ZDL

I met the artist on Mastodon and got permission to post. I like the aquarian background.

Happy New Year to you too.

Sometimes the DM has to send a rescuer to avert a TPK. This can seem like the hand of God tweaking the PC's nose. So, best if the rescuer fits into the narrative, somehow, and it's also best if the rescuer helps the party survive rather than single handedly waltz in and save the day.

Yep. It can be done correctly, but it's very easy to Tom Bombadil a rescue.

Like Hamlet, "I must avenge my father's death." A ghost story with vengeance as a dramatic situation. Definitely medieval and it ends in a TPK as a dramatic resolution.

TICKET TO RIDE! CARCASSONNE!

Two of the best games ever made, in my view.

(For the first, I like the Europe version best.)

We love Ticket To Ride but I've never played Carcassonne.

Carcassonne is a tile-laying game where you try to place limited meeples to control resources that are revealed as the tiles are laid out. You have to balance playing the long game (risking losing access to meeples) against the short game (getting sparse resources but keeping meeple flexibility).

I've only ever played the base game or used "The River" expansion. Both are good, though I actually think the river does a good job of keeping things localised.

I will ask my kids about Carcassonne. They turned me onto Ticket To Ride.

This Thanksgiving it was Doodle Dice and Qwirkle. For Black Friday it's family game.

Why did I read that as "aggravated"?

Good to hear from you ZDL. Vivian and I agree that aggravated feed fits. I also added our tumblr feed just below the aggravated feed.

An alarming trend I noticed over my life—though I haven't read much recent SF or fantasy so I don't know if it's continued—is the inexorable change of speculative fiction from being largely optimistic to largely pessimistic, at least in western specfic.

Old-timey SF in particular was, even if branded as "horror", still pretty positive at least in terms of the setting. Sure THESE PEOPLE may have died horribly, but the world at large was doing fine, and the reason these people could die horribly was because the world was doing well and humanity was spreading out to the stars!

Slowly, but surely, across the '70s and into the '80s and '90s that positivity faded. The world was going to be obliterated in nuclear suicide. The world was going to be an unremitting corporate-driven Hellhole of crime and corruption. We were all doomed and the protagonists of stories were the unlucky ones who'd survived.

Like I said I haven't kept up, so maybe this trend eventually reversed itself (though the popularity of shows like Rick & Morty suggest to me that existential dread and straight-up nihilism still rule the roost). But if it has, that's still nigh-on 50 years of social depression so serious it mimics clinical depression in its feel and its impact.

Is that something worth discussing?

N. K. Jemison just won three Hugos in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy which was deeply dystopian. So the trend hasn't reversed. I do think there is more variety today then at any time in the past but mostly post apocalytic and totalitarian corporacratacies rule.

Do you find this as troublesome as I do?

In our superheroes we've moved to anti-heroes and psychopaths (I consider post-Dark Knight Returns Batman as a psychopath). In our visions of the future we only seem to be able to picture dystopias.

There doesn't appear to be hope for anything in popular entertainment. It reminds me of the endlessly depressing post-holocaust fiction of the '80s.

Troubling, maybe. Realistic, probably.

I'm not sure "realism" is a net good in this genre. SF used to be a vision of hope. Unrealistic hope, yes, but it gave ideals to strive for. When (not "if"!), in the process of striving for said ideals you fell short, you still made the world a better place in the process.

We've lot ideals. We're wallowing in cynicism and self-pity. And it reflects in the world around us: people are more self-involved, nihilistic, and short-term focused.

Yes, Megan brought this up in the discussion. This isn't just happening in Science Fiction. Comedys used to be funny or they wouldn't last. Now cringeworthy is a goal that somehow is supposed to have humor embedded in it.

She's ... not wrong. Comedies in general haven't been funny in ages. It's been more frat boy pranks and sorority "mean girls" for ages now.

The Star Trek (original) TV series was my introduction to SF. Then I kind of spread forward and backward from that: the New Wave stuff in one direction (as it was published) and the Golden Age stuff in the other, chiefly Asimov, Heinlein, etc. for that bunch.

Yeah, I was books first and when there was science fiction television I thought, "Oh, wow!" but it rarely lived up to expectations. Except for "The Trouble With Tribbles". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Tribbles

I was books first in general, but my parents weren't much for SF so I didn't have SF books until after I got exposed to the very notion of it via Star Trek.

I worked at the library shelving books and after I read through all the SF in the children's area I started checking out the Science Fiction they had upstairs. Now I read on my Kindle using Overdrive so still a library patron.

Books have always enthralled me. When I was approaching my teen years A well written story would keep me reading till I fell asleep with the book in my hand. Mother complained about it but she never denied me access to books. We lost my father when I was in 7th grade. It was a traumatic time for us but we survived. When I reached Jr.High School I volunteered to help with the school library. It was a great way to learn just how libraries operate and why books have to be shelved in the right place for things to run smoothly.

I still read at night until I fall asleep. Sometimes I have to reread a page or two in the morning. And what am I reading now? The new N.K. Jemisin Hugo nominee, "The City We Became".

Without going into a lot of the detail. OD&D was written for the miniature wargaming community of the early 1970s. This was a community used to running sophiscated multi-session campaign. As there was almost no commercial rulesets, people made their system cobbled together from existing games like Diplomacy, miniature wargames, and above all their own experience in coming up with rules for a specific scenario based on historical or in case fiction.

