In my campaign, AD&D, I have made the Player’s Handbook available, but the players don’t read it, except for spells. I don’t make the other manuals available.
They have a lot more fun with the surprise of some strange monster they can’t seem to kill, a troll, and being scared that zombie bites make you a zombie.
For my players, they just have fun exploring the world I created and piecing things together. They make much different decisions than someone who has memorized all the manuals.
Unlike back in the day when RPGs were new and we read everything that got into our hands, I don’t think the younger set like to sit and just read rules.
The assumptions and discussion of plans that my players is funny based on their assumptions and limited knowledge of the world and the rules. As the DM who knows the main points of the rules, at least the ones I use, and has a lot of gaming experience, I get as much entertainment out of watching them decide whether they should panic and run, or fight. I found their reactions to a troll and zombies hilarious.
One does not need to know the rules or have a copy of them to play in an RPG. For example, I played DCC for the first time at Marmalade Dog 20. I relied on others for specific rules, but because it was a fantasy RPG, I had the basic idea of how to run a character.
I have played RPGs from a variety of genres, and once read and knew the rules to most of the ones I player. I never had Traveler, but played it a few times. I think if someone has the basic idea that RPGs is make believe with rules and a referee, one can get by with the minimal understanding of how the stats, any stats checks, and combat works. Some games I have not played are very rules heavy, and without minute knowledge of all the special cases, exceptions, etc. one cannot get the most out of their character. That is why I think rules that don’t require hours to create a character or hours to run a simple combat are best. Get started playing sooner and have more fun.
Board games are the one area where I think players need to read the rules. Back in 9th grade I played a WWII board game that had the Maginot and Siegfried Lines on the map. I don’t recall the name of the game. I had heard of the Maginot Line, but not the Siegfried Line, and my friend who had read and mastered the rules knew about the Siegfried Line. I did not put any troops in the Siegfried Line, in our rush to play. I had not even read the rules. The Germans lost WWII because the French took them out soon after the invasion of Poland. So games where you get your clock cleaned if you haven’t read the rules, yes, you should read the rules. Since most board games don’t have referees, this means each player has to look out for his own interests.
Except for massively complex rules or a poor DM that wants to rack up character deaths, and never says, “Are you sure?” Players don’t need to read the rules.
How many new players would show up if they had to read 100+ pages of rules before they sat down a the table? What if the rules read to them in a way that is so confusing and put them to sleep? Would they still want to come play? I think the best way to introduce someone to the game is to have them jump in feet first like into a cold swimming pool. It may be a shock, but you get to the point, swimming much faster than if you take forever inching your way forward. Make the only boring part the character generation, but even that can be spiced up.
My rule (-1) – “If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.”
Back in the mid to late 80’s I bought a quad ruled desk pad from an office supply store. That was back when desk pads and pen and paper were still the mainstay of business. I have only one sheet from that desk pad that holds the map to the town for Griswald, the longest running character I have played, who is now, essentially retired from play.
I don’t know what happened to the rest of the pad. I used it for mapping out a Boot Hill area, and such things. I think that pad may have been one of the things I lost in the water leak incident, but I don’t recall.
I have in the last few years tried to find such a pad in stock at an office supply store, but no go. I would have to special order or order online. If you search for quad ruled desk pad you will find them. They run a little under $20 each.
I like using them to map out large cities. I am a visual person and like to be able to see them. In my campaign, there are ten ancient cities of a fallen empire. I have taped together 8.5 x 11 quad ruled graph paper for a rough map of the one closest to the action of the current group of players. Having a bigger single sheet would simplify things and make it easier to fold up and get out of the way.
I also like he idea of using them for a megadungeon. Who doesn’t want to design a megadungeon? I think I started to do so way back in the day, but it is lost material.
