Area company, I soon discovered a rich and vibrant Champions community. I also discovered that how I interpreted character adaptations to the game was very different from others. Some of that difference, I maintain to this day. I personally believe that too many gamers inflate the stats of their favorite characters out of love for the character, rather than an examination of benchmarks and mechanics of the game. But these are things that can only be understood through play, and that was something I had not yet done with Champions. In playing the game, I learned how some combinations worked better than others and I learned that other players were much more likely than I had been to "grab" the "Obvious and Accessible" items some characters used in combat. Not that I designed a lot of those kinds of characters, I didn't, just that I had expected gamers to behave more like the characters in comics than like "tactical gamers" and that the rules treated gamers as tactical gamers while allowing them to behave like characters in comics.

Long story short, I learned that you can only truly judge the quality of a game by playing it. I still love Champions and think it is one of the top 3 or 4 super hero games out there, but my view is now grounded in experience of how the game works and how when some character building norms take over the game can slow down significantly and lose some of its charm.

Eventually, my love of super heroes and super hero games led me to purchase Villains & Vigilantes, Marvel Super Heroes, and DC Heroes, all of which have there charms. At one point in time, not that long ago by some standards, I could claim to own a copy of every super hero rpg published (at least in one of its editions). With the explosion of pdf based publishing, that is no longer the case and I'm sure I'm missing out on some great games, but I also have a HUGE backlog of games I'd like to play...see how I'm pulling this back to the question of the day?

Among that backlog is Jay Harlove and Aimee Karklyn/(Hartlove)'s early Supergame. It wasn't the first super hero rpg published, that was Superhero 44/Superhero 2044, but it was one of the first and predates Champions. Both the first edition and revised edition came out in 1980. I discovered the game as a "real" thing and not just something mentioned in old gaming magazines, when I moved to Los Angeles after graduating from college in 2000. I was looking for gaming stores and found a long standing game store in Long Beach that had a copy of the 1st edition. Later searches on the internet have shown me that I got a significant bargain on it, as I did with copies of Warlock and a couple of other games originally designed by the Southern California gaming community.

Supergame, like Superhero 2044 which predates it and Champions which comes after it, has a point based character creation system. It also has an interesting skill and combat system that I think has a lot of potential. Some of the stats are odd in how they are presented. For example, if a character has an Agony score (similar to Stun for Champions fans) of 10 or more they suffer no penalties to how they move or act. Given that scores start at 0, and that some sample characters have 0s in other stats implying that a score of 0 is sometimes the "average" score, it seems odd that a person has to spend points just to be a normal person in some areas and not others. Why not just have stats start at "average" and let people buy them down later? Or why not have Agony start at 0 with no penalties and allow negative scores to cause impairment? It's a small complaint, and there are a number of neat features like different defenses against different types of attack (pre-Champions remember). A thorough reading of the rules, both editions, and the supplements has convinced me that I need to play this game to evaluate whether the designed characters are effective at all in a way that would be fun. There are far more characters who have an Agony of 10, or a Physical (like Hit Points but with those with less than 10 being hurt), which means that if they suffer just 1 point of damage they will be impaired.

 I think there is a very good game buried in the Supergame rule books, but I think it is a game that needs a lot of play testing and rules tweaks to bring out that game. I applaud Jay an Aimee for their hard work on the game and their ability to get a game like this published in 1980, and this is definitely a game I wish I was playing right now. I have so many questions I'd like answered and I'd love to house rule this game into a more complete system.

Favorite New Games, Most Surprising Game, and Other #RPGaDay2015 Catch Up on Prompts 3 through 11

I've already posted answers to the first two #RPGaDay2015 prompts by +Autocratik, but I wanted to catch up before focusing on longer posts for some of the future answers. I'll be answering the prompts between 3 and 11 today. Some of these deserve longer posts, and I will likely do some later, but I don't want to drop the ball like I did last year and not answer all the prompts.

You can find my answers to Prompt 1 (Most Anticipated Pending Product) and Prompt 2 (Kickstarter Project Most Pleased to Have Backed) at the appropriate links.

3)  Favorite New Game in the Past 12 Months -- The Strange from Monte Cook Games.

