Late To The Adventuring Party

Save Vs Pointy Stick!

2009-07-11T21:03:00.004-04:00

My new favorite Blog! Mostly for his (much more succinct) response to the same inanity I was just talking about in the last post. But his newest graphic, a random encounter table of what moves into a dungeon after you finish clearing it out, is just as awesome, and much more useful in gaming.

Odd Comments and Clique Thinking

2009-07-11T20:36:00.002-04:00

Apparently James Maliszewski stumbled across a sore spot for the Old School community in his recent post Save or Die, Part II, I think? The comments seem to have been the root of the problem, according to JB, of the B/X BLACKRAZOR Blog.

He starts out quite reasonably, stating "Mr. Maliszewski is simply expressing his ideas, his interpretations of the game, and everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, no need to argue." So I was a little surprised when, two paragraphs later in the same post, he says, "[...] quit your whining already! If you think otherwise, you aren’t playing Old School…go play 4th edition, specifically made for whiners like you!"

Dude. You seem like a really nice guy, and you probably have some really wonderful insights into Basic D&D (and many other games); years of experience playing, lots of fun game stories on you blog and all... but it's hard to take you at all seriously when you can start a post by acknowledging "everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, no need to argue," and then follow that up with calling everyone who disagrees with you whiners.

JB is not, of course, one of the Pillars of Old School Renaissance, doesn't represent any company or anyone besides himself, and is entirely entitled to his (contradictory and insulting) opinion (and thanks in advance to you, JB, both for providing me blog fodder and for no-doubt being a good sport about my singling you out). What really flips my shit is to see something of that caliber coming from a gaming professional like James Mishler. His post, Save or Die: Heroes and Snowflakes is just stupid. Stupid-funny, in it's way, but after the initial chuckle all that's left is the realization that Mishler is insulting his competitors and their fans, throwing random insults at 4E Players like "Precious Snowflakes," "Fan Wankery," and "Mary-Sue."

Yeah, Mishler, that'll really help your sales.

Aside from the complete lack of an reasoning on the chart (Being a "Badass" is the opposite of thinking you're a unique "Precious Snowflake?" The opposite of "Bildungsroman" (the psychological, moral and social shaping of the personality) is Mary-Sue? Obviously, Mishler just put shorthand for "Dumb" towards the right and bottom and "Intelligent" in the upper left), it's also completely unprovoked, and a wild tangent from the comments he claims set him off. Lets look at the comments in the initial Grognardia post.

Given all this hand-wringing, insults, and angst that resulted, I expected to find the internet equivalent of chimps throwing their own shit at 0D&D. Instead, I found this:

"(1) I'm not sure about earlier editions, but in 3rd edition I found save or die to be incredibly frustrating. [...]

(2) For earlier editions, maybe save-or-die made more sense. [...]

(3) People enter the game with assumptions that they're going to tell a grand tale about their character and his heroic exploits. Save-or-die wrecks that assumption."

(Parenthetical statement labels added for reference below)

Let me paraphrase that, from the Super Defensive 0D&D people who hear everything as an attack:

(1) "Save or die sucks in 3e. "

You'll notice that this isn't a comment about 0D&D, 1e, or even 2e.

(2) "I'm not saying it was wrong for anything before 3E."

Not sure how to be more clear that we're not talking about 0D&D.

(3) "People have assumptions that save-or-die contradicts."

*This* would be a fair point to discuss further. You could mention (as Maliszewski does) that 0D&D is not the sort of game that supports those assumptions, and that criticizing 0D&D for that reason makes about as much sense as complaining that your toaster doesn't make waffles (a position that I'm starting to come around to more and more, after the spirited rounds of debate between this blog and Editions & Dragons). That's a fair response. And the rest of the comments are people talking about whether or not they preferred homeruling save-or-die into something else. It's a good conversation, with respect and no insults, and no one claims to have found The One TRUE Way that all others must follow.

