Go to Hell!

I can remember at least two campaigns in ye old high school days which culminated in journeying to the Nine Hells and taking on all the big devil-bosses in a big melee.

Also, occasionally someone would pull a bad card in the Deck of Many Things and we'd have to go rescue them.

But, this is not something I've played or run since - Hell, that is.

I kind of miss it.

Ever adventured in your campaign's underworld?

Some more 5E tidbits

More intriguing bits from here. I have to admit my curiosity is growing, despite my natural skepticism (though its amusing to see someone describe a game like below as if it were an alien experience. Which, perhaps, if you've never played an earlier edition, it very well may be).

"There was a LOT of talk at the table. In character at times! I’ve never been at a D&D table where players were more invested in figuring out their next move.

On that topic, your next move isn’t on your character sheet. You don’t go paging through all your stuff thinking, “Well, I could Bluff this guy.” Nope. We were doing what we thought our characters should do, even if that involved our very NOT charismatic half-orc fighter trying to be a charismatic leader of a band of skeptical savage orcs. Multiple times. In other games, it’s “Okay, who has the highest Charisma? You? Okay, you go talk to those orcs and get them to help us.”

Everything was fun and fast and fluid. I didn’t feel like the game got bogged down at any time during our session, even when we had a few rules questions for Monte. Things just happened and they flowed with the story and the story was awesome because we made it that way."

Pic from the 5E demos at DDXP

Keep on the Borderlands with no battlemat/mini's?

Sweet, sweet, Vanguard

Man, I used up a lot of quarters on this bad boy back in the early 80's.

A few bullet points

- Have you been by the Warriors of the Red Planet blog lately? Thomas has posted an example page of how the book is looking, which is simply amazing!

- Have you been paying attention to the open beta of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG? Since I had a chance to playtest the game, I've been cautiously optimistic about this, and it is definitely growing on me. To the point that I'm thinking about running a one-off with my group to try it out from a DMing perspective. There's plenty of nice old-school nods here, like race-as-class and level titles, but one of my favorite elements is what they call the character generation "funnel".

In a nutshell, the "funnel" means everyone rolls up 2 or 4 0-level characters to start, and (if any survive the first adventure) you pick your favorite to move along to first level. While my kneejerk reaction was that this was just a way to let everyone enjoy a meatgrinder adventure without fear of ending up character-less five minutes into it, the implications are actually a lot more interesting. Its actually a clever way to avoid the d20 rabbit-hole of min-maxing - you aren't carefully crafting a bonus-master PC, you're picking an average joe that you have an emotional and time investment in. Character development through actual play, rather than number-crunching - how can I not love this?

- Also on the DCC RPG front, Joe's been posting some artists galleries showing off the awesome art for the game, and the latest feature is Erol Otus, so check that out.

- Have you been watching all these movie trailers? 2012 is looking like its going to be a banner year for genre movies: John Carter, The Hobbit, Prometheus, Avengers (to name a few). Lets just say I was less than impressed with the last couple of years worth of cheap remakes and knock-offs (I think Tin Tin was actually the best adventure film of 2011), and I'm looking forward to something with a little effort put into it.

- One movie we won't be seeing, though, is Elfquest. Because someone at Warner Brothers decided its the exact same thing as the Hobbit. Wtf Warner Brothers? Did I mention the last couple years of cheap remakes and knockoffs? Maybe this will free up some cash to work on that remake of Soylent Green with Seth Rogen and Jennifer Aniston.

- Lastly, I once mentioned ( a loooooong time ago) talking a bit more about health: "...we all joke about "Gamer's Disease", and it's no secret our hobby doesn't involve a lot of healthy eating/exercise, and many of us are soon-to, or have long-since, passed the dreaded, evil, forty-mark. There have simply been too many health-related tragedies in our hobby in the last few years to pretend there's not a problem. Is there a way to effectively promote healthy living hand-in-hand with gaming?"

I still think health is a huge concern in the gaming community - diabetes, obesity, and depression, especially, seem to have a constant (but politely ignored) presence. If I put together a "Healthy Gamer" resource page, would any of you be interested in that? Or if I were to post monthly "guest columns" from readers about exercise, recipes etc, would you be interested in reading or contributing? Please let me know in the comments below.

