Showing posts with label King of RPGs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label King of RPGs. Show all posts

Sunday, June 24, 2012

[Movies] D&D 3 -- When Your Trailer is Less Exciting than a Board Game Trailer it's Pretty Bad

It is a shame that the new trailer for the Descent 2nd Edition Board Game is more engaging than the new D&D movie teaser.

Before anyone starts thinking that this is going to be a screed about how the new D&D movie looks terrible, is going to be terrible, and how lame Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro are, let me make it clear that this will not be that kind of post.  Instead, it will be a post about how the movie looks like it doesn't have a budget, that even "bad" fantasy films can be entertaining, and how this is yet another legacy of the pre-Wizards dying TSR.

Let me say that thing that leaped out at me the instant I hit the play button on the new D&D trailer was how low budget it looks.  The CGI dragon looks more CGI than the dragon in a Kickstarter project I funded, the actors stilted acting makes it clear that the budget for talent was pretty low, the make up isn't very good, and the visual effects on the spells...well...let's just say that I'm less than impressed.  By all appearances Joel Silver has closed all stops and plugged up the budget everywhere...which is to say that this film appears to be the D&D equivalent of the Roger Corman "Fantastic Four" film.  It looks like Silver and company are spending just enough money on the movie to maintain the license.

Setting that aside, some of my favorite fantasy movies were made with zero budget.  What really seems to matter in these cases is whether the people making the project are actively trying to entertain you.  From what I know, and though I know someone who worked on the project that is still remarkably little, many of the people on this project really want it to work.  One of the writers on the film is a regular D&D player, has worked on a number of good rpg products in the past, and is an all around nice guy.  My hope is that this film can rise to the quality of a "Hawk the Slayer," "Krull," "Beastmaster," "The Knights of Bloodsteel," or even the second D&D movie.  I don't have much hope that it will be as good as the "Midnight Chronicles" movie that Fantasy Flight Games made, as that is a pretty remarkable piece of work considering its budget.  I don't think it is too much to ask that if this film isn't going to feel epic, that it will at least feel fun.  My favorite "D&D" movie is Jet Li's classic "Swordsman II" -- my second is his amazing "Kung Fu Cult Master" -- and if one takes off their "Hong Kong films are awesome glasses" it becomes pretty clear that "Swordsman II" is kind of hokey.  But sword energy is still pretty awesome.

All of the problems with this D&D movie, and the earlier two, can be laid in the lap of one single transaction and that is the sale of the license to Courtney Solomon in the dying days of TSR.  Courtney was 19 at the time and eventually managed to bring the film to fruition by partnering with New Line Cinema for distribution who purchased the rights for $5 million.  This ensured Courtney a solid payday, and ensured that until someone buys the license away from Silver, we are unlikely to get the "D&D movie we want."





Friday, March 19, 2010

You Should Be Reading "King of RPGs"



In his invaluable The Complete Guide to Manga¹, Jason Thompson writes, "Dragons and wizards, sword-wielding heroes with improbably large shoulder pads, terms such as levels and hit-points -- many of the trappings of Japanese fantasy can be traced to RPGs (role-playing games), the popular category of video and tabletop games that originated in America." Thompson follows this statement with a quick rundown of the development of the RPG field in Japanese culture and a discussion of the ascendancy of Video Game RPGs and Collectable Card Games and how tabletop RPGs enjoy a "small cult following in Japan, as in America." According to Thompson, roleplaying games influence on Manga as a whole is largely as a background influence, with few Manga being based specifically on roleplaying titles. There are some key exceptions, including the Record of Lodoss War series, that is based on the Japanese RPG Sword World by Ryo Mizuno and a couple of others, but for the most part RPGs influences the underlying archetypes of Manga fantasy without being a direct inspiration for the field.

Think of it in terms of the anime Dragon Ball Z's "Over 9000!".



Or even in terms of the cult classic martial arts film Kung Fu Cult Master's "if I have 6000 points, he has at least 10,000!.



Both of the above pieces of entertainment contain obvious roleplaying game references, but neither is a representation of a specific roleplaying game or aspect of roleplaying game culture, though R. Talsorian Games did release a roleplaying game based on Dragonball Z in 2000.