So why are the older, supposedly more mature gamers acting like twelve year olds? If you want to be treated like you have something intelligent to say, you should start by acting like it.

New Fav Post

2009-07-10T00:54:00.002-04:00

ByDonny_The_DM of The Fine Art of the TPK, a very interesting discussion has broken out in the comments; check it out.

More that 4,096 Characters

2009-07-09T02:19:00.008-04:00

A preface: This is in response to a wonderful post by Matthew over at Editions & Dragons, and all free-floating quotes are from him. This was suppose to be a comment over there, but was too long.

"I have a feeling that Charles is most comfortable when he can approach the game from the mechanical side first."

This is not entirely true. I view the game as having two main modes, combat and non-combat, which are basically two different games. It's not that I'm theoretically more comfortable with the combat mechanics, it's that, at the start of a game, I don't know the world, all I know is my character and the combat system. So it's that it's impossible to be comfortable with the social / world setting while I'm still wondering what it is. I think this is natural when exploring a new world, and not really problematic.

I see your point (I think) -- the lack of mechanics in Labyrinth Lord removes crutches that poor role players lean on. But there are other ways to engender role playing. If it hasn't been happening, think about the types of adventures we've been through; feel free to adjust down the amount of combat we experience per session, I think we could handle a combat-free session every now and again. Or, a setting where there could be more roleplaying between combats, instead of straight from one combat to the next. (And after tonight's session, I should add that it already looks like you're doing something like this.)

Skills-- I'll admit to being more ambivalent towards. In the end, I think it's nice to give people who aren't suave and charming in real life a chance to play a character who is; gaming is about *fantasies* after all. But you can still tell those players that they need to actually roleplay their character's actions. Even if what they say isn't as great as what the dice say it should be, it's practice, and with time they'll get better at smooth talking. Or funnier at failing.

"In my preferred world, sometimes you take an axe to the spleen, and baby, that sucks, but at least you know where you stand."

Well, no, we don't. We don't know Dakkan as well as a true native would, and didn't know that Trolls were in the area, or that they wander across the hill sides, or whatever it is Trolls do. As villagers, we should have heard all the common wisdom; like our parents telling us never to wander in the woods, or whatever. The local woodsmen and farmers would have some sort of system to do their trade without having to face deadly danger all the time (Like the tripwire-on-spikes idea, good suggestion, Chris!); we would know the local tradesmen and could talk to them and learn the local folk wisdom.

Here's my real problem with dying: It's repetitive and boring to keep making level one characters, over and over again. It is, literally, the exact same thing session after session, trying to get a character through the same dungeon, or hill side. I want to have different adventures, see different parts of the dungeon, and meet new foes. I don't care to spend months trying to get one character to the point where I can actually accomplish a single goal. It's just frustrating to try the same thing, week after week, and make zero progress. Or, in the case of losing two characters, a mule loaded with gold, and magic binoculars; reverse progress.

"(After all, 4E does make a heck of a tactical skirmish miniatures battlegame with roleplaying elements- although I feel more and more that that's the long and short of it.) "

Yes, that is *exactly* what 4E is. 99% of the rules in the books are about the combat sub-game, because that's the only part that needs so much description (to play the version of the game that WotC is selling, anyway. Whether you *like* that particular game or not, YMMV.) If you wanted to get rid of skills in Aquea, you absolutely could. Skill Challenges are a different "sub-game" from combat. You could decide "Magic items are rare," and not give them out (and either assign the powers players are suppose to get from magic items some other way, or just tell people "tough luck"). This ain't tournament play, go nuts.

"In my humble but of course 100% Accurate opinon, character death is what it's all about. Of course it sucks. Of course it's aggravating. That's kind of the point."

I have better things to do with my leisure time then spend it being aggravated, thanks.

"Not only is it a great tool for learning from your mistakes, but it lends itself very naturally to really prizing the times It Finally Went Right."