What rules were written were usually typed and mimeographed. Mostly used as a reference (charts, tables, etc) relying on the referee or players of the campaign for the explanations of how to use them.

OD&D was written as a set of guidelines to explain to miniature wargamers how they could run similar campaigns to what they heard was happening in the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva. It was not intended to be for novices picking up a game for the first time off of a bookshelf.

It subsequent popularity outside of this wargaming community caught Gygax off guard and he and later TSR recognized the issue and started correcting it once they had the resources to do so. For example the Holmes Basic Rules.

I recommend reading books like Playing at the World, Hawk & Moor, and the Elusive Shift to get a sense of what was happened and why OD&D was what it was.

This is also important why there are big fans of OD&D. It not because of nostalgia or because it was first. It because it represents that early mindset of the hobby. When people understood that there was great fun to be had with gaming but because of the lack of commercial products* had to come up with their own to play.

OD&D is represent that for tabletop roleplaying. A set of guidelines to be used as foundation for one own campaign. It was understood by its initial buyer in 1974 and 1975 as a starting point for their own campaign. Hobbyists like that idea and build on it for themselves and love how OD&D enables this.

For example how one weaves a basket in a campaign? In a more recent edition or currently published RPG, likely there is an answer in the system. In OD&D, you would have to come up with your own take. Decide which factor the system already has that is important, attributes? class? level? Or perhaps come up something new for characters like a skill system or my own ability system for the Majestic Fantasy RPG.

OD&D by its nature forces the referee and players to come up with their own answers. Gygax when writing used his experience running wargames campaign to put in what he felt would be the most useful material. Most of which are lists of stuff (monsters, items, etc.), tables, and charts.

The characters mechanics were bare bones because wargame campaigns relied heavily on either how reality worked or how it was described in fiction. So if somebody wanted know how far they could jump, then they would look at sports statistics and knowing that a 10 Strength was average figure out what a 15 strength character could do from there. This can be seen in the attitude that Gygax, Arneson, and other referees of the era have about the trend of ever more complex system. One of common answer "Why don't you just look it up in a book or encyclopedia?" Which reflects what they did back in the day.

Overall my view that this is a style of play, not THE style nor a worse style. Some folks don't have the time to the research like they had to circa 1970. They don't have the leisure time and appreciate authors that take the time to do the work and lay it out nicely in a rulebook. Bonus points if it also straightforward and quick to use and find.

It helpful to have a through rulebook when the players and referees are novices as well.

But it doesn't change the fact that for many OD&D does work 'as is'. But it helps to understands the early 70s wargaming mindset to better understand what OD&D does and does not do as a system. In that context OD&D is fine 'as is'.

*One of the few commercially available ruleset for wargaming was Chainmail. Because of that it will well-known among the small wargaming community of the early 70s. Because it focus on medieval combat, along with the fantasy addenum, and also because Gygax was one of the author. It was mention for use with OD&D as a resource to use.

"I have played at tables running B/X or Holmes and, like always if the DM was good the game was good."

There is an element of truth to this that, however, obfuscates an important fact. I'll illustrate by way of analogy.

I know a person here who does magical things with wood to the point I call him "the wood whisperer". I have seen him create wonderful works of art with a pen knife and a repurposed screwdriver. So obviously that's all you need for woodworking, right? Because in the right hands a pen knife and a screwdriver are great woodworking tools!

Wrong.

He wouldn't even agree with that. His workshop has about, conservatively guessing, 50 gazillion chisels alone: not one of which is a repurposed screwdriver.

The fact that a good craftsman *can* make miracles with subpar tools doesn't mean that a) they should, or b) they'd want to.

Yes, some truly great campaigns have been run with Gary Gygax's dross, whether that was OD&D, AD&D, or even ... I don't know ... Cyborg Commando. But every time I hear of these, I wonder inside (and sometimes vocally) how much better they could have been had the GM been using tools that aided him in success instead of gaining success despite the tools at hand.

You're a musician. Imagine being told "a good enough musician can get by with a penny whistle" and as a result being forced to only ever do music with a penny whistle. That penny whistle is the OSR as it presents itself in my eyes.

Core takeaway. " I think there is room for the OSR concept: simple, fun-focused, hack-and-slash or exploration-oriented, pick-up-and-play games that also have room for depth and soul but that don't have a need for the millions of pages of rules for every contingency." My OSR experience starts with Rules Cyclopedia. I have earlier rulesets but only to collect and browse. I have played at tables running B/X or Holmes and, like always if the DM was good the game was good.

I think part of the thought process behind love of OSR is players remembering their early experiences and how much they loved the game when they started playing. The problem is that each of these players is remembering the game as it was played at their table and it was played differently at every table.

I've never actually used the full Cyclopedia, but I did follow the Basic/Expert/whatever the next level was called stack up to that point and found it pretty decent. It was a bit limiting and had some things that really grated on me (like "elf" being a class, or "dwarf") but the information presentation was good and the system was mostly clean, if limited in scope.

It did lack, however, things that other games had (like elves who weren't 100% fighter/magic-users!:D), like that coherent framework for governing situations not specified in the rules. I understand that was finally added on much later, but by then I was already tearing through dozens of other games and really had left D&D behind entirely.

What I really want from an "Old School Revolution" is something that has that simple, pick-up-quick vibe of the Basic/Expert/whatever chain but informed by nearly half a century of subsequent game design. Something with a single core mechanism, say, that covers combat, social situations (like hiring henchmen, or bargaining), physical feats, etc. in a single unifying mechanism.