What has never really been done in Manga is a book about the people who play roleplaying games -- a kind of Manga equivalent of the Dead Gentleman The Gamers series of movies. Author Jason Thompson and illustrator Victor Hao have changed that with King of Rpgs. This book is Manga that is a send up of every aspect of the gaming hobby in a way that takes the meta-cognitive "tell the story of the adventure the group is roleplaying" storytelling of the Dead Gentleman productions and turns it on its head. King of RPGs isn't a book about how fun the stories gaming groups create during their playing sessions and how funny many of the common experience of the gaming group are. King of RPGs tells the story of gamers and gaming through the lens of a shōnen Sports Manga. These Manga take the competitive nature of athletics and transform them into wildly over the top stories that combine narrative tropes from Kung Fu films with "poverty to success" storylines. The formula, known as spo-kon is apologetically melodramatic and can be wildly humorous depending on the title. According to Thompson these Manga often feature stories where the hero, "through intense training...struggles to succeed in sports, although it is a long, hard road full of blood, sweat, and self-sacrifice. His coach or his father...is harsh and unforgiving, an archetype known as oni coach. Of course, he has the hero's best interests at heart...or at least the drive to win, no matter what the costs."

Take a second to imagine that description if you will. Imagine one of the players in your gaming group as the "poor struggling player" who through intense training will succeed in being the ultimate game player, although the path will be full of blood, sweat, and self-sacrifice. Imagine that you, the game master for the group, are the oni coach who must push this gamer to become the best he can be and to win at all costs. Imagine wild roleplaying sessions where you bring live snakes, throw dangerous objects at the players, and where the dangers the players face are as real as the ones their characters face. If you can imagine that, you can begin to imagine what Thompson and Hao are doing with King of Rpgs.

From the back of the book:

At the University of California, Escondido, no one would ever guess that freshman Shesh Maccabee is a hard-core gamer -- and in recovery to boot, following a court order, a wireless ban, and months of therapy (all because of one little seven-day Internet cafe episode). His friend Mike -- who personally prefers Japanese-console RPGs -- is tasked with keeping Shesh far away from any computer with access to World of Warfare.
Everything is going according to plan -- until a Ren Faire fangirl introduces them to the campus gaming club, where they meet Theodore, a fanatical tabletop game master whose single goal in life is to run the greatest Mages & Monsters game in the world. And there just happens to be room for two more players. Soon Shesh and Mike are dragged into the dungeon of hard-core gaming -- and cops, baboon men, Sri Lankan cave roaches, and Gothemon card collectors converge in the zaniest adventure that ever involved twenty-sided dice!


In the first volume of the series, Thompson and Hao manage to spoof, parody, and turn into dangerous life-threatening activity, almost all aspects of the gaming hobby. The only thing they leave out are the board gaming community with its fertile Diplomacy and Eurogame fields, but I am sure that those will have their day as well.

Victor Hao's artwork is dynamic and he manages to bring the wild visual storytelling one would expect in a Football or Baseball Manga into a representation of tabletop game playing with remarkable skill. Hao makes playing an RPG look like a visually exciting activity! Trust me, this is quite an accomplishment. Imagine turning the conversation in Plato's Republic into an action movie, not what they are describing the actual conversation. Not easy right. Hao could do it. I know, because he made sitting around a table chatting look fast, furious, and life-threatening! The panel to panel artistic storytelling is excellent. Hao's artwork leads the reader's eye naturally from panel to panel. Hao's Manga caricatures are well drawn throughout the book, though there are some pages/panels where I think he could have added more consistency to the line art. The monster designs are excellent and Hao does a wonderful job differentiating the "fantastic" sequences and hyper-action sequences from the "real world" sequences in a way that visually notifies the reader what emotional queues they should be following.

Thompson's writing on the book is strong. The reader immediately sympathizes with Shesh and his friend Mike, and we come to like their gaming group as well. Theodore Dudek, the young Game Master (read oni coach), of the book is a glorious creation. A creation that Thompson is so fond of that he even created a blog "written" by the character. True to form, Dudek's blog is not only a good "send up" of the Gygaxian personality GM from the 80s, it is also a very good game blog.². Thompson, a gamer who cut his teeth on the classic Erol Otis covered Red Box edition of Basic D&D, has a wide knowledge of the gaming hobby and is able to incorporate references to the tabletop RPG, live-action RPG, CCG, and Video Game genres seamlessly and fluidly into the narrative. He is also a master of taking what seems like a relatively mundane scenario and turning it into a nightmarishly wild experience for the participants. Thompson also pokes a bit of fun at the anti-D&D (and other games) sentiment that rears its head from time to time in the Culture Wars and has a character dedicated to eradicating game playing due to its harm to society. One wonders when/if Thompson and Hao will include a send up of the classic Chick Tract -- Dark Dungeons.