You know, back when I was in the service, they used to say, "Don't show a man how to do something, tell him what to do and let him surprise you with his ingenuity"

Assuming that someone has the perseverance to keep slamming their head against the same brick wall until they finally break it down. I'm sorry, but you know I'm not the kind of person who's willing to deal with BS from my hobbies-- I just find things to occupy my time that don't have a "hazing process" at the front.

"The PLAYER knows he or she has earned the treasures and powers commensurate with his or her level, because the risk was not only real, it was demonstrated time and again as prior characters and fellow adventurers died to seemingly trivial traps, sword slashes, and simple daily dumb bad luck."

You say "earned," I hear "Forced to jump through hoops, so you'll be grateful when we let you do something entertaining."

"...even character creation is an exercise in mechanical balance and synergy optimization- things that, to me, should be anathema to a fantasy campaign."

Why? combat optimization is setting-neutral. It's prudent; and if we're playing characters risking their lives, they *should* be prudent in how they do that. It's logical that people don't traipse off into the unknown and risk life and limb unless they feel that they're somewhat more likely to survive than the average guy.

I would also like to emphasize that my problem is not at all with the amount of rules-- I'm fine with the fewer combat options and abstract, figureless combat. The two combined make combat so much quicker than 4E combat that it doesn't really bother me to have fewer mechanical options. I guess that means I would find 3.x really boring for the martial classes? I only played 3.x a dozen times across five years, so I don't really know how I'd find it in regular play.

Here's the thing-- Out of five sessions of LL or S&W that I saw and/or heard about, exactly one didn't feature at least two player character deaths. Compare that to one death in 14 sessions of Dwimmermount so far. I really don't think we've been that stupid, but encounters are frequently deadly and attempts to flee usually futile.

When death is frequent and apparently random, that makes survival just randomness as well. And surviving at random isn't exactly an achievement; if I want to win or lose on dumb luck, I'll play candyland.

Why I Like 4E, Con't

2009-07-05T16:52:00.005-04:00

Having re-read my last (non-upstate-New-York-thanking) post, I feel like I've only danced around the issue, only addressed the mechanics issues (and, honestly, 4E's strengths are also it's weaknesses, mechanically). For me, the biggest draw to 4E is the type of characters you play.

If nothing else, this blog so far should have made it pretty obvious that I "imprinted" on superheroes early in life, and they are my model of heroic adventurers. The type of story I like is one where, people with significant powers go up against an even more overwhelming force. Typically, that boils down to having to stop many, many people less powerful than the hero (Spider-Man fighting street crime) or one Archvillian (Batman fighting the Joker). Of course, that's only the basic roles; this can be mixed, matched, or subverted in any number of ways (the Kingpin, with his physical prowess and armies of professional criminals, for example, combines elements of both). It also doesn't have to be a superhero, or even a super-powered setting; high tech spies, a band of noble outlaws, or any number of other perturbations are acceptable.

This is relevant, because 0E, at least what I've seen of it so far, does not do this. You characters are very mortal at the beginning, and going out to adventure seems more like a desperate cry to have your head examined then a reasonable attempt to either make a fortune or help villiagers.

Let me use a recent event from the Labyrinth Lord campaign my frienemy Matthew is running (when not writing about RPGs at Editions & Dragons). I actually wasn't able to attend, so my character (Father Rosencrantz, because medieval fantasy needs it Jewish Clerics, too) "sat it out," which turned out to be in his best interest. The characters (who played) were looking for a rogue "Adventurer" who'd been attacking a peaceful Kobold warren, so they decided to camp in the woods near the cave entrance, and took turns keeping watch for his return (or anything else, for that matter). On the second night, a Troll wandered into the camp; killed the person keeping watch, and killed a second person when the rest of the party tried to flee, leaving one survivor.

When I heard about this after the fact, my first reaction was, "Boy, I'm glad I wasn't there for that." How fucked up is that? To be glad that I wasn't able to play, that doing nothing had a better result, and gave me more enjoyment and pleasure, than actually playing the game would have?