Like, say, the Cepheus line of rules. Those are looking pretty nice these days.

@ZDL
1) My overall thesis is that the initial release of OD&D was sufficiently coherent for its audience. And unlike 15 years ago, we have folks like Jon Peterson who done the research and documented what was going on. Which is often at odds with what people remember.

The problem with OD&D is that it quickly escaped the confines of that audience. Gygax and TSR played catch up throughout the 70s as a result.

2) I am not sure how you read "Rules for everything" in my comments on what good for novices. But I think we can agree that if you want to write a book that teaches people who never gamed how to play tabletop roleplaying, then you have to more than just be a concise reference for a system however simple or complex it may be.

Original OD&D was not written for novices to the miniature wargaming hobby at the time.

@ZDL
As for the format of OD&D, of course it could be better. We are fifty years in and as a hobby and industry we learned a lot about how to explain and present OD&D.

THE issue of OD&D is that it assume the reader is part of the miniature wargaming community of the early 70s. If the reader wasn't then it a lot of important context was lost.

For that audience, OD&D was a superior presentation compared to what was currently available. It far more coherent than the other rulebooks for miniature wargaming that I read from that time period.

To say that Gygax should have done better assume that he had knew or planned for his game to spread beyond the miniature wargaming community.

Nor is comparing it to publishing standards outside of the wargaming community valid. The wargaming community of the time was it own world and publisher did what they could with the time and budget they had.

And today in 2021, we know so much more about what happening and what was being done. Thanks to collectors zines, games, and other material from the era has been found and documented.

As a result OD&D wasn't some poor first attempt but an important step and revolutionary in its own right. And because we have things better documented we can fill in the missing context and enjoy the game 'as is'.

And to clear there is no "lost' manuscript of missing rules out there. No additional rules. What documented that referee of the time used the rules as a framework and added their own research.

@Hairlarry
"Do you have any handle on pre D&D rules sets, scans or text files? Thanks."

I would sign up for the OD&D discussion forum or one of the old school facebook groups. There is https://www.acaeum.com/

Also the Comeback Inn for Arneson and Blackmoor.
https://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/

Prepare to be disappointed if you are looking for rules. The pre-D&D manuscript are pretty much what in the 3 LBBs of OD&D but specific details added or omitted as Gygax tried out things in his Greyhawk campaign.

Or in some cases some enterprising playtester got a copy and make their own take.

Don't get me wrong it is interesting and worthwhile to read and discuss about. But in the end in my opinion it all amount to what I outlined before. They thought of something to play, did the research, assembled or wrote some rules, played, tweaked and played again. Then repeat for something else.

Because of that most of what there are references, charts, and tables that supported this stuff. Everything else was word of mouth or ad-hoc inspiration.

"It helpful to have a through rulebook when the players and referees are novices as well."

More helpful is a coherent core system upon which people can hang consistent decisions.

I mean I EXPLICITLY SAID that "having a rule for everything" was insanity.

There is a huge difference between "having a rule for everything" and "having a rules framework that can cover everything".

Perhaps it might be best to read what you're replying to before you churn out two responses almost as long each as the original piece? You might not then feel the need to 'splain history I mentioned I was there for most of. Or to answer issues already addressed in the piece.

(I note also that you utterly failed to address another key point: that even within the milieu of the time, OD&D's writing was INCOHERENT ROT. It was crap writing just from straight information presentation perspectives.)

Thanks to everyone for their comments. Looks like we've got a hot button issue here. All opinions welcome. Please share.

Specifically for ZDL. I started on Rules Cyclopedia and a mix of that with AD&D. Do you think that Rules Cyclopedia, the whole game in one book, accomplished it's task? By the time it was published everyone knew there was mass market potential.

robertsconley - I played Gettysburg and other war games in the sixties but I was never in a club. Then I skipped forward to Rules Cyclopedia and AD&D because, life. Vivian aka sound played fantasy role playing with miniatures in the early seventies from some of the mimeograph sheets you mentioned. This was in Beebe, Arkansas. Carl helped us research on the internet and we found a war gaming club with a zine that had three or four pages about fantasy role playing. This was pre D&D. Do you have any handle on pre D&D rules sets, scans or text files? Thanks.

@robertsconley "Thanks to collectors zines, games, and other material from the era has been found and documented." This is what interests me. Do you have links, book titles, ...?

@hairlarry

I recommend right off

Playing at the World by Peterson.
Warning: Very Academic and very through.

Hawk and Moor by Kelly
Gets more into the personalities not as academically rigorous as Playing at the World but far more readable and approachable.

The Elusive Shift by Peterson
Documents what happened to the hobby after the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons. It charts the emerging concept of tabletop roleplaying as something distinct from wargaming.

Also more relevant to how the hobby is today than the pre-D&D era because of the fact that D&D was written with an audience of miniature wargamers in mind. As a result everybody outside of that like hex and counter wargamers and science fiction fandom developed their own interpretation of what the game meant. And the consequences of these interpretations remain to us this day.

And it documents those who have some of the exact same objection about OD&D that that ZDL's article has. As well responses to those objections.

thanks

No problem, I don't expect folks to always agree with me but folks should be aware of the wealth of documented history we now have. That it is there for folks to read and draw their own conclusions if interested.

> Original OD&D was not written for novices to the miniature wargaming hobby at the time.