I cannot wait to see what they could do with the above panel.

I highly recommend the King of RPGs Manga for any gamer fan, or really for anyone who wants to read a funny over the top story about college kids. The book is quite fun. My only criticism is that we have to wait almost a year before the second volume is released. It only takes about half-an-hour to read the Manga, and it leaves you wanting more. It doesn't leave you wanting to wait a year! It's like Frito Lay potato chips, you want more than one!

To help tide us over. Thompson and Hao are offering a lot of behind the scenes information on the King of RPGs blog and have posted this hilarious Book Commercial for the Manga based on Sonny Chiba's classic Satsujin ken (aka The Streetfighter).





¹At least it's been invaluable to me as a non-Otaku. The book has served as a wonderful introduction and critical resource of recommendations for me as I explore what Manga I think might be worth investing my time and money in reading. It has become the Manga equivalent of Thomas Weisser's excellent Asian Cult Cinema. Weisser's book turned me from a fan of films like Hardboiled and The Killer into a full blown obsessive fan of films like Bride with White Hair, Swordsman 2, and Chinese Ghost Story. My friend Jay and I made several road trips to the Bay Area in order to buy Tai Seng videos that eventually covered a wide array of genres.Return to Text.

²Though for some reason Thompson doesn't always post comments from Dudek's imaginary nemesis (B N Nemecz) who stops by the site to harangue the lad. Nemecz put a little bit of work into a post responding to Dudek's "First Time DM'ing Tips: Part 1" that has yet to see the light of day. It should also be noted that Thompson's Dudek blog stirred a bit of a controversy on the RPG Bloggers network. Some readers felt that it was a "marketing ploy" and should be excluded from a network of gaming blogs, but other argued that the blog -- in addition to being a viral marketing attempt -- was a very good gaming blog in its own right. While I wouldn't confuse "Dudek's" opinions with Thompson's by assuming they are one and the same, "Dudek" brings up some interesting points for conversation.Return to Text.


Thursday, January 28, 2010

Expanding James Maliszewski's "To Roll 20" D&D Combat System



Over at his absolutely must read "in praise of Old School RPG gaming" site Grognardia today, James Maliszewski takes on one of the typical myths regarding the complexity of the original AD&D and D&D games. Many people believe that you absolutely need the combat matrices on pages 74 and 75 of the Dungeon Master's Guide in order to run combat, and that continually looking at those charts can diminish the verisimilitude (to use a Gygaxian term) of the role playing experience.

In response to this criticism, James -- who has worked on the excellent "new school" games Colonial Gothic and Thousand Suns -- shares the chartless system he uses in his home campaign Dwimmermount. He describes the system as follows:

when a monster attacks, I roll a D20, and add the monster's Hit Dice and the target's (descending) armor class to the result of the dice roll. If the sum is 20 or more, the attack is successful. This system is simple and quick and I don't need to consult any charts.


What James has done here, and it is mildly ingenious, is to deconstruct the old THACO system that was introduced late in the 1st edition. Essentially, under the THACO system each player wrote down a number that represented how high that player needed to roll on a d20 (after modifiers were added) for their character to hit Armor Class (AC) zero -- THACO stood for To Hit AC 0. Using the old THACO system, the player essentially ran the following subroutine:

  1. Roll d20 + Attribute Bonuses + Item Bonuses
  2. Get total.
  3. Subtract total from THACO.
  4. Result is AC you hit


The subroutine created what can only be described as a seesawing of arithmetic. First you add and get a result, then you subtract, and finally you compare that to a target number -- your THACO. It was a clumsy system, but it was better than the charts and became the basis for the 2nd edition combat system.

James has taken that seesawing subroutine and made it a one sided equation. It's fairly elegant.

  1. Roll d20 + Attribute Bonuses + Item Bonuses + Opponents AC
  2. Compare result to Target Number of 20


The system has the same mathematical effect as the THACO system, but adds a layer of elegance by putting all the arithmetic at the beginning of the process -- a negative AC would be a negative modifier to the initial roll.

On his site, James has included the chart for Fighting Men that he uses in his campaign. I don't know what chart James used to base his chart on, but I have calculated the "To Roll 20" bonuses for the character classes based on the charts in the old DMG.