The Player Driven Campaign

It seems to be the nature of gaming blogs that they are largely DM-oriented. We do a lot of dissecting what makes our games work best, the ideas we have for making them better, campaign setting details, houserules, and, especially in our old-school corner, the "lost secrets" of how the first DMs and game designers made things work. What's often given short shrift, however, is the player's role in all of this.

Is it simply a given that the player's in everyone's groups are just as involved in the development and growth of a campaign's setting and houserules as the DM is? I kind of doubt that.

Personally, I've found that players that are more interactive than reactive are pretty hard to come by. I've DM'd at more than one table where I've felt like some sort of performing monkey, doing my best to provide an engaging game while being met with blank looks and bored expressions while players just wait for me to tell them when to roll some dice.

The best groups I've played with or DM'd have not just been the games that were run the best, or offered the best adventures or settings, they were the games wherein the players were just as interested in developing the game as the DM. My current group, for example, is primarily writers and artists, and the effect they have on the game is profound. They are not shy about expounding on the possible uses of weird magic items they find, they're specific about the things they look for in cities and settlements, they tend to think outside the box when it comes to defeating powerful foes and obstacles...

It makes me wonder if there is a way to quantify what makes the best sort of players - would this help make bored or reactive players more involved in the game? Or would it be seen as an affront to a particular player's creativity? It seems like having a way to briefly describe the players' role in the development of the best campaigns would be a good thing - just as important as providing a good setting, good adventures, and the best suited ruleset.

In the notes or on your own blogs, please tell me a bit about what you like best about, or expect from, the players in your game.

What works in D&D - part 4

So we've looked, separately, at some interesting elements I think make D&D "work": a solid baseline, an experience point system that rewards play beyond the realm of combat, and an achievable "end game". As most of folks reading this particular blog will already know, the gradual erosion of these elements over the later editions of the game led some to keep playing, or return to, the older editions, or produce retroclones or variant d20-based games like BasicFantasy RPG and C&C.

An interesting alternative to that mindset was proposed, back in 2007, called E6. What this did, in a nutshell, was to take the existing 3x rules and pull them in nice and close to the baseline - characters topped out at 6th level and gained only feats from then on. This had a neat effect on the assumed universe of an E6 campaign; everything was at a power level much closer to what we would think of as "normal" in a sword & sorcery setting - the scary monsters like dragons and giants stayed scary rather than becoming mere stepping stones to get at challenges of an ever increasing power level ("Epic!"). This approach holds a lot of appeal to me - it acknowledges the strengths of a later ruleset (which I think we in the old-school community are often too reticent to do) while finding a clever and effective way to reign in the obvious problems with that ruleset. It neatly recreates a more traditional rpg experience by having a period of dungeon crawling followed by a period in which more high-concept campaigning will come into play.

But, I would be remiss if I concentrated solely on rules when it comes to "what works in D&D". As the revolving door of editions spins increasingly faster, something extremely important tends to get forgotten. If you've been following the whirlwind of 5E newsbites, you've probably noticed some familiar names keep getting mentioned: "Keep on the Borderlands", "Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth", "Tomb of Horrors", and so on.

Yes, I'm talking about Adventures!

One of the biggest things that is simply missing, from late 2E on up, is memorable adventures - the kind that everyone you know who plays D&D has played, the kind that becomes a part of the whole gaming vernacular and a measuring stick to gauge other adventures by. Since WotC's acquisition of the brand, only three titles come to mind as having any lasting impact on the collective mind of the gaming community (Sunless Citadel, Red Hand of Doom, and Keep on the Shadowfells), which over a course of 10 years is a stunning failure. The best adventures have a way of making players not care a whit what ruleset they are using. Companies like Necromancer Games, Goodman Games, and Paizo were able to step into this gigantic hole left by the game's official publisher, and build a nice business around giving folks what they needed - great adventures. While many like to blame 4E's perceived failure on its rules, I tend to lay the blame equally on the fact that WotC didn't pursue an aggressive publishing schedule of consistently engaging adventures, and at the same time refused to add their new ruleset to the open license that enabled third parties to produce adventures to go along with it.

As 5E begins its open playtest (you can sign up for this here, btw) in a couple of months, I am hoping that the discussion of rules does not completely crowd out a discussion on what players will get to do with these rules - will there be a renewed emphasis on adventures?