Again, *I KNOW THIS*. This is why OD&D is *NOT* a good thing to fall back on for "simplicity". It is literally a set of guidelines written for a very small group of people in a very narrow area who'd been presumed to know certain things already (like Arneson's long-running proto-RPG campaigns), who had access to specific rulesets (Chainmail, chiefly), and thus knew what Gygax was talking about once you got through his absolutely terrible writing.

My thesis wasn't "OD&D was a bad thing for its time and place". It wasn't (Gygax's writing notwithstanding). It's a bad thing for *NOW*.

The goals of the OSR are laudable. Their weird worship of an incoherent mass of lore is not one of those laudable things. That is the point.

Thanks that clarifies the thesis of your original post.

As for folks and OD&D in the present, what you are not taking into account is that w now know about that "small group of people in a narrow area".

It not a mystery to the OD&D community and more than a few folks including myself wrote out about it.

For example Philotomy's Musings.
http://www.grey-elf.com/philotomy.pdf

Or Finch's Old School Primer
https://www.lulu.com/...age=1&pageSize=4


Folks talked to folks who ran successful OD&D campaign from back in the day and the few that continued to present.

It not 1995, when people only had the 3 LBB to go by and scratched their head at what looked like a incoherent mass of lore. By 2005 those who didn't dismiss OD&D found out there was more to its story, including myself.

By 2015 that story had become well known enough that folks figured out and expanded on the different ways to approach OD&D and it had regained some popularity and was supported again. Largely because OD&D did not turned out as incoherent as people thought.

So unless what had happened for past 20 years is addressed I don't see how a thesis that OD&D is a bad fit for *NOW* can be supported.

I think I'm going to just start replying by quoting things already said that you apparently didn't bother reading.

===========

I know a person here who does magical things with wood to the point I call him "the wood whisperer". I have seen him create wonderful works of art with a pen knife and a repurposed screwdriver. So obviously that's all you need for woodworking, right? Because in the right hands a pen knife and a screwdriver are great woodworking tools!

Wrong.

He wouldn't even agree with that. His workshop has about, conservatively guessing, 50 gazillion chisels alone: not one of which is a repurposed screwdriver.

The fact that a good craftsman *can* make miracles with subpar tools doesn't mean that a) they should, or b) they'd want to.

Sounds interesting

Well, I started writing it and then computers did computers and I lost an hour's work.

I'll try again later.

I hate these things.

I think this is a cool aspect of old school games that isn't common anymore. I love the grittiness of it, and the mixed levels never bothered me when I played. I remember even having some guest players over who brought over their level 9 character to our 5th level campaign. It never bothered us.

That said, for a dungeon master it's much easier to do milestone leveling and have all the players be the same level. It's a lot less to keep up with, and certainly for writing adventures I think it takes a load off the DM if they only have to worry about writing it for 4-6 players of 3rd level, than 4-6 players of 2nd-5th level.

Less bookkeeping for players too. Pencil and paper used to be required. And tasks were assigned. Map making, accounting, ...

There are several aspects of old school games I like, most notably the increased diversity that randomness tended to cause.

The wildly divergent capabilities of characters, however, was not one of them. In the presence of most GMs, having the weakest character meant a) dying, or b) not having anything to do. Neither of these is really conducive to enjoyment.

There are a handful of GMs I've met in my life who could give equal "screen time" to characters of wildly divergent capabilities, but those are few and far between.

Mixing levels amplifies this already-existing problem tenfold in my books. (Never mind that levels measure nothing meaningful in D&D; that's a rant for another day.) If you're the first level magic user in a group of 3-5th level other things, your entire gaming session consists of cowering in the corner and hoping you don't get noticed. You have nothing you can do that helps anybody (unless you're lucky enough to have gotten Sleep -- in which case you got to do one thing that might have slightly contributed), and this will also very badly impact your ability to level up to a point where you can be useful.

Points well taken. (and I really want to hear your rant for another day, that levels measure nothing meaningful in D&D.) Some things a DM can do to address your points are to start the new character at second or third level but still in the bottom ranks of the party. Level the character up quickly by adjudicating extra XP for doing well in spite of the low level disadvantage. Help the low level character out with found spells or magic armor/weapons.

And then there's the whole non combat side. The role playing, puzzle solving, exploration part where characters of all levels are more equal and the results depend more on the player than on PC stats. And DMs can award XP for good performance in non combat situations.

There is a built in premise in OSR games. PCs need XP to level up. You get XP by killing monsters. So, let's go kill some monsters. At a lot of tables that is the game. To me, it's a side show and as I get older I run more games that are all exploration and role play without any combat at all.

Liz wrote: "Just wanted to add something since I'm not sure i can even make it Monday. Mom at one point started a drop-in drop-out/open play DCC campaign (it didn't last very long due to where we lived) so I have a little experience.
What she did was give each player that was there their 4 level 0 characters for the funnel. After that, we all picked a character to level to level 1. The idea would be that it took 1 game to get to level 1, 2 additional games to get to level 2, 3 games for level 3, etc.
If a player was to have their character die, they'd start again with either 4 level 0s or a level 1.
So figuring out when you level is easy, since you only have to count the number of games you were able to play in. But you would still eventuality get level differences, as players die or miss games (again, this was supposed to be for open play)"

I'd like to add that in the oldest of old school most of your XP came from earning treasure not killing monsters. Which means two things 1. You don't have to fight that big bad monster if there was a way around it to get the treasure behind it. and 2. Your lower level character would level very rapidly because of the amount of gold the higher level party was able to procure.