 

4) Most Surprising Game -- James Bond RPG from Victory Games. This is quite simply one of the best espionage role playing games ever designed and given the poor state of licensed games at the time it was quite a feat. You can get the retroclone Classified here.

5) Most Recent RPG Purchase -- Fantasy AGE by Green Ronin Publishing. I also ordered their TitansGrave campaign sourcebook.

6) Most Recent RPG Played -- Savage Worlds by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. I love the game and it gives my players a break from all of their 5th Edition D&D games.

7) Favorite Free RPG -- Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules by Wizards of the Coast. There is enough there for years of gaming. There are other free rules I enjoy, but when Wizards offers most of 5e for free it's a big deal.

8) Favorite Appearance of RPGs in the Media -- The Big Bang Theory.  I know that this show has gotten a lot of hate from the gaming community because "They are playing it wrong," but it's my favorite appearance for two reasons. First, David Goetsch and Maria Ferrarri - writers on the show - have been kind enough to visit my podcast twice (First TBBT Visit and Second TBBT Visit) in which they demonstrate how geeky they are. Second, and more importantly, they show players having fun. Everyone is having a good time when they play, and that makes it a good appearance.

I'd like to give special recognition to TitansGrave and True Detective Season 2. I almost gave it to True Detective because Ray's son was playing at recess on a DIY grid-map made from a cardboard box and with random action figures as miniatures, but I opted for TBBT.

 

9) Favorite Media You Wish was an RPG -- Thundarr the Barbarian. This was an extremely difficult question because it seems like this year is the year when all my RPG wishes are coming true. Modiphius is releasing a John Carter role playing game. Flash Gordon is being released by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. There was an official Sherlock Holmes game produced this year. It really seems like all my favorite stuff is getting made with official adaptations. That leaves Thundarr. There are several unofficial mockups, but I'd like to see what could happen if someone did a professional version. Ideally, I'd like a version based on the 4e adapted Gamma World, but that would be impossible.

10) Favorite RPG Publisher -- Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Good people, creative ideas, and focus on fun. Savage Worlds, Necessary Evil, Rippers, Flash Gordon, Deadlands, Weird War II, Slipstream, Solomon Kane... Oh, and I've written something that they'll be publishing later this year.

11) Favorite RPG Writer -- Greg Gorden. He has been a part of most of my favorite role playing games. He worked on James Bond, DC Heroes, Torg, Deadlands, and so many more. His design sensibilities add cinematic qualities to everything he works on.

Sorry Gaming Paper, But The Game I'm Most Pleased I Backed on Kickstarter Is...#RPGaDAY2015 [Day 2]

The first "patron" project I ever backed was Wolfgang Baur's first  Kobold Publishing product. There was a time that I backed every one of Baur's projects, but as he continued to publish primarily for D&D 3.x and Pathfinder at the same time that my bookshelves overflowed with material for those games I moved on to supporting other projects. I missed out on some excellent products, but I'm only going to play those games -x- times and I have more material then I will ever need.

I backed my first Kickstarter project in 2010 and in doing so began a fandom journey of directly supporting projects that I believe in before they are published. I became a non-profitsharing venture capitalist. I decided to be more than a consumer and to support the companies and creators I admire by backing their projects. Note the word I used there, backing. I didn't say "pre-order" their games because that isn't what Kickstarter really is. Yes, that is often what it ends up being for some companies, but that isn't the only thing a backer is. I'd have backed some of the projects I did solely for a T-Shirt or button that proclaimed I was a backer. That first Kickstarter project that I backed was Erik Bauer's Gaming Paper Adventures project. With it Eric left the realm of selling gaming accessories and entered the realm of game designer. Erik is one of the nicest guys in the industry and a natural salesman. I've called him a gaming huckster in the past, and I meant it in the nicest and most William Castle way. In addition to being a great salesman, Erik is a great guy. I'm proud to have supported his project. It's probably the "product" I'm most pleased to have backed, but since it's a supplement it isn't technically a game . So it isn't the game I'm most pleased I backed.

The game that I'm most pleased to have backed is Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls. There are so many reasons that I'm pleased to have backed this game. First and foremost is that Tunnels and Trolls, along with various Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf game books, was the vast majority of role playing game play that I participated in as a kid. Without those and Bard's Tale, I likely would have stopped playing games after my first session. My first experience had been with a "killer DM" and it hadn't been much fun, then I encountered a Ken St. Andre solo module and it was salve to my wound.

