I was born cursed, or lucky depending on who you talk to.
My parents met through a mutual love of science fiction fandom. My dad a science fiction author, and my mom a perpetual organizer and volunteer at science fiction conventions (which she still does to this day.) This means that I was pretty much born a geek. You might as well have put Spock ears on me in the crib.
Like so many other geeks, I was picked on in school. I discovered I had little in common with a lot of the students around me, and it was just easier not to talk about myself to them. Fortunately, I found others who would make some kind of reference to a science fiction novel or were scanning a 2e DMG in the computer lab. Those people I would seek out. In time, it became easier and easier to have geeky conversations during lunch.
Nowadays, I almost never hide my geeky side (and heck, it might even be impossible for me to do so at this point, with what comes up when you google my name.) I fly my geek flag high in my office (literally, I bought it at ren faire). I put the games I’ve designed on my professional resume. I’m not afraid to speak out with my geek out, for those that judge me aren’t going to be the kind of people I want to talk to anyway.
Some would say I was born cursed because there was little chance I wouldn’t become a geek of some kind. Others might say I’m blessed because I don’t have to keep that side of my life a secret. I would like to live in a world where being a geek is accepted for everyone, where everybody feels blessed because they are a geek.
(The title, by the way, comes from comments on what the title of my memoir should be called, should I ever write it, after I recounted my experience playing an RPG with Gary Gygax.)
This made me laugh my ass off!
Thanks to Berin Kinsman for pointing this out!
Chatty DM and I have officially started working on our now-annual Gen Con event, Drunken Dungeons & Dragons. What started as a small group of blogging friends has turned into an event, which is still kinda weird to us (and has come with some growing pains, as these things do.)
We’ll be posting up a few snippets of development here on Roll, though the majority of it will remain hidden until after the adventure- we like to spring as much as we can on the players as close as possible to keep the surprise. But I hope you’ll find what he can share interesting anyway.
Here’s the week’s developments:
So a lot of details hammered down… nothing decided about the adventure itself yet. But we have IDEAS and about a month to make it happen. Here we go.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve taken a look at combat in 4E, with all the different stat blocks and monster roles and status effects, and wished it could be a little more complex. Sure, we all enjoy tracking a million different numbers for a table full of shouting, whining jerks, but how can we dress this lunatic salad with creamy chaos? Anyone feel like a three-way?
A couple months ago, I played in a one-shot where our party engaged a mind flayer and his drooling thralls, and right as the battle was heating up, a trio of drow appeared and attacked all of us. Apparently, the mind flayer hadn’t cleaned out the dryer lint trap or had put in the toilet paper upside down (it’s Real World: Underdark), so now we the party found ourselves in the middle of a massive, thrilling, and completely wild battle, with our allies changing from round to round. First, the mind flayer gave a psychic enema to the drow necromancer (yay!), but then seized our dwarf fighter and tried to gnaw on his gray matter (boo!).
If you’re going to run a combat like this, I’d recommend building the two enemy sides at LVL+1 or LVL+2, maybe just a little higher than a standard encounter, and clearly determine the motivations of both sides prior to rolling any dice. Otherwise, you’ll be tempted to gang up on the party, and probably slaughter them. In our encounter, the drow were hunting the mind flayer for some wrong or other, and we the party were just in their way. While they weren’t focusing on us, they didn’t go out of their way to choose attacks judiciously. Hey, if a burst or blast included us, what’s the big deal? They had no interest in sharing e-mail addresses or becoming BFFs, so once the mind flayer’s thralls started falling, the drow started targeting us on purpose.
This was tremendously fun, scary, and nutty, and I was very impressed with the DM’s ability to manage everything that was going on. One of my favorite parts of 4E combat is its mobile and tactical nature, and this adds another facet to that experience, as you can never be entirely sure if you’re safe on all sides.
I think unemployment is getting to me. I dreamt this morning that I was interviewing for a job doing programming, but once I got there nobody really wanted to talk about the job itself. The company was based in a huge, luxurious mansion, and all my potential coworkers were muscular, short on words, and wearing the kind of suit and tie normally associated with defending political leaders from bodily harm. I wasn’t interviewing with anyone in particular so much as I was listening to everyone tell stories about how they had to rough someone up to achieve some company goal. As time passed, the stories progressively got wilder, and the tales turned to epic superpowered combat (but still ending in something like a pickup truck getting repossessed).
I later found out that I was interviewing to be one of these metahuman repo-men, but that the job required me to code in PHP during the slow times when no faces needed rearranged.
Then, the dream turned to the saddest thing I’ve ever even heard of — a man whose only superpower was to die while reading a bedtime story to his children. I woke up in mid-sob. It was not cool.
You may not have heard, but in 2012, there’s this tiny, low-budget, independent movie coming out called The Avengers, based on a peripheral 1970s comic book of the same name. The movie will feature a core four sausage fest—the Hulk, Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man—and because my brain always hums to a D&D 4E frequency, I couldn’t help but assign each of these character to corresponding class roles.