This all comes to mind as I ran across Peter Regan’s most recent Kickstarter for a Dungeon Desk Pad, over at Oublette Magazine. It is an interesting idea. I am trying to avoid new Kickstarters for the financial responsibility end of it, but man is this one hard to resist. Personally, I prefer a full-size desk pad of grids, but this idea is interesting. My desk pad pages are 16 inches by 22 inches, slightly smaller than the A2 standard. The Dungeon Desk Pads are 16.53 inches by 11.69 inches, which is the A3 standard. The other issue is that Peter is UK based so overseas shipping adds to costs, etc. So far, I have only backed US-based Kickstarters, mainly because I have not had interest in others that were not based in the US. I know that Peter has a good track record, thus hitting the funding goal, and stretch goals are reasonable and fit with the base project.
I was also intrigued by an article that Peter shared that of Ian Livingstone of Games Workshop [former link: http://unpluggedgames.co.uk/2015/02/13/games-workshop-the-inside-story-part-one/] still has his first dungeon on a desk pad on his desk. You can save this photo and zoom in to be able to read the room descriptions. It would be easy to use this for a quick dungeon for your next session.
Ian Livingstone Deskpad Dungeon
This motivated me to get the rough map of Helmsdale, Griswald’s town, and share it here. The quick story on this town. My brother, Robert,the DM determined that for Griswald to be a half-elf, it made sense for the human to come from a place near the Elven Kingdom. The hillsmen in his campaign are based on the Scottish clans. They live in a series of hills called Carbaen Moor. Griswald is a Fighter/Cleric/Magic-User and we rolled his age. I believe 45 years old, so the backstory is that the hillsmen had a civil war where the Buchanan Clan Kicked the Stewarts out of their territory and became king. They did not maintain control of the Stewart territory so it became infested with Orcs and worse.
Griswald’s father was a duke, and as far as Griswald knew, he was the true heir to the throne. He later learned that the grandson of the king and the grandsons of the dukes higher in precedence had their own band of outlaws called the Red Arrows. They had red fletchings (feathers) on their arrows. Griswald joined up with them, and through creative use of magic and bluff developed a reputation beyond their actual abilities. Tameus, the true king, decided it was time for war. Through lots of favors owed and other factors and army big enough to challenge the Buchanan’s was raised, and while outnumbered by the Buchanans, magic and Elven cavalry defeated them. After reclaiming the kingdom, there was a massive earthquake that devastated most of the kingdom and the old Stewart lands. Since the orc tribes in the Stewart lands bordering the former Buchanan lands were hurt as bad as the humans, Griswald decided to take back his ancestral lands. With the help of a small force of mercenaries and a PC wizard and his own henchmen – two fighters and three magic users, the orcs where driven out.
The town is in a valley of a ring of hills. It has a ditch 30 feet wide and 20 feet deep. The earthquake reduced the walls. Griswald rebuilt a smaller town with an Elven temple, the price of the Elven troops. This works for Griswald as he is a cleric of the Elven moon diety, Isil-nar. There is also the ducal palace and homes for troops and workers and farmers. Outside the walls is an inn, The Merchant’s Delight. The merchants like Griswald, since he does not tax them as heavily as the orcs. He also built a gatehouse at the only way across the ditch.
The two biggest orc tribes were not hurt by the earthquake, and were consolidating their control over the remnants of the orc tribes Griswald had not yet eliminated. These tribes did not like this upstart half elf moving in, so they moved to invade and take him out. Griswald has a crystal ball so he looked for the leaders of the invaders and took Alim, his highest level magic user henchman to teleport to these troops on the march to take them out. While the two most powerful magic users in town, Griswald 10th fighter/10th cleric/11th magic user and Alim, 10th level magic user were gone, the other orc tribe got past the wall across the valley to the south and surrounded the town. Griswald and Alim mangled the rear guard of the larger force and were gone until morning. This was put on hold for 15 years, until we made it work to finish the scenario. Robert wanted to resolve it so the other players would know what happened, as they are ten or more game years past this point in time.