I would like to mention one small thing when using these charts. James' "To Roll 20" system does make it slightly more difficult to hit certain armor classes than the charts on page 74 would normally be. For example:

Kin Rathslayer is a 7th Level Fighter with a +1 Longsword and a 17 Strength. Due to his weapon and Strength, Kin gets a +2 total attribute and item bonus to hit. He decides to attack Theodore Dudek "villainous rogue" who has an Armor Class of -8 due to equipment, attributes, and armor.

Using the chart on page 74 of the DMG, Kin would need to roll a 20 -- excluding his +2 bonuses -- to hit Theodore. With his bonuses, Kin needs to roll an 18. Kin has a 15% chance to hit Theodore and take the crown of "King of RPGs."

Using the "To Roll 20" system, Kin would roll d20 +6 (level bonus) +1 (weapon bonus) + 1 (strength bonus) - 8 for Theodore's AC. Kin needs to roll a natural 20 in order to hit Theodore. He has only a 5% chance of success.


This slight drawback occurs in the regular THACO system as well, and is due to the fact that on the charts each character class can hit multiple ACs on a roll of 20. For example, a 7th level fighter hits AC -6 through -10 with a total of 20. All four of those ACs have an equal chance of being hit by the fighter. A 4th level fighter hits AC -2 through -7 on a total of 20 on the DMG chart on page 74. The THACO and "To Roll 20" systems remove this long tail effect and substitute a much needed ease of play to the system. The statistics work out differently than the charts -- more for the non-fighter classes than for the fighter -- but the dividends in ease of play more than make up for that drawback.

Were I to run a 1st edition game, I would certainly use James' "To Roll 20" system and mock those who think that AD&D requires charts to determine if you hit your opponent. At least I would if I could figure out how the initiative rules actually work when using speed factors and weapon sizes.

Monday, January 25, 2010

The Street Master: Evangelizing Role Playing Games Without Dispelling Stereotypes


I have recently been frequenting the King of RPGs blog -- a blog used to promote gaming and the new King of RPGs Manga by Jason Thompson and Victor Hao. For the past few weeks, I've been deliberating whether or not to purchase the manga. After finally taking the time to view their Street Master video, I decided to take the plunge and order the book on Amazon today.

Before I get into the premise of the manga, I thought I would share the premise of the Street Master, share the first Street Master video, and tell you why this strange occurrence tipped the scales and goaded me into purchasing King of RPGs.

The Street Master is a mysterious individual who wanders Modern Post-Apocalyptic America in the pursuit of sharing the glory of role playing games with the world. Only role playing games can save us from the cultural (and entertainment) malaise currently overwhelming society. The Street Master sets up D&D games on street corners in random cities and evangelizes the entertainment merits of role playing games by recruiting passers by into spontaneous sessions of gaming fun.

I think that this is an ingenious way to share our hobby with the world at large and wish more people would set up random role playing game sessions with the sole desire of sharing a fun time with complete strangers and spreading the word about this wonderful entertainment medium. I don't necessarily recommend spreading the word by dressing up in Necromantic Sorcerer garb like the Street Master, that doesn't really help dismiss stereotypes, though it might be interesting if there were suddenly multiple Street Masters running games in multiple cities at the same time.

Regardless of the outfit, the gaming hobby desperately needs more advocates like the Street Master.



There are a couple of things that happen in this video that prompted me to buy the King of RPGs manga.

First, it's pretty obvious that the Street Master is Theo Dudek (the main character of King of RPGs) in disguise. Those nasty rumors that the Street Master is Jason Thompson obviously ignore the fact that Jason has horribly slandered Theo Dudek in print, and that his wearing of a d20 necklace would constitute mockery of the highest degree.

Second, if the comic book exhibits anywhere close to the sense of humor it would take to initiate an endeavor like the Street Master, it will be an entertaining diversion.

Third, the Street Master uses Gaming Paper in the promotion of our hobby. The folks at gaming paper are also wonderful advocates for the gaming hobby, and anyone who supports them deserves a second look.

Fourth, the Street Master says something that I am quickly going to turn into my gaming mantra -- even though it is humorously ironic.

"There are no limits in role playing games! ...Except the Rules!"


I want to add that there has been a minor kerfuffle regarding King of RPGs and viral marketing in the RPG Bloggers Network. I'll write a post with my opinions on that soon.

What do you think are the best ways to evangelize our hobby and expand the number of gamers playing role playing games?