And I don't know about you, but I don't play games to experience fantasy gygaxian naturalistic environments. Those can be a nice background, but it isn't a main draw. I don't play games with the hope that, after a couple weeks or months, I'll get to a point in the game where I can actually, finally be enough of a badass to no longer be completely at the whim of fickle fate. I get enough of that shit in real life. I play games for enjoyment, pleasure, and fun.

Getting killed by every wondering Troll is not fun. Being set back to Square One because one of the fifteen Kobolds you're fighting rolled a 6 on 1d6, once, is not fun. It's frustrating, and invalidates all the effort I put into making whatever meager progress I did achieve.

One final point: If I really was Father Rosencrantz, or any other aspiring Fighter/Cleric/Wizard of Dakkan (or any other 0D&D setting), I would set up a nice Hillel in the town square, and never leave town unless I could travel with a large and well-armed body, like the King's tax collectors, or an Army unit, or something. The only way 0D&D characters are playable is if they are: 1) Ignorant of how dangerous the world is, 2) So driven by grinding poverty and obligations, and so without hope of otherwise earning a living, that they can justify the danger, or 3) Completely batshit crazy. The odds of dying are just too great for anyone with any sense of self-preservation to try adventuring. Games are escapist and aspirational, why would I fantasize about being worse off than I am in real life? The idea of pretending to be a ignorant country bumpkin isn't appealing, neither is being a psychopath. And, oh boy, crushing debt! What a fantastic and exciting problem to deal with!

No, I'd rather play a game where I live or die because I was clever or stupid, not because the Wandering Monster Table roll returned "Troll."

[Meta] Thanks, Upstate NY!

2009-07-05T03:51:00.002-04:00

Checking our stats on Site Meter, I see we have had our first visitor who I do not know from real life. So thank you, random person from Rochester, NY! You have made my day.

Why I Like 4E

2009-07-05T03:44:00.002-04:00

As the title suggests, this is the post where I'll lay out the general points of what I like about 4e over 0e / retro clones (specifically Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord). There is another post, I think to be called "Why I like 0E," singing the exact opposite song, coming soonish (I might do another Origins '09 post first).

The biggest thing that attracts me to 4e is the crunchiness of it. The character building is like a puzzle, looking for synergies between your powers and your teammates. The long term planning and experimenting it engenders. This is because (Shockingly!) I like 4e combat.

I know this is the main point of divergence with old schoolers, but I actually prefer the more intricate combat of the modern systems. The introduction of powers *is* a huge new array of options for players on their turn. But options are fun! Making decisions about how to expend resources for maximum effect is engaging, and should be a constant puzzle. The combat rules for 4E are a really cool miniatures combat system; a sort of analog MMORPG.

0E combat, by contrast, is much more rote. Wizards or Clerics might have one spell (and only one possible right then) they could use at level 1, but everything else is either "swing ye sword" or run.

"But Brett!" I can hear the one person who'll actually read this post thinking, "In 0E, you are encouraged to think *creatively*! You use lantern oil to create fires, or negotiate with the monsters, run away!"

Well, ok, imaginary straw man, but all of that is possible in 4E. Just because there is a very detailed system you can use when combat begins, doesn't mean the non-combat stuff has to go away. Of course new players, especially, will look at the book and see that 95% of the page count is devoted to combat, and like a carpenter with only a hammer, will see only nails. But it does not have to be that way, once people are more comfortable with their characters and the world.

"But Brett!," my imaginary friend once again interjects, "4E characters are indestructable! When your hammer is an atom smasher, treating every problem like a nail actually *works*!" This is because, 4E characters are superheroes. At low level, they are Spider-Man tier, and at high levels can becomes Superman or even more ridiculously powered.