Don't get me wrong, Ken St. Andre is a "killer DM," his adventures don't suffer fools and they don't suffer the wise either. They are brutal, but they are never cruel and never seem unfair. When Ken kills one of your characters in a horrific fashion, you end up laughing with him at the absurdity of the situation. The worlds of Ken St. Andre, and his fellow Trolls, are imaginative to the point of psychedelia. They are a patchwork of everything wonderful in fantasy. They are Michael Moorcock meets Disney meets Harryhausen. They are creations of pure joy and excitement.

Add to Ken's literary patchwork the wonderful artwork of Liz Danforth and you have a perfect example of why role playing games caught on in the first place.

For a long time, the 5th edition had been my "go to" version of the game. There had been a 7th edition published by Fiery Dragon that updated some rules, and had a nice packaging, but it lacked a little of what made the original so magical. That little bit was the touch of Ken St. Andre's imagination and Danforth's editing and artwork. Liz Danforth edited the classic 5th edition and was brought back for the new Deluxe version of the game. It's taken a few years for this version of the game to be fully developed, but what I have experienced so far captures that early magic.

Tunnels and Trolls was the second role playing game to be published and it laid the foundation for today's OSR movement. Whenever I buy a new OSR product, I'm reminded of Tunnels & Trolls and that's a good thing. 

#RPGaDAY Days 8&9 in one Post Because "My Favorite Character" Stories are Painful

I honestly cannot believe that Dave Chapman (@autocratik +Autocratik) actually asked gamers to discuss their favorite character. There are fewer things in all of geekdom more annoying than listening to gamers convey the "epic" adventures of their favorite characters. In fact, the order of annoyance in geekdom is:

1) Filksinging
2) Guys who blog about "Fake Geek Girls"
3) Conversations about a player's favorite character and why you should allow his/her 25th Level Anti-Paladin of Asmodeus who wields a +10 unholy avenger, rides an Apparatus of Kwalish, and lives is a Fortress of Daern into your low-level campaign because "I can mentor your other players how to win at D&D."

There are no exceptions to this being annoying. It is even annoying when I do it. I could discuss how much I love my Cathar Vampire from a short lived World of Darkness Middle Ages campaign. I could discuss my steampunk influenced Amberite who manufactured a Golem horse with which I rode through Shadow opposing the vile Benedict. I could even mention "Molecular Man" my Vision-esque character, and one of the first characters I ever played in Champions.

I could mention all of them, but no. I'm going to take you down the rabbit hole that is Tae Pao Kee. When Oriental Adventures came out, I noticed three things. First, the Kensai was badass. Second, the new martial arts rules were crazy cool. Third, the changes to the Monk class shifted the character from a Destroyer pastiche (as stated in the preface to Oriental Adventures...yes...Monks are Remo Williams)  to a mix between one of the Five Deadly Venoms and San Te from The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.

From that moment, I knew I had to make a Human Kensai who became a Monk. After all, being a +5 weapon who can declare maximum damage "x" times a day comes in really handy when you have all the Monk abilities added on. And when your martial art does somewhere between 5d8 and 15d8 (depending on when you multiply the damage from a flying kick or add bonus Monk dice), you quickly see why the good folks at TSR designed the Bloodstone series of adventures. Oh...and not only was Tae Pao Kee grossly overpowered...he lived in a Fortress of Daern.


As for my favorite dice? I have to say that I love the Zocchi set that is used in Dungeon Crawl Classics the rpg.

#RPGaDAY #7 Most "Intellectual" RPG Owned -- My Answer Might Just Surprise You

For the seventh entry in his #RPGaDAY project Dave Chapman (aka +Autocratik aka @autocratik) asked the members of the gaming community to answer what the most "intellectual" RPG we owned were. Dave's own answer set the tone when his response was non-ironic. He wanted us to share the game that we legitimately thought was most intellectual -- though some people still answered the game ironically with responses like "Marvel as it has the most super geniuses." In the non-ironic responses there were references to Nobilis (Dave's own choice), Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth, Mage: The Ascension, and other games from the "avant-garde" or "artiste" era of role playing game design.

