(At least, there’s the hope…)

So it’s been… a long while now since I’ve blogged with any amount of regularity – and once a month (if that!) does not qualify as regular.  As a result of this, my creative and literary talents have lapsed, and I’ve felt my writing muscles atrophy.  This is, succinctly put, bad.

As such, I am pledging to make a return to blog – both on this site and on Incorrigible Dicta, which I have truly horribly neglected.  Thus I now shall commence to write every day, at least once per day, and fill you guys in on… I dunno, whatever the hell I feel like writing about I guess.

Anyhow, it’s pure geektalk from here on in, so follow at your own risk. (more…)

Hm.  So I haven’t written in a long time.  This is a thing.

I’ve been busy.  My brain has been occupied by Bar/Bri.  My time has been occupied with both Bar/Bri and working with my old boss Ed for a little extra summer cash.  (I’ve gotten to drive his car all around Boston getting papers for him.  His car is zippy.  It’s fun.  Also lets me get some mileage out of the new GPS I bought.)  I also have a job interview tomorrow.

But these are not the things I’m here to talk about.

A few days ago – just Friday, in fact – Wizards of the Coast came out with 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.  Yes, this will be a D&D post.  No, I won’t be telling any gaming stories.  I’m talking about the new edition of the game as a system.

Normally I’d write up a formal review, give it a rating between no recommendation to Gold recommendation and move on.  But the truth is?  I don’t honestly think D&D 4th Edition deserves my time and effort.  I managed to get my hands on a copy of each of the books to peruse, and have managed to read them all.  Okay, I skimmed them cover to cover, and read the important nonspecific bits (IE, I didn’t pour through the list of powers that is 90% of the PHB, but I read about powers and attacks and… etc.)  I’m even running Keep on the Shadowfell for the Open Game Night group.

And at the end of the day?  It’s not the second coming of gaming.  (Wouldn’t 3rd edition be the second coming of gaming?  Not the third coming then, I suppose.)  If it were any game other than Dungeons & Dragons it would be completely and totally a non-event.  It’s not a bad system.  It’s just not for me.  (And I hasten to add, they shouldn’t have called it Dungeons & Dragons.  There’s a certain D&Dness to D&D that is completely and totally lacking from 4E.  To me, they should have called it Generic Sword and Sorcerery Game, because it’s just not Dungeons & Dragons.  Too many – in fact, all – of the sacred cows that made D&D D&D were stripped away for no real reason, as these did not really present any problems in gameplay other than, maybe, idiot GMs who don’t know that they can play around with the rules if they wanted to.)

But that’s not why I’m not giving it a recommendation.  I’m not doing so because the marketing and brand teams totally and completely fucked up their jobs.  I remember having arguments with Sam since last year when the announcement came as to whether the game was going to suck or if marketing was just bungling their jobs.  In fact, I believe I’ve written about this before.

But J.D. Wiker has written about it much more eloquently than I think I can currently cohere my thoughts, and so I’ll just let him tell it.

There is no good reason why only 39% of the people polled on ENWorld are not converting to 4E, and only 39% are–except that Wizards failed to convince 39% of their audience that 4E is the optimal choice for D&D players. They could have done a lot more to convince the 3.X audience that sticking with 3.X was a vastly suboptimal choice, but, instead, we got a lot of vague descriptions of rules systems, a lot of clues that had to be pieced together from interviews and message board posts, a few leaks, and no free, online fast-play rules that showcased the best features of the new game.

…

Ultimately, 4E is a completely different game. Throw out what you know about races, classes, skills, feats, spells, magic items, monsters … basically, the whole shebang except rolling the d20. This is a completely new system, with thematic and mechanical similarities, but it isn’t similar enough to do a conversion from 3.X to 4E, like you could with 3.0 to 3.5, or 2.0 to 3.0. In fact, I recall seeing official word from Wizards that there would be no conversion rules; you’ll have to start new characters and new campaigns (or develop the conversion rules yourself).

…

The 3E brand team made it a central goal of the d20 System to indoctrinate the audience in the belief that the d20 System would be all they ever needed: You could play fantasy, modern, future, western, horror, you name it–all without learning a new system. And, judging from the large number of d20 System companies out there exploring fantasy, modern, future, western, horror, you name it: Most of us bought into that. It’s no wonder 39% of the ENWorlders polled said “No thanks” to 4th Edition; they’ve been taught–by Wizards, no less–that if it doesn’t use the rule system they’re already familiar with, then it’s not worth their money. The latest brand team has failed to convince 39% of the audience that that’s no longer true.