I appreciate the comments about mixed level parties being difficult to adjudicate for. But one thing that is different for old school (unless I am mistaken they changed this in later editions) is that any magic user could use any scroll. Even if they are not high enough level to cast that spell. So if you have a low level wizard among your 5th level parties dropping a few scrolls changes the whole dynamic.

I didn't know that. When I mentioned scrolls I was thinking of more spells per day not stronger spells. Also when I was first playing D&D we got almost all our hit points from killing monsters just because the game wasn't treasure oriented. Generally speaking group XP is always the lion's share and will help low level characters level up fast.

You may level up quicker sure.

Provided you don't get instakilled by the first creature larger than a kitten that takes a swipe at you.

Provided you don't get BORED being relegated to the sideline for multiple grueling hours of watching OTHER PEOPLE have fun.

I mean my calculus is simple: I play games for fun. If I'm not having fun, I don't go to that game anymore. I don't plan fun on spec. It's fun out the door or I move on.

The non-combat things that hairylarry mentioned can ameliorate this, but in my experience those tended to be few and far between in most campaigns. You'd have a short time in the village talking to the villagers and then it's the next fifteen sessions in the dungeon.

There are a great many things to praise in the old school. The way mixed-level parties worked was not one of them. Some GMs could figure it out. Most couldn't, leaving the low-levelled character's player bored and/or frustrated and, very likely, absent next week.

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We've discussed solo play here before. I guess I'll have to try it to get it. I am definitely into 1 DM and 1 player. Viv and I did that for an Ari and Caper adventure. Ari, the PC, had a smart wild cat, Tude, for a pet. Her sidekick, Caper, was an NPC so I ran the game and 1 NPC in the party and Viv ran Ari and Tude. That really worked well.

Just had an interesting listen. Gamers chuckdee and Peter_R are both into solo gaming. https://archive.gamerplus.org/groups/7

I use a system called "Mythic" as a capstone system to do solo RP. It works quite well, the really cringe-inducing illustrations notwithstanding.

(I reviewed it here: https://archive.gamerplus.org/blogs/218)

Beautiful and simple setup. What's the strategy?

The game is a prettier version of the game Gobblet, it turns out. (https://www.boardspace.net/gobblet/english/gobblet_rules.pdf) Each player has three stacks of nesting cylinders (12 pieces total) and the board is 4×4. In alternating turns each player may choose one of:

1. Take the TOP piece of an off-board stack (i.e. the largest) and place it on a blank space.
2. As #1, but place it over (any, regardless of colour) SMALLER piece already on the board.
3. Move any showing piece of that player's colour to a blank space on the board.
4. As #3, but place it over a smaller piece.

The goal is to get four in a row of your own colour: horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. If you touch any piece in play that you can play (on the board, not in your stacks), you *must* play it. If lifting up a piece reveals a line of four of the opposing colour, and your move doesn't stop that line of four from completing, you lose. (In other words there's a memory component to the game.)

It's fast (a long game is 15 minutes) and it's simple to learn. It may be a perfect "we've got a few spare minutes, let's play!" game.

I like the simplicity of the rules.

It's suited to fairly young children, yet has depth that kept two adults playing a few times on the first trial.

Or maybe a grandparent and grandchild. In our hopefully soon post pandemic world.

I'll be playing it with a 13 year old boy sometime this weekend. I'll let you know.

Hi ZDL, how are you? Sounds like you have been busy. We have been doing a little rearranging here. Seems like we do it every spring. Makes the house feel enough different that we enjoy the effort. Hope you have some time to enjoy the rest of the week.

I'm less busy at work now (back to five day weeks) so much more busy over weekends finally. :D

I'm looking forward to warmer weather just not hot weather. That being said I cant wait to to see our flowers blooming all over our yard. Spring begins here tomorrow.

I liked it too. Looks like we're going up against a Frost Giant. Gonna have to be clever. The direct approach doesn't seem wise.

I used to read OOTS almost compulsively. It's been around for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time.

I'll check out the other ones starting with Gunnerkrigg.

Do you have any other favorite webcomics? I love that part where you're going through the archives and it seems like the goodness will never end. But before you notice you're waiting for the next episode and you only get to enjoy one or two episodes at a time.

There was one I enjoyed (Sluggy Freelance) until it went a bit too far off the rails for my tastes.

Thanks. I found it. Looks interesting.

Gunnerkrigg is really very good!

And I'm caught up on Gunnerkrigg. Wow is that an interesting storyline!

I"m enjoying it too. Kind of a modern day fantasy with gothic art.

With a hint of native American flavouring that is kind of nice too, yes.

Not as shiny but in some ways the coolest. Are they pretty heavy?

Yes. They're quite heavy.

Isn't this a dodecahedron? Icosahedrons are the 12-siders, no?

I know it's counter intuitive but dodecahedrons are 12 siders and icosahedrons are 20 siders.

But you mentioned "icosahedron with the hieroglyphs" in my gem dice picture and that's a 12-sider.

My mistake. Glancing at the photo I thought it was a 20 sider. So what are the hieroglyphs for, anyway?

I see you already answered this question.

Thanks. I like the icosahedron with the hieroglyphs.