If they're Heroic (or Spider-Man) Tier, throwing the average street criminal at them is a joke, and even someone who'd seem objectively overpowered to a normal person (a Doctor Octopus level villian, lets say) should be defeatable. There are a couple ways to deal with this. One is to go the Green Goblin route: set up the conflict in such a way that to fight at all is a loss. DMs can take a lesson from this, and make objectives that are obviously (or not) attainable only through peaceful means.

Another method is to go the "Kingpin" route. A horde of Kobolds can threaten people well above their level, in great enough levels. Or, you can go sort of the opposite directions, and throw a villian just way out of their league at them (like when Spider-Man goes up against Doctor Doom). Villians they could only hope to defeat by undermining around the edges first.

Another (somewhat related) thing is that I'd say this indestructibility is a feature, not a bug. The characters should be mortal, it should be possible that they'll die, but doesn't have to be likely. Frequent character death means that I don't see the point in investing emotionally in the character. Sure, once you get a your first character to level 5 or so in 0E, you'll be pretty attached by then. But that's many, many sessions after you've started playing, and what's keeping your interest in the mean time? Everything doesn't have to be relevant to the story of your character, but because everything has the potential to be, it keeps my interest.

Origins 2009, Part 1

2009-06-30T01:29:00.001-04:00

To go to Origins this year, I decided that I did not want to buy a badge. Years ago, my friends and I reached a similar conclusion about anime conventions and decided to start putting on panels as part of a group called Where's The Buffet? and got free badges to a wide assortment of anime conventions in the midwest. Now I see badge purchasing as something... not *beneath* me, but rather, something I've left behind. So I signed up to run four modules for the RPGA, which got me a free badge, a free booster of DD:M1 minis, and two books of my choice; I went with Eberron Player's Guide and MM2, which were the two books I'd hoped to. Overall, I'd say it's was a good deal.

The modules themselves were more of a mixed bag. On sign up, I'd hoped to get the Dungeon Delve, or especially the D&D For Beginners assignments. The DD is just combat, and I can enjoy the raw "minis game" feel of combat. I really wanted the Beginner's panel, because a recent convert myself, I still have a lot of sympathy and understanding for there position. There's a huge, crazy, game of playing badass heroes tackling hordes of monsters out there, but that size is also intimidating, if not broken into easy to digest pieces, slowly. Instead, I was assigned a module from Living Forgotten Realms.

It's not that I dislike the Forgotten Realms, but I just have no experience with them. And, really, no interest. I overdosed on fantasy book series in high school, including most of the Magic the Gathering books, The Wheel of Time series, the Black Company, the Sword of Truth... After those, I never really recovered back into fantasy prose novels. I liked them all, but I just got tired of the tropes. Movies, games, comics, sure, but not prose. And FR just looks too... tropy.

I read over the modules a couple times before the con, and was not really impressed. As my friend who played it (with another DM) called it after the con, it was a real Choo Choo Train: impossible to steer off the rails. He played Living Death and Living Arcanis for most of the last ten years, before giving up on the living campaigns six months ago. I tried running it for my friends before the con, but they couldn't sit through the entire thing (although their dislike of FR is probably even more extreme than mine). That also could be more a sign of my bad DMing; I'd never tried running someone else's module before, except Tomb of Horror, which is basically plot free.

I had signed up to run the second and third shift, Thursday and Friday, to get it all out of the way before the weekend started. The first shift on Friday, there weren't enough players, so I was released. The other three shifts were all a good assortment of DnD 4e players, the good, the bad, and the tolerable.

the first one I ran Thursday was for a so-so group. They didn't really role play there characters at all, usually speaking about them, rather than for them. On the other hand, two of the six players were young kids, 8- and 12- ish, the third their father, and the fourth a friend of his, so they were mostly helping them play, which I would never complain about. They ran it pretty straight, no metagaming, but no real engagement with the plot either. It was somewhat boring, but they were inventive enough in Combat to be fun.