The orcs surrounding the town set up a catapult and started battering the walls. They also attacked the gatehouse with 50 men that were the troops of Logan, a PC who was killed, but the men stayed with Griswald. The gatehouse was cut off from the rest of town and the 30 or so cavalry on hand tried to get through, but were routed and nearly all of them were killed. The archers on the walls of town made long range shots at the orcs around the gatehouse, and nearly exhausted all the available arrows. The gatehouse fell. The high priest of the temple cast insect plague in the area around the catapult to delay the battering. By the next morning the high priest rested and relearned insect plague and cast it again. Somewhere in here, we had a two year delay of getting together to wrap it up, but we finally finished it.
Finally when the time line in town caught up to them, Griswald and Alim read teleport from their travelling spell books and returned to the palace. Griswald and Alim had hardly any spells or scrolls left, but as a fighter with protection from normal missiles, Griswald could mount the walls and fight off the invaders. Finally enough orcs were killed that their morale broke. I don’t know if I ever got a full count of the number of dead orcs, but the image in my mind is of The Battle of Roake’s Drift from the movie Zulu. Thankfully, it was not The Battle of Islandawana.
On this map each square = 40 feet. I found that the width of the squares is the same as the distance between the lines on a standard 3 x 5 index card. Index cards were handy for measuring ranges in the battle. We used a few miniatures, but was mostly scribbles on the map.
Every time an orc was killed we yelled, “Oh no! They got Grignak!” The inspiration for Grignak comes from Galaxy Quest.
First the map of the “north” of my brother’s campaign. This is one half of a TSR hex mapping paper, with the Willingham cover. The other half is the “south”. Only one player has been off this map. It is 10 mile hexes. This is a photocopy. I did the coloring. Robert used the photocopier to enlarge and zoom in in the following images. These are pictures and not scans. You still get a hint of my brother’s artistic talent here.
The Stewart Lands shows the fiefs of the various Stewart Dukes.
The North
Carbaen Moor
Stewart Lands
Griswald’s Hex
Below shows the ring of hills with an opening in the hills to the North West and South. The rectangle in the center is where the town goes.
Detail Griswald’s Lands
The post it note was added to complete the circle for the area of effect of insect plague. That spell is one of the ultimate battlefield spells if you can buy a high priest ten minutes (one turn) to cast it.
This is in pencil on 20+ year old paper with poor lighting.
Helmsdale
Inner Town
Insect Plague
I am curious if there are any other desk pad sized maps of towns, dungeons, space ships, etc. That would be an interesting gallery.
Adam goes into details about its origins and how it has worked in actual play from the GM side.
All I can say it, it is a blast and keeps one on their toes and revving up their off the wall ideas. After two sessions at Marmalade Dog, my character still doesn’t have hit points because he was never hit. I can imagine that it will be a nail biter if I play that character again and have to roll HP after being hit in combat.
I think that style of play works well for a con, and for the right group of regulars it could be a lot of fun. In a con game, it allows one to get up and running with a character quickly that one is more invested in than a pre-gen passed out by the GM.
As I mentioned before, Adam and I talked about this, and a GM with mastery of the rules, or a simple set of rules, like Delving Deeper, by +Simon Bull would best facilitate this style of play.
I backed the Grimtooth’s Traps Kickstarter. I probably shouldn’t have, but I did. I spend way too much on this stuff. Supposed to be a July, 2015 delivery date. I ordered the hard back, which includes the PDF.
They met the goals for all of their 13 stretch goals.
Of course, more later for the unboxing sometime in July.
The Hero Forge Kickstarter was one of the first Kickstarters that I backed. I got swamped with real life and missed out on playing with the beta websites.
Tonight I finally made time to go online and design my mini and place the order. My Kickstarter pledge for $30.00 gets me a detail mini and free shipping. As one of the backers I have access to the beta hexagonal base, for no additional cost.