That's an astrology d12: those are the sun signs or whatever those are called. The stone for that one is "blue sandstone". In person the stone has odd depths. The gold flecks are such that they give the illusion of being layered. Quite nice.

The d4 is a stone I can't find the English term for: it's literal translation is "natural black wood grain gemstone". It *might* be a petrified wood, but if it is it's smoother and more amorphous than any of those I've ever seen.

The d6 is blue turquoise (sintered, obviously: a real chunk that size would cost more than a car!), the d8 is a brown tiger eye, the 0-9 is lapis lazuli, the 00-90 is something that translates as "red sandstone" -- it's gold-flecked like the blue one -- the d12 is opal, and the d20 is green malachite.

The d6 with the weird glyphs in the foreground is something translated as "colourful jade" and that's one half of a pair of Tibetan divination dice. (The other half is still being etched. It will be made of "egg yolk opal".)

Yep, the hieroglyphic dice have pentagons for faces = 12 sider.

I'm https://mastodon.online/@zdl on Mastodon.

I followed you.

Followed back. I think. (I'm still not used to it.)

Anyone else using the fediverse?

Things are OK. You?

Getting there. The older I get the longer things take. Hope you are doing fine.

Well, 2020 was a year of two months of terror followed by 9 months of 6-day workweeks, so glad to see the back end of that year going away.

2020 was a year of staying home for us.

I used to have real trouble with SF as a gaming genre outside of space opera. The solution turned out to be in the very problem statement.

As you identified, there's just so much bewildering *variety* in science fiction in terms of genres, tones, scales, et al that it's almost, but not quite, a useless term.

Once I figured out that the reason I had problems with the genre outside of space opera was precisely because space opera is a very specific subset of science fiction, the rest fell into place: now I don't play science fiction games. I play "space exploration". Or "world settlement". Or "interplanetary trade". The key was always in my hand, without my recognizing it: focus.

Nice article that brings back so many years of frustration and its eventual resolution for me.

I didn't really understand SF gaming until I played in RoboG's game. I went for a computer technician and loved making up all kinds of stuff with cyber jargon. It's like you get to be a hacker without having to do all the work. Essentially every computer, data jack, cable, or robot became a path to more information. I enjoyed that.

I don't do card games but I'm interested in yours when it's available.

Thanks! - I wasn't a card game guy until I invented one.

I'm a huge fan of card games, but more of the traditional variety (though I play a lot of commercial ones too). Currently I'm a fan of "Six Tigers".

Does it work for a one off or only as a campaign?

I suppose it could work as a One Shot... But the game seems to work better as a campaign.

I wonder if ZDL has played it.

Nope. It has two strikes against it: first it's based on Amber which is really not my cup of tea, second it was made by someone who I would never wish to support financially in any way.

I like Precis Intermedia, the publisher, but one of the authors Brett Bernstein champions leaves me absolutely cold.

Roger Zelazny's Amber?

There was (ages ago!) an RPG based on Zelazny's books. This is the same system, just retooled for Greek mythology.

So I guess it's the Amber game system you don't like. The Amber books are great. SF/Fantasy adventure narrative. One issue with the book is that the protagonist is actually Hitler or should I say was Hitler since the series starts just after that unfortunate episode (from the point of view of the Amberites). The reason I don't think the magic system is good for RPGs is because walking in shadows and walking the pattern are solitary endeavors so it's diffiucult for a party when every time the magic system is invoked they go their seperate ways. Maybe ok for a single player and a GM.

Yes, I meant the Amber game specifically, yes. I really didn't like it at all, and this game is that same game with a Grecian skin.

It's actually somewhat different. The Magic is different, the setting is different and the rules are based more on the unpublished Amber 2e. As to Pundit, I agree with not liking him, like at all. However I really like his games which by and large are divorced from his idiotic nonsense.

I have no opinion on the quality of his games because no money will ever leave my hands to buy them, nor will any of my valuable time be wasted on examining them.

I generally don't buy from people I despise.

Fair enough

I had it (in its first edition, I think?) and liked it and couldn't get anybody else interested in playing it. :(

Is it based on "Journey To The Center Of The Earth" or is it just inspired by it?

Inspired by a whole lot of fiction including JttCotE, yes.

Great job on these guys!

And thanks for the little houses.

There's a whole poem about things that should and shouldn't rhyme that don't and do respectively.

http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

English is a failed experiment. We need to find a better language!

That's cool. I got to the second verse and I had to express my pet peeve about the Wheel Of Time books. There is a major city called Tear. But how is it pronounced? How hard world it have been to spell it Teer or Tare? What was Robert Jordon thinking? How can I be nitpicking such a fantasy classic? Well ... I can.

Synchronicty is running strong this morning. Anyway I added Chaos to MixRemix. https://mixremix.cc/...erard-nolst-trenite/

When I was teaching oral English (16 years!) I had a standing challenge: if you could recite The Chaos (reading or memorized, I didn't care!) without a mistake you got an automatic A and didn't have to come back to class ever.

I never, in 16 years, had a student pass that test. :D

I like to write non combat modules or combat light modules where there is a possibility of combat but it isn't baked in.

Fortunately Vivian likes to play non combat.

For many players the combat is the game. I'm with you. I avoid combat. And when I do combat I prefer tactics, plan B, tricks and general sneakiness.

But if I'm at a table where the players love combat. Roll for initiative.

Thanks

I had my Great Awakening in the early '80s, and that actually led me away from the D&D family because so many people not only just assumed combat, but assumed combat to the death with no quarter, no fleeing: just grinding down hit points to 0 on one side or the other then moving on to the next hit point grind.