There’s more, and I encourage you to check it out, if this is the sort of thing that catches your fancy.

Me, I’ll be sticking happily with 3.5 (or my heavily modified version of 3.5 which my players are beginning to call 3.Alex).  Because it’s the game that brings me what I like, what I want out of a game, and lets me tell the stories that I want to tell.  (I mean, seriously.  We’ve converted it to outer space hard core science fiction.  We can get what we want out of D&D 3rd edition.)

This is just beautiful.  From a 4E playtest by designer Sean Reynolds:

“Don’t get me wrong, there are some things in these rules that I think are really neat and I can see adding them to a 3.5 game. Then I look at Monte [Cook]’s Book of Experimental Might and these neat rules are already there, and compatible with the 3e rules, and don’t require a complete overhaul to the mechanics and feel of the system, and without months of people telling me that the game I know and like so well is actually an inferior piece of shlock compared to what they’re going to show me. So … why should I play this 4e game?”

I’ve been saying for a long time now that one of two things is happening: 1) Either 4th edition is going to suck and the designers are just putting their (sucky) best foot forward with these demos, or 2) WotC fired everyone in their marketing department and replaced them with blind monkeys who are just flinging poo (in this case, random bits of rules) out into the public for demonstration.  Either way, it has completely failed at getting me excited about 4th edition, especially when the aforementioned Book of Experimental Might is worth (at most) a fourth of the 4E cover price.

You can read the whole post that generated the above comment here by the way.

So.  Gary Gygax died earlier this week.  I haven’t really written anything about it, even though it’s actually fairly big news, because – well, honestly, there are many reasons.  I don’t, generally speaking, become affected, on a personal level, when celebrities or pop figures die.  I’m sure perhaps that might be different in the future.  Don’t get me wrong – when I heard Heath Ledger had passed I was taken aback; I had a similar reaction to other celebrities who have died recently.  But I’m never moved, down deep in my soul.  To me, I guess, death is just another part of the journey.

So when I think of Gary Gygax the man, I feel only a small bit of empathy for the fact that he died.  And I’ve read a lot of what people have written, and particularly the comments that people wrote about him – and in general everyone lionized the man Gygax.  After all, he was, in the end, the ubergeek.  He was one of the first to come, and he was certainly the highest proponent of roleplaying games.  He helped build an industry that now makes more money than certain small countries.  The sum total of works that he has affected, directly or indirectly, is a business that probably makes money than most countries.  And still, this is not Gygax the man.

I’m not here to speak of Gygax the man, for what I knew of him I knew only from legend (and from reading some of the court documents from the original legislation surrounding TSR and Dungeons & Dragons, but that’s beside the point.)

However in reading through all of the various eulogies and comments and in general memories and desires that people had, I was moved.  As a geek, I was moved.  As a roleplaying gamer I was moved.  As a person, I was moved.  Because I saw all of the tangled threads that spun from one Ernest Gary Gygax and, through a very short line, connected straight to me.  And to you.  And to a great many other people in the world.   And I’m not talking just people who play Dungeons & Dragons, though we are likely the only ones who recognize this link, at least intuitively.

If you have ever enjoyed a fantasy movie in the past twenty years, it’s likely you have E. Gary Gygax to thank for it in no small part.  If you have ever played a computer roleplaying game, or a mass multiplayer online game, or a platformer like Super Mario Bros., you have E. Gary Gygax to thank for it in some small measure.  If you have read a fantasy novel written in the last twenty years, you have E. Gary Gygax to thank for it in no small way.

I don’t believe I am misstating the facts when I say that Gary Gygax changed the world.

I owe the majority of my current friendships to Gary Gygax, because most of the people I hang out with now I’ve done so thanks in a major party through roleplaying games, with D&D being the flagstone of those unions.  Thanks to Gary Gygax, I had an outlet for my creativity starting since before I knew what a roleplaying game was.  That’s right – before I played Dungeons & Dragons, I was creating my own games and RPGs, inspired by video games which were in turn inspired by D&D.  Some of the clearest memories of my childhood are playing these video games with my brother.  Since the third grade I was putting my friends Rick and Jay through my homebrew games, which at first were just arbitrary adventure mazes and then later involved actual characters and stories and (post-D&D) dice and task-resolution, and…

And.