I find myself doing this sort of thing a lot actually, and the only surprise is that I haven’t worked on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Teletubbies. For example, I’m pretty sure Po, the red Teletubby, is a Striker.
Anyway, I considered the available Avengers, and assigned the roles as follows:
Controller: Because it can be tricky finding a corollary in other media (outside of fantasy literature’s boom-zap wizards), I had the most trouble figuring this one out, and fell back on process of elimination. Three of the characters dropped into the other roles easily, leaving me with just one for controller. So, who alters the battlefield, shoving around opponents and delivering large scale area attacks? I decided that with his kinetic repulsors, sonic blasts, and explosive rockets, Iron Man made a really good controller.
Defender: This was probably the easiest, since I thought along the lines of, “wade into combat, attract a lot of enemy attention, take heaploads of damage, and fight for a big, long, sprawling time.” This would have to be the Hulk. Yes, he does cause a lot of damage, making you think striker, or you might be tempted to slot in Iron Man with his armor or Captain America with his shield. Trust me, they fit better elsewhere.
Leader: Understandably, the title “leader” makes us automatically think of the person in charge of the group, like the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards, who’s probably more of a controller, or the Hundred Acre Wood’s Winnie the Pooh, who is really more of an imbecile. However, in this case, you do have a warlordy-type character in Captain America, going toe-to-toe in battle, but also directing the actions of allies, setting strategy and calling shots.
Striker: When it comes to doing damage, you can’t really do much better than a Norse god, right? I’m totally picturing a barbarian-themed Thor, blowing apart hordes of minions with his mighty shout, and caving in the skulls of solos with the deadly flight of Mjolnir. Sure, he’s got the thunder and lightning thing going on, suggesting some hot controller action, but Thor’s about the damage, so he’s our striker.
Despite my base nature and kitten-kicking tendencies, I think I’m going to avoid using, fighting with, and complaining about the sweet, hot, amazing, exciting, and fundamentally broken new Monster Builder. I won’t observe that you can’t filter by level, export as text, RTF, image, or pretty much anything else, or use this abomination without being forced to learn various new languages to expand your range of profanity.
I will also avoid uninstalling my computer-based Monster Builder, despite its rampant and hair-pulling idiosyncrasies. This was a mistake I made with the Character Builder, and was never able to locate the old timey installer anywhere on the web. I will wait, be patient, not complain, and the new Monster Builder will get better. And I shall love it, and maybe even call it George.
So I talk about a ‘Mythic Africa’ and it is all light and hope and air. Birds are chirping. Is that a rainbow I see?
But the reality is this: Africa is a continent. A large continent. Thousands of cultures have thrived, vanished and brought themselves into the present time. That’s a lot of myth. How to tackle that? I could be researching for the rest of my life to build a comprehensive world out of all that is there. I could bury myself in history, culture , and myth.
It’s taken a lot of thinking, but I finally have an approach. Here’s a list of things I’m not going to do:
Myth, Not History. The first thing I need to do is to give myself the freedom to build a truly mythological place with no clear binds to history. I would rather build something that inspires someone to learn real history than to build a game around history. I think that games that deal with alternative cultures typically feel forced to glom on to history, and have to suffer because of it. Let’s face it: history does not always make for great games. And I want great games. So we are borrowing from cultures across times and place and putting them in a configuration that suits my creations.
Tell the story of one culture at a time. Honestly, I am fascinated by the Zulus (pre-colonial, not doing a Zulu War game!), so I’m just going to start there. The players are zulu-inspired warriors and/or shamen, dealing with outside tribes. I can build out the games to let players tell these specific stories and then, I can do another culture nearby. I can link these cultures and myths together, and over time, create the place I want. Creating it all at once equals suicide.
Embrace my personal values. Hey, I definitely know that only men could become warriors in the Zulu military structure, but you know what? In my zulu-esque world, women can be warriors too. This is definitely spinning off of building a world that is not beholden to the real world, but it is also serving the larger picture of…
Authenticity is a Trap. This is a summation of everything above. In thinking about this, I find that following this unwritten law that says when you do an alt-culture game you have to be authentic or your game is lesser for it. I actually tend to think the opposite is true. D&D? Not authentic Europe. Also, it is a pretty playable and fun game. Harnmaster? Quite realistic. IMO, not nearly as playable or fun. Authenticity is a trap because it also forces you to do things that are not actually game design. I am definitely researching, but I know there is a limit where I am going start building and stop researching. To be truly authenticate is to delay the game and extend the not-game. I want to avoid that if at all possible.
Past Experiments. I mentioned earlier that I’ve had past experiments with building alt-cultures. Ghosts of Five Nations is a setting I built based on Iroquois mythology. I am definitely inspired by my research but what I like best is that I feel one can envision what it be like to play in this setting. You know who you are. You know the rules of the world. You have the ground floor for absorbing specifics and detail regarding the world.
As always, talk to me.