And D&D doesn't have to be played that way but it is common. And more common in 5e with more powerful characters out of the box and death saves.

Yes, I know it didn't have to be. :( My "great awakening" was the realization that there was more to life than rolling d20+d<damage> non-stop. But I couldn't find others who thought that way in the AD&D circles I frequented, so I moved on to DragonQuest (where I knew players who did non-combat).

As a DM who got involved in the early days of roll playing I tried to prohibit the idea that if you were in combat it must end with somebody dead. The thought that maybe this situation could be resolved by talking through it rather than hacking and slashing wasn't usually employed. I often docked points from those who just wanted to kill without any other choices made available. Real life sometimes seems to follow that route now and then and I think using it as entertainment is just asking for increasing bad choices in our youth.

I think the problem was that a lot of early role-players stepped into it from the world of war gaming. (I didn't.) I'm positive a lot of the people I gamed with in the early days just viewed the characters as complicated playing pieces to optimize the movements of, not as characters in a setting.

And that's the kind of combat I like to play. Where you use strategy and work as a team to win the combat. If that means they run away or surrender you still win. But I prefer avoiding combat most of all and as a player try to roll dice as least as I can.

Yeah, figuring out how not to use all your resources in one fight so you have enough to accomplish your goal. Less fighting leads to less time wasting healing up and going back to town empty handed.

Especially if there is a time element. You must retrieve the potion before the full moon to keep your friend from turning into a werewolf ... Can't waste time fighting and healing. Let's figure out a way to sneak around those kobolds.

Time pressure is a GM tool more GMs should use more often.

I agree and I build it into my modules when I can. For instance the party was tasked with gathering medicine and with the people in the neighboring village sick they needed it by tomorrow. In my latest quest the party has to get a branch off the ancestor tree in a magic forest with about a bajillion hills and a big old tree at the top of every one. The catch was the ancestor tree glowed with a fey glow when the moon was full. So you know that only happens every 28 days so they had to be in the right place at the right time.

Good backups are essential. My brother uses a similar service called Carbonite and he swears by it.

Yes, no matter what you want to keep, back it up.

I'm never sure so I back up all of our home directories. We mainly use Xubuntu Linux so that's all of our personal data. I back up in house to two backup servers. I rsync everything to one server with 11 TB. I am working on my second server using a backup program called Restic. I recommend this approach only if you are a retired computer consultant who builds machines for fun and is always looking for something to do with them. I'm literally surrounded by computers. To my right is the Hairy Larry Rocks server running Yunohost. https://hairylarry.rocks To my left is my HP workstation where I do most of my work and my MixRemix server running a LAMP stack. http://mixremix.cc And in front of me is my proxy server directing web traffic for my server subnet and an extra big UPS to keep things running when the lights go out. If you don't really understand everything I'm talking about here you might want to use an online backup service like Follow Me And Die does. (I'm not just a gaming geek, I'm a computer geek too.) Cheers!

SO has set up something that backs up my personal stuff onto a network thing every hour and that thing itself backs up the critical stuff to Baidu Cloud daily.

He did this the day after he had to spend three weeks painstakingly recovering a decade of pictures from a hard disk that broke... :-/

Yep, the only thing harder than making good backups is not making backups. It's not if you lose your data it's when. I don't know how many times I've preached this. When I would take on a new client the first thing I made them do was put a backup system in place. And then I would check it. I wouldn't do anything until then because I have been known to make mistakes too. The last thing I wanted to happen was them telling people that their new computer guy lost their data.

Winter is coming.

Winter is only breathing hard here. :-/ I miss snow.

It snowed here last week. But it didn't stick. Anymore we go through a lot of winters without snow. And then there was the ice storm where everybody lost electric for weeks.

This is a rather head scratching pic for me. The robin seems to be perfectly calm or maybe it is just so stunned and perplexed it can't move.

The robin is ensorcelled by the necklace.

I see. Well that explains it I reckon.

There is rather a lot going on in this picture...

This is cool. Like a big rock show.

This group does recreations of ancient works, new works done in ancient styles, modern-style orchestration with ancient instruments, and off-the-wall stuff like one of their orchestral pieces where a didgeridoo is a prominent instrument.

I love them!

Oriental music often wings off into interesting combinations of instruments and self expression. I believe this is a good thing and a way to add form to sound.

2021 will bring you to over 2000 subscribers.

Unless whatever 2021 has in store for us depopulates the planet to under 2000 people. But, I mean, that goes without saying.

Always the optimist. I blame it on too much dystopian gaming.

lol

I just watched Megan on twitch.

https://www.twitch.tv/megantopia

Well we brought the past into the present and pushed the present a little bit into the future but we still can't wait for that screen door to hit 2020 on the ass.

2020 houndsight: "That was a rough seven years!"

I love the crane terrorizing those fish.

That's lovely and evocative.

We played Microscope on a Related to Geeks video. It is a world building RPG where you play out scenarios to build the world. Surprisingly it is top down and bottom up at the same time. And fun to play too.

I've read about Microscope, but have yet to get or play it.

If I didn't have Spark, I'd likely use Microscope as my favourite game instead.

Is Spark world building too?

Yes. The very first thing you do in a proper (non-prefab setting) Spark game is build the world. It's glossed over in my review.