The second group was much worse. They metagamed out the wah-zoo, shamelessly, warning each other about what attacks not to make on what creatures, to avoid their immediate reactions. I asked "but would you character know that?" and was meet by one player rolling a d20 and telling me "there, I've got a 24 on a nature check." Well, so fucking what, I thought. I don't care what your nature is, you don't know all the monster's powers, that's ridiculous. (*See Note at bottom) Fine, I thought, there isn't much else I could do to call them on that. Later, one of them was a Longtooth Shifter, which gets Regenerate 2, and they tried to insist that Regenerate continues after being KO'd. Well, I only had my PH1, PH2, and AV1 with me, and (as I later found out) Regenerate is described in MM1. Not seeing anything to contradict the player's interpretation, I decided to allow it, but, as I warned them "When these Dwarves see you stand up, multiple times, without any assistance, they're going to get the idea to coup de grace you."

Well. They did not like that, not one bit. They tried arguing with me, saying (and I'm not kidding) that they dwarves would have to dedicate an entire round to nothing but studying her Shifter, watching her wounds heal themselves, then beat a DC blah-blah Intelligence check. "No," I said, "If I knocked someone unconscious, turned around to fight someone else, and they somehow got back up and started attacking me again without any aid from someone else, and that happens multiple times, It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that maybe unconscious isn't good enough, maybe I should chop their head off to make certain they don't get up again."

Blank stares. It was like I was their first drill sergeant, and I had just insulted their mother's virtue. Instead, they decided to have the shifter get up and run around to the other side of the combat, to engage a different set of enemies every time she was KO'd and regen'ed back up. I decided that was fine.

The third group, however, was awesome. It was two different groups of three friends, and their party was mostly leaders-- a Cleric, a Warlord, a Bard, a Paladin, a Swordmage, and a Ranger. With all that healing and two Defenders, there wasn't much I could do to really threaten them in combat, but they still played smart and fair. But, most importantly, they engaged the module! They talked with NPCs instead of just hunting for the MacGuffins. In combat, they behaved as people in a fight instead of just plotting how to destroy the module.

(Not that there isn't a place for that, but that style of play is called a "Dungeon Delve," go play like that there. If you're going to play in a module with a plot, you should actually want to engage it.)

And, they were animated in combat, really getting excited about the fates of their characters and cheering their successes and mourning (or laughing at) the failures. They were generally a really fun group, and I wish they lived in Columbus so I could run them in a weekly game.

It was definitely interesting to be an RPGA Judge for two days. The rewards were great for the amount of effort required, and even that was usually pretty fun. And getting to met more DnD players was, if nothing else, an education.

(*)Note:

It seems I was mistaken about this; see comments for detail.

The Opening Bell

2009-06-29T17:38:00.001-04:00

I have long been a fan of fantasy settings and games (and sci-fi, and horror-- comic books got there hooks in me young). I also remember very quickly becoming bored with the standard boardgames like Clue that I had as a child, and always was interested in finding "better" (which, to someone bored with the slim variety of options offered the player in Monopoly, typically meant "more complex") games to play.

The first game I decided to get into and bought myself was Magic: The Gathering. This was after seeing it played at camp, the summer after Pogs had blown through my elementary school, so I was already primed to accept the idea of collectability, "deck building" (the choice of Slammers was highly debated before every match), and never knowing what your opponent was using (or even what they possibly *could* use) before the match. More than playing the game, I felt that the true art of MTG was deck building, and that playing the game was basically a test of who'd built the better deck.

And for years, I was a M:TG kid. I started with Revised / Fallen Empires and only played Magic straight through the end of the Apocalypse cycle, which I think describes a nearly ten year stretch of time. I do remember starting in third grade and going most of the way through high school. I had no idea, really, what the term "RPG" meant. I remember reading EGM reviews of video games, and learning the term from their reviews of SNES games. Of course, I only had a Genesis, so I didn't really understand what it meant even in that context; I first thought "RPG" was one of the magazine's descriptors, an award they would give games they liked. I overheard two kids I knew in fourth grade talk about playing an RPG, but when I asked about it, was deriding for not understanding what the term meant (They described it as imagining characters and playing there actions, I asked "What, like, you act out what they're doing?" and was mocked for thinking it was something as childish as "Make Believe"). This was my only experience with RPG players until college, where I was again told I couldn't join a campaign I heard my friends talking about.