In many ways, I think that the listed choices does a disservice to the many games that preceded the games of this era, not to mention many games that came after these admittedly intellectual games. When I think of intellectual, I tend to think of it in two categories. The first is "thought provoking" in the philosophic sense and the second is "well researched" akin to a dissertation or research paper. All of those above qualify by both standards, but so do many others.

One cannot deny that Chivalry and Sorcery by Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus wasn't a well researched role playing game, or AD&D for that matter.  

Steve Perrin and Ray Turney's Runequest is a mythopoeic marvel - especially in its use of Greg Stafford's Glorantha setting - that provide interesting intellectual fodder regarding the origins of faith.

Tom Moldvay's Lords of Creation touches on many of the issues that the later "artiste" games cover. Being a "Lord of Creation" in that game is to be a game master who makes new worlds.

There are many others of the classic era of gaming - I didn't touch upon Empire of the Petal Throne for example - but there are also more recent games like Lacuna,  My Life with Master, or the controversial Vampires by Victor Gijsbers. Vampires is an attempt at a deconstructionist roleplaying game, but requires an explanatory essay. The essay and the conversation around the game are thought provoking though and all three of the games mentioned are story telling games of the post-modern school.

I own all of the games mentioned above, but not one of them is the game that I believe to be the most intellectual game that I own. That game - a game that combines scholarship, mechanical innovations, and is thought provoking - is Joseph Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics. The game was inspired, and is informed, by the author's intellectual desire to understand the literary inspirations that influenced Dungeons & Dragons. Goodman read the entirety of Appendix N for the purpose of learning about D&D and this led him to desire to create his own RPG. Given the length and breadth of Appendix N, that's a pretty scholarly effort in my opinion and worthy of praise. His game balances mechanical innovations and nostalgia. It also fosters discussion as to what exactly the purpose of role playing is.

#RPGaDAY 6: Favorite RPG You Never Get to Play -- DC HEROES in a Landslide

As I mentioned in the second post in this - behind schedule - series, DC Heroes is the first game I ever truly Gamemastered. I was an undergrad in college at the time and had just finished playing in a couple of remarkably well GM'd games.

There was Roger Frederick's GURPS Riverworld extravaganza that was a wonderful role playing experience and set us at odds with Horatio Herbert Kitchener. To this day, I despise Kitchener beyond all reason. There was the D&D campaign in which Rob Faust's character and mine were half-brothers...my character was "so strong he carried hemp rope." There was also a fun Amber game I played in that demonstrated both how well that system could be run and how lame it could turnout -- all due to the diceless mechanic.

I had also read a couple of books that discussed role playing games and how to run them. The best of these were Aaron Allston's Strike Force for the Champions RPG and the stuff in The Fantasy Role Playing Gamer's Bible based on Robin Laws' writings on player types.

I was ready to run an rpg and I was in the mood for a super hero game. I had recently acquired the 2nd Edition of the DC Heroes RPG and the sheer toy factor of that boxed set convinced me that this was the super hero game I wanted to play. That and the fact that TSR's Marvel game has some really wonky bits when it comes to certain match ups. Picture for yourself what a comic book smackdown between Captain America and The Everlovin' Blue-eyed Thing looks like. Got it? That's not at all what it would be like in the TSR Marvel system. There's a lot that is good about the TSR game, but unlike Champions (and to some extent DC Heroes) having a system where Captain America can hurt The Thing isn't one of them. Oh...and depending on the Wolverine write up, he can't hurt The Thing either.

So I wanted to us the DC Heroes system, but I wanted to use it in a manner that was "comic universe neutral." My DC Heroes earth had both Marvel New York and DC Metropolis. Captain America and the Invaders joined Sandman and the Justice Society in their quest to bash Nazis around. Conversion between TSR's Marvel to the DC Heroes system was a cinch since - in my view - DC Heroes APs correlate 1:1 with Champions DCs. Using this guideline the Hulk had either a 12 Strength or a 20 depending on whether I adhered to TSR's "carrying capacity" or just converted Strength 1:1 to Champions. I did the latter and my "DC" Hulk has a 20 Strength. Using the DC system, there is little need to give him the "grows as he gets mad" mechanics one might build into a Champions character. DC's "hero points" mechanic has that covered. If the Hulk needs to hold up a mountain - ala Secret Wars - he can push his Strength and spend the points. This had the effect that some of DC's more epic heroes were slightly more powerful than their Marvel counterparts, but close enough for government work. A battle between my "DC" Hulk and Superman wouldn't be without significant collateral damage, and it wouldn't be a cake walk for Supes.