How To Build a Dungeon is world building related to dungeons, but is more a mental exercise for the GM than a stand alone game.

I hate you.

My granddaughter told me that.

Except she said sometimes he laughs.

We've got a whole thing about how "I don't get it" is a punch line.

No kidding every kid got to experience that one.

There is a point to this, gaming-wise, that I'll expound upon after laughing at some of your suggestions.

This falls into the realm of "lost inventions" and those are a treasure trove of ideas for gaming.

Celery square dancing.

a lamp pull

What, not even Dixie?

Especially not "Dixie"!

I shall look away then.

I get it!

:D I was wondering if anybody would. Some call my jokes "too subtle". Those not trying to be polite call them "terrible".

My idea of the perfect joke is one that goes over everybody's head except for one person who is Rolling On The Floor Laughing His Ass Off.

I've pulled those off once or twice in my life only. It generally requires a three-language pun or the like.

Jiminy Crickets Sound! I'm in the same boat.

I managed without it so I guess I managed without help.

I'd love to help, but my get-up-and-go got up and went. :-/

Probably not as bad as you say. Most people don't read most of the rule books anyway. And they're going to page forward to character generation. I agree. They shouldn't have to. And given the book I would likely give up before I found character generation. But that's me.

I think the real unanswered question is who's going to play this game? There's no established fandom or compelling feature set.

That's a mystery to me too.

In the '70s and '80s there would have been a HUGE fandom based on the popularity of the TTA books. Those books were DYNAMITE and probably helped set the feel of SF gaming despite never being directly used. (You can see a lot of TTA look and feel in Traveller...)

By 2006 there was no demand for this book and, as their attempt to rejuvenate the series would have shown them, there was no way to make demand. Anybody who wanted to game in the TTA universe was already doing so with other games--a task rendered simple by virtue of the fact that the books were almost ruthlessly focused on SPACESHIPS and installations, not people. You could fit almost any game system and it would work. Add in the terrible editing on the new book, plus the terrible information design of the game itself, and, well, there's a reason why this is a fringe game.

And believe me, it is as bad as I say. Stuff players need to make characters and actually play is mixed in with setting information and fluff in ways that makes it difficult to find. And, indeed, so difficult to find that even if you do use the ToC to get to character generation, you'll still need information in the info dumps to proceed ... with no cross-referencing nor easy stand-out way to spot it.

I see.

I've only done SF gaming a couple of times but I enjoyed playing a computer geek.

In SF games I tend to play badass types. Gunners. Infantry. Rocket riders (fighter pilots). That kind of thing.

It's been autumn for a while! Mid-Autumn festival is in 8 days and it's a bit later than usual this year!

Everything is imperfect. Sounds interesting. The only similar game I have played is Microscope which is world building a scene at a time. I enjoyed that a lot. I also find the dice pool interesting. You get curves and you get to roll a lot of dice at once which is always fun.

The dice pool mechanism in *Engine* (not *Bones*) with its aspects and rolling ones thing is actually very nice. It's quick. It's easy to explain and understand. The "auto ones" thing for skills is a clever way of having skills make you more reliable at certain jobs instead of playing the escalation of difficulties and penalties game.

Interesting. I don't know about dramatist but i am more interested in role playing a story with character development than I am in fighting. This is still a minority position. Most games I play in seem to be one combat encounter after another which I can enjoy even though it's not my preferred play style. Thanks again for sharing this history with us.

There's a lot of little gems in the early days of RP (1974-1984, call it) that didn't survive not because they were bad but because they were ahead of their times: the public wasn't ready for the ideas, and of course they were breaking new ground and made mis-steps.

Can't you train them out of that by just having them get bitten a few times?

Only if I'm the DM. And when I'm the DM I hate to have the NPCs lead the PCs. I have played in games where the DM just said it outloud. I can't answer questions you don't ask. Worst come to worst the NPC can just blurt out the important info for no reason but I don't like that either.

If only every player at my table knew exactly what I was hoping they would do. Wait. That's not good either.

Hello, Alan!

Heyoi! Good to be here!

Looks like they magnetize into hex patterns too.

They do. They magnetize into a stack for storage and deploy into magnetically-arranged layouts at need. It's a pretty nifty thing. I'm getting a set. :D

Is this the same kit as the first picture? I like the yin yang one.

The first picture is my dice tower/dice tray combo. The second is these things stacked for storage (held together by magnets top and bottom). The third picture is the trays deployed for use (held in whatever configuration you arranged them in by magnet again).

Thanks

As a DnD monster we can call it a round centipede. Amazing speed downhill.

I'm going to call mine Arthur. Arthur is king, see, and kings wear crowns. Corona means crown so...

Someone else recommended Covfefe instead... I may go with it.

On Inspired Unreality I told Vivian I would rather roll a 1 than a 20.

I like BIG failure better than "meh" failures myself, yes. If you're going to fail, FAIL BIG! :D

This game sounds really interesting to me. The print copy is about $20.

http://www.wordmillgames.com/mythic-rpg.html

It's also available on Drive-By.

What is DnD Beyond?

It's an online system for playing 5e. https://www.dndbeyond.com/

Ah. I don't even have D&D5. :D

Me either. My son, Kier (Draklorx), is DM. We just go online and play, I guess. So far we made characters. We played a 5e campaign in person for about a year (which I prefer) but now we're going to play online so we can all stay home.

Nice choices!

(I need to add a few more now.)

looking forward to seeing them