And that’s the story of E. Gary Gygax.  That’s the story of Gygax and every single gamer in the world.  There’s a more than good chance that almost everyone under the age of 30 in the United States has been touched, in one way or another, by E. Gary Gygax.

But this isn’t about the man Gygax.  If you want to read more about him, two authors I seriously respect have written far better remembrances than I ever could: Eric Burns (link is, as of this writing, down) of Websnark and Monte Cook, of Malhavoc Press.  And, I am certain, there are far more out there.  As for me, I’ll honor what he gave us the only way I think I can.

By playing Dungeons & Dragons with all of my gamer friends.

Tomorrow is my last final of my legal career.  (Not the last test, mind: that would be the Bar Exam, which I will take in July.  And it is my Secured Transactions final, which by all accounts will be the one test that will probe me unbidden in that uncomfortable place.

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about gaming goodness – and by this I mean roleplaying gaming goodness, so all of you readers who have no interest in it can turn away…. now.

As some of you may or may not know, I’m currently working on a brand new campaign setting, inspired somewhat by the advent of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, but mostly borne out of a lot of frustrations I have with the way the game works generally, as well as specifically.  There’s a lot that I find frustrating about Dungeon Mastering, as I’m sure there’s a lot that people find frustrating about PCing.  And this setting is meant to address a lot of those issues – in effect, it’s a setting built around new methods of playing the game – not with new mechanics (indeed, I shall mostly be keeping to 3.5, despite the fact that I do not believe this setting will be done before the release of 4th edition – hey, I’m not done with 3rd edition yet, dammit, and feel no reason whatever [except, perhaps, the compulsive "shiny new thing" thing] to buy a new edition), but rather with a new way to approach roleplaying in general, with an attempt to tell a vast, cohesive, epic story, while at the same time avoiding DM-burnout and PC stagnation.

Can I do it?  No idea, but JP has expressed interest in what I’m doing, and we’ve been talking about expanding my vision a little to include even more experimental methods of playing the game.   We may not be breaking new ground, but the territory we plan to cross is pretty darn exciting to us, as its something we’ve never done nor personally seen done.

Meanwhile, I’ve been considering the different methods of gaming.  See, everyone does things differently.  It’s built into the game itself – roleplaying is modular.  No two groups specifically work the exact same way (that being said, the varieties between groups are small, I’m willing to bet.)  This comes largely from where roleplaying comes from: war gaming.

In a standard war game, you set up a tactical terrain, pick armies, and then go at it.  There’s usually no real story, and very little beyond just the tactics of the game itself.  A step beyond this pure war gaming is the tactical skirmish, where you have all of the elements of the war game but add a few special terrain elements: victory conditions (such as capture a given area of the map) and tactical terrain that grants bonuses to your units.  This adds an element of story beyond just a tactical war game – it’s not just two armies facing each other on a field, it’s one army defending a castle, for example.

On top of the tactical skirmish is the tactical encounter.  The encounter differs from the skirmish in that it is meant to represent only one sortie.  This is where we individualize the game to the point of having single characters facing just a few bad guys.  This is the standard Dungeons & Dragons encounter.  This is where roleplaying truly started.  If you string a series of encounters together, you create a dungeon.  Once you add a story to the dungeon you create an adventure.  String a series of adventures together and you have a campaign.  String a series of campaigns together around a particular world and you have a campaign setting.

Now, typically, Dungeons & Dragons focuses around adventures and campaigns.  But this wasn’t always the case.  In the early days, D&D was very heavy on the dungeons, more or less devoid of story.  It’s from these days that the game gets its heavy hack-and-slash reputation.  Now, the groups that I’ve participated in have always run campaigns, not just adventures.  When you run an adventure (or a dungeon) without focusing on a campaign, we call that a one-shot.  The one-shot style is very different from the campaign style.

There’s really no problem with any of these ways of gaming.  There are pros and cons to all of them.  And I can tell you my mind is fried because I have no idea where I was going with this, except to say I think we should run more one-shots.  If you’re a new DM, you should mostly do one-shots, because they help you learn how to DM and create interesting stories without relying on more advanced skills like information management and pacing.