What do/did I like most about DC Heroes? What makes it special? Most of these come down to Greg Gorden's design work on the game. If you don't know Greg Gorden's name, you should. He worked on the James Bond 007 RPG, Torg, Earthdawn, DC Heroes, Deadlands, and a host of other games. The games he worked on seem to share an ability to capture "cinematic awesomeness." The Bond game has areas of expertise where the PC is so good at stuff he/she doesn't have to roll to succeed. DC Heroes has the Hero Point mechanic and open ended die rolls on doubles. Hero Points can be spent to "push" abilities, but they can also be spent to "alter the environment." Did Hawkman drop his mace and desperately needs a replacement? Spend X number of Hero Points and there might just be a crowbar on the counter. DC Heroes pushes the players to become active narrators in the game play. DC even rewarded players for creating and playing out purely narrative sub-plots, this is very much like TSR Marvels use of Karma rewards for having Peter Parker pick up the laundry.

The game is great. It has clean mechanics. It's easy to learn to play and run. But it's out of print. None of the players in my group own a copy and while it is easy to learn the basics there are some maneuvers available in combat and non-combat that are more complex in concept. They are all easy in implementation, but you have to become familiar with them. The game also has a point based build component and even with this excellent character generator program, that means homework for the players or a PC generation day and my players don't tend to like those. Oh, and they also suffer analysis paralysis with questions like "How smart are you compared to Hank Pym or Batman?"

So I never get to play the game. That's okay. There are some other great superhero games out there. The Marvel Saga game and the recent Margaret Weis Productions Marvel game are pretty darn fun too.

#RPGaDAY #5 Most Old School RPG Owned: Did you even have to ask?

The fifth topic of @autocratik's (aka +Autocratik ) #RPGaDAY list is the Most "Old School" RPG owned. Like most of the prompts in the #RPGaDAY list, this one got me thinking about what Dave Chapman meant by "old school." Did he mean Old School in the sense of the Old School Renaissance movement which used the OGL to create games that evoked play that echoed the way games used to be played, or did he mean the games themselves? It could mean either as sometimes when one refers to "old school" one is only talking about the metacognitve content that is referring to an older age and not to that older age itself. The material from that older age might be called "classic" while the modern material that evokes that feel might be called "old school."

I know that this may be a bit too pedantic, but since I am writing full blog posts rather than merely providing a one sentence reply, I reserve the ancient right of industrious pedantry. Michael J. Finch - author of Swords & Wizardry which happens to be an "old school" game for which I own the "white box" edition - writes in his "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" that for an old school game like Swords & Wizardry "just printing the rules an starting to play as you normally do will produce a completely pathetic gaming session -- you'll decide that 0e is just missing all kinds of important rules. What makes 0e different from other games isn't the rules themselves, it's how they're used."

To phrase it in a cruder and less flattering light, "Old School Games are games that are missing rules, but are cool enough to inspire you to make your own." That's not exactly what Michael is saying, but it's kind of what I think the Old School Games actually were. Original D&D was so vague in its mechanics that it lead to the creation of a host of other role playing games -- starting with Ken St. Andre's innovative Tunnels & Trolls (which I blogged about here). The game that best captures this "missing rules but great inspiration" is Superhero 2044. The game is incomplete as it is, but it influenced so many later games like Champions and Superworld as I discussed in this earlier post.

By this "missing rules but great inspiration" criterion, most of the successful OSR movement games qualify. Those that don't qualify lack the inspiration component of the equation, though there are a couple of OSR games that are more "Middle Age" School than Old  School and have more complete rules as the games of the 2nd age of RPGs tended to. Among the most successful of these OSR games - and these are all games I own - I'd list Swords & Wizardry, Adventurer Conqueror King, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Having said that these games qualify as Old School Games, I'm going to revert to the easiest answer to the initial question and combine it with the new definition. I'll be answering what game from the 1st generation of RPGs I own is the "Most Old School" or best exemplifies the "missing rules, but great inspiration" mentality. I thought about Superhero 2044, but have decided against it.