Of course, this exclusivity served only to make the whole thing seem more mysterious and interesting. I think the first time I played an actual RPG was D&D 3.0, at either the 2001 or 2002 Dragon*Con. For the next five years, I'd play some D&D at every D*Con, adding a LARP called Dark Confrontation soon after. But outside of that one convention, I didn't really play anything regularly at home.

Until I was introduced to Munchkin. Card and board games like Munchkin and Chrononauts lead to more involved boardgames like Catan and eventually Descent. Once I discovered Fantasy Flight, I think my fate was sealed.

And now I've been playing D&D 4e for about six months. I love it. But one of the things I learned from being an obsessive comic fan is that the Best Stuff was always written before I was born. Modern RPG people think they have it bad dealing with Grognards? You have no idea what you're talking about until you've had Golden Age and Silver Age fans (normally natural enemies, mind you) come to agreement just long enough to talk down to you for liking a comic written after 1972.

Comics are a weird world, too. For most of my life, the established fandom's official and nearly universal position was that everything was in decline, had been for decades, and that if you hadn't gone back and read the Claremont X-Men and Miller Daredevil, you were too ignorant to have an opinion worth listening too. Of course, they were usually right about "Book XYZ" being awesome and worth checking out, if wrong about everything else.

Taking that lesson to RPGs, I was inspired by all the enthusiam I've seen on the net for retro gaming and retro clones. Initially, I was a little thrown when my DM mentioned getting into Labyrinth Lord, but it didn't take long for me to realize that the arguments on the forums about old-school versus 4e design philosophy are the exact same geek arguments about "done in one" versus "story arc" comics. And to remember that, while it's nice to keep up on what's going on now, 90% of everything is crap, including all current work, but that when going backwards and reading old stuff, it's a lot easier to just skim the sweet stuff off the top. There must be a reason people speak in such hushed tones of Tomb of Horrors, I reasoned, and I wanted to find out what. The modules I was most excited to play at last weekend's Origins were 4e updates of White Plume Mountain, Ravenloft, and Against The Giants (all long sold out when I tried to buy tickets, unfortunately). If it's stood the test of time, there must be some reason why.

So that's the point of this blog. To be a DMZ between retro and modern. There will be no edition wars here, because edition wars are about as meaningful and helpful as wars of religious purity. If it was (or, better, still is) popular, there is a reason, some core of Greatness, that people were willing to swallow the other BS in the system to get out. I'm at least respectful of that Core, and interested in dissecting games to find them, even games I wouldn't want to play regularly. Of course, the weaknesses of a system are just as much a part of their makeup, and I won't ignore them, but rather try to discuss them objectively and without knee-jerk pronouncements. I hope you all enjoy reading my bull hockey, and encourage debate and comments; but be aware that I'm firmly in the Warren Ellis camp of website comment management: This site is my little corner of the 'net, my virtual "home," and if you cannot be respectful of myself and my other guests, you will be summarily banned and your comments deleted. You can say whatever dumb shit you like on your website, but here I want to see some *thought* behind your comments if you're going to be arguing with people. Debate is welcome, argumentative name calling is not.

So, look forward to me cross-posting some earlier DnD posts I previously made to my general purpose blog, and some new comments on my experiences at Origins this weekend. I hope to update at least a couple times a week, but everything is subject to change.

Thanks for joining me,
Charlie "Brett Day" Goren

(PS: To any comic nerds reading this, please substitute "mainstream superhero comic books" for any of my less specific use of just "comics." You and I know "comics" is a medium and not genre, but I'm writing this blog for people in the RPG world, and don't want to confuse those people.)