I own a copy of the White Box Collector's Edition of Dungeons & Dragons - as well as all of the supplements - and I certainly think that it is in the competition. The core 3 "little brown books" do not contain enough clarification on the combat system to make a completely playable game, add to that a lack of mechanics for a host of other situations, and it falls firmly in the "missing rules camp." The supplements like Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and Eldritch Wizardry added a rich inspirational flare - as did Gygax's prose - all of which make it a strong contender for the title.

But Game Designer's Workshop's En Garde! is a strong competitor. It is filled with tidbits of background and inspiration and yet is lacking in a number of mechanical areas. I say lacking, but let's face it a part of the OSR movement happened due to the fact that a lot of rules may not actually be necessary. I love En Garde!'s dueling mechanic, and I love that it is "dedicated" to Danny Kaye - among others. 

Fletcher Pratt's Naval Game isn't a role playing game, but since his Harold Shea novels (co-written with Sprague De Camp) and this game influenced the creation of D&D, I thought I'd list it hear as in the running. The game requires you to own Jane's Fighting Ships or similar book to properly play. 

Then there's the Fantasy Heartbreaker entry. The Complete Warlock is a product of the Southern California gaming scene and is an attempt to fill in some of those areas that were missing in the D&D rules set. There is a lot to like in Warlock and it is clear that it influenced J. Eric Holmes' writing on the Basic Set of D&D. It has critical hit charts, percentile based combat charts (by weapon), a spell point system, level based abilities for Thieves akin to 4e, Elves as a class, and a cornucopia of alternate ways to "play D&D." I'm desperately tempted to call this glorious book the "most old school RPG" I own.

In the end though, Original D&D wins out. I'm still not sure how to play this game. Have you checked out that initiative system in Eldritch Wizardry? Do you use it?

Special Self-Promotion Section

As a reminder, I am in the middle of a Kickstarter for a second series of Cthulhu Claus Holiday Cards. You can back it by clicking the link in the side bar. A picture of the first series is below.

#RPGaDAY #4: Most Recent RPG Purchase -- What Do You Mean by Most Recent? Espionage vs 5th Edition Player's Handbook

I've been having fun thinking about Dave Chapman's (aka +Autocratik or @autocratik) #RPGaDAY prompts. While I haven't been keeping up with the calendar, and am about nine days behind, the list of 31 ideas for rpg related blog posts have been thought provoking in different ways. One of the most interesting things about the prompts is that there are many ways to approach each one. For example, when I wrote my response to prompt #2 I made some distinctions about what it was to actually be a gamemaster. The distinctions led me to two different answers. A similar thing happened when I thought about today's post on the "Most recent RPG purchase." I began asking myself whether Dave was asking what was the most recent RPG I've purchased  or whether he was asking which RPG I've purchased most recently. These are two different things.

The "most recent RPG I've purchased" isn't a recent RPG at all. For the past month I have been scouring through my gaming collection to find the copy of the Espionage adventure Merchants of Death that belongs in my Espionage boxed set. I've never played Espionage, nor it's follow up Danger International, but I have always been intrigued with how his game shaped the future of the Hero Game system and more importantly the Champions RPG. Though I own - and have played - Top Secret and James Bond and have run sessions of Night's Black Agents (which is awesome and currently available from Pelgrane Press), I haven't run or played an spy thriller using the Hero System. I am a fan of the system overall and have wanted to run a game ever since I read Aaron Allston's Strike Force where he discussed how he had adapted the martial arts rules from Danger International for use in his Champions campaign. He believed that the way martial arts were modeled in DI were superior to the old 3rd edition and earlier Champions system. Clearly the other designers agreed because the 4th edition of Champions uses a modified version of Aaron's adapted system.

So my interest has been high for a long time and Espionage and Danger International have long been a part of my game collection. Recently I've been wanting to play a superhero game with my gaming group and have been confronted by one significant problem. All of my favorite superhero role playing games that have tactical components have a fairly extensive character generation system. DC Heroes, Champions, and Savage Worlds each have qualities I very much like, but since they allow you to build characters based on a concept and my group has little experience with this kind of character generation. In fact, it often leads to analysis paralysis due to an overwhelming number of choices. Yes, 3.x D&D/Pathfinder have a daunting number of choices too, but some of them are spaced out across play and not all the decisions have to be made up front. My thoughts were that if I could run a game of Espionage which utilizes the Hero System, but where the choices are more confined, it would be a nice introduction. Trust me when I say that character generation sessions have broken down by merely asking the question "How strong is your superhero?" Given that some of my players don't own all the games I own...scratch that...none of my players own all of the games I own, we often have to have character creation sessions. Given the build a character nature of Champions/DC/Savage Worlds this can lead to some pretty dull "game time."

Long story short, I wanted to run Espionage for the players and I wanted to use the introductory adventure Merchants of Death. I couldn't find it anywhere, so I had to hunt eBay and various online used RPG stores until I found a copy of Espionage that had the adventure. I am clearly not the only person who has misplaced the adventure as it took quite some time to find a copy. But find one I did, and it arrived today making it my "most recently purchased RPG."

As for the most recent RPG that I have purchased, I will spare you the long context laden backstory. Last Friday I got my copy of the D&D 5th Edition's Player's Handbook at my Friendly Local Game Store. Let me just say that I am a big fan of D&D in all of its editions, but that I am very impressed with this particular edition and look forward to playing it. I am also intrigued how Hasbro has chosen to have D&D be the only brand mentioned on the cover of the Player's Handbook. Wizards of the Coast is mentioned inside the book, and Wizards and Kobold Press are listed on the module, but D&D is the only brand present on the cover of this book. It's a very interesting assertion of brand commitment.

#RPGaDAY #3: First RPG Purchased -- Tunnels & Trolls 5th Edition

It happened approximately one month before the Great Sweet Pickles Bus War of 7th grade. My friend Mark and I had been competing over who could purchase the most Michael Whelan covered Elric novels and who could purchase the most obscure role playing game. Given the number of game stores in Reno, NV at the time and the purchasing power of 7th graders, the phrase "obscure roleplaying game" is better defined as "a game not published by TSR."

Mark struck first with his purchase of the Tunnels & Trolls 5th edition rules from Flying Buffalo. I was really impressed when Mark showed me his copy and I knew that I had to find my own copy - and get some of those "solo dungeons" that used the Tunnels & Trolls system. It didn't take long for me to find the rules and copies of Arena of Khazan, City of Terrors, and Beyond the Silvered Pane. Before I knew it, I was enjoying hours upon hours of role playing fun. I had a file card case full of combatants for Arena of Khazan, and a handful of characters who survived long enough to become precious to me.

While there are some detractors of the Tunnels & Trolls game system, I have always thought that the game was not only enjoyable but also innovative.

1. Liz Danforth's art and editing in the 5th edition of the game set it apart from many other publication of the era. The 5th edition is a truly professional edition and prior to the soon to be released "Deluxe Edition" it has been my go to edition of the game.
2. Ken St. Andre's version of the Saving Throw as presented in T&T has had a deep influence on the gaming industry. Where D&D at the time had saves for "spells," "poison," and "rods, staves, wands" T&T had a system that used a character's attributes against a target number. It took D&D several generations before they adopted something similar with the 3rd edition rules set, and completed the transition with their own 5th edition. Prior to 3.0, stat checks in D&D were typically "roll stat value or less on d20" and 3.0 changed that to roll d20+stat modifier vs. target. T&T's system uses a simple formula [15 + (level of challenge x 5)] - Statistic = Target Number on open ended 2d6. Dan Eastwood does a nice statistical breakdown of the system here.
3. The concept of exploding dice was new with T&T and though T&T explodes on doubles where some other games explode on largest value, it isn't hard to see the influence of T&T.

As I mentioned earlier, Moldvay Basic was the first rpg game system I owned, but T&T 5th edition was the first edition that I spent my own allowance on. It was my first purchase, and it is still one of my first loves. I might just crack open that file card case this evening.