What is really cool, is that you can name and save the character and then click the share button to get a link to that character. My mini is my interpretation, limited by the options of the Hero Forge site, to make Griswald Stewart, my long-time character in my brother, Robert’s AD&D 1st Edition game. Griswald is a half-elf fighter/cleric/magic-user of 10th/10th/11th level , and is the one for whom Robert drew the wolf’s head image that is Griswald’s personal symbol. Griswald was the only one with a magic weapon when the group he was with encountered a wolfwere. Slaying this magical beast gave Griswald the appellation, “The Wolf”. Griswald’s father was a hillsman, who are based on the Scottish clans, so he is supposed to be wearing a kilt, it is the lower half of robes.
I will show pictures of the unboxing when it arrives.
I will now have to locate paints and other supplies to prepare it. I will do my best to put the wolf symbol on the shield. I will have a post or two on the progress as I paint it. That could take some time, as January is my busiest time of year at work, plus my first grandchild is due in mid-January, so I may not get to it until sometime in February.
I found the Hero Forge website to be easy to use. I could have chosen from many different genres, like science fiction, western, modern, or east-Asian. You pick a genre, body type, racial type and design from head to toe including facial expression. It is all point and click. The low end mini is $15 and is not suitable for painting. The detail mini is designed to hold paint, and there are three inch and six inch versions available, for a big increase in cost. Standard shipping is $5.00. It is also very cool that you can change your view of the mini in design to make sure you know how the whole thing looks and if it is to your liking.
If you want a mini that is massively customizeable, this is a quick and easy way to get one, although I find the cost to be one to limit my purchases to either favorite characters or major NPCs to use in my game. I only have eight lead/pewter miniatures from back in the day, so I don’t use minis in games I run.
I will include further impressions of the actual mini as part of my unboxing post in the coming days….
I had an idea for a group name generator. Here are my initial ideas. I will polish this and do a proper table after I let the ideas ferment a bit more.
Some groups of players like a name for their group. The online group I play in had a hard time coming up with a cool name, so we ended up using the name of the guard dog of our wizard. The dog’s name is Starchy. Some of us were in the first group of players and by association all of us were referred to by NPCs as “Baldric’s Boys”, since we recovered a gem with significance for the followers of an admiral who died hundreds of years ago. We merged the two into “Starchy’s Boyz”.
It can be used for groups of NPCs, the bad guys, allied good guys, mercenary groups like The Black Company from the book series or The White Company from European History.
It’s been a long day. Snow and cold last week, followed by warmer temperatures and a lot of rain and a thunderstorm last night. I only new there was a thunderstorm because I had to get up in the middle of the night, I can sleep through most anything once I get to sleep. That was at 3:30 and the power was out.
I got back to sleep.and was sleeping soundly and dreaming, on the edge of lucid dreaming when I swore someone was pounding on my front door, so I stumble downstairs to see who it was. No one. The dogs in their kennels were all excited and wagging their tails into the sides of the kennels making a load of racket. Did my dreaming translate that into pounding on the door? That was at 5:30 and I couldn’t fall back asleep. At 6:30 the power came back on and the streetlight across the street filled my room with light. (I need blackout curtains.)
At 7:00 my alarm went off, so I grudgingly got up and got ready for work and stopped to get massive amounts of caffeine to help me get through the day. At about 9:30 I dozed at my desk for a bit. Thankfully, it was a relatively slow day at work.
We finally got a CostCo in Kalamazoo, within a couple miles of my work, and just off the way home. My son presented me with a membership card, as he got two with his membership. Since he lives with me, we are in the same household. I made the mistake of shopping while I was hungry, but got things that are healthy…or mostly so. I saw what I consider a good deal on a mini desktop with Win7 Pro. My last desktop got zapped and all I could salvage were the peripherals and the hard drive. My laptop has a failed screen and keeps freezing up and having issues with Google+ Hangouts with the weekly AD&D game I’m in. I do some work for a non-profit, so I need a working PC to keep up. I was on the look out for a good buy.
My tired brain came up with a name based on some of the OSR and original modules, and I thought I’d write about that tonight.
The Caves of Cavernous Caverns. Awesome, right?
Or, The Caves of Chaotic Caverns.
The Crumbling Caves of Chaotic Caverns.
The Terrifying Terror of The Terrible Trolls.
What this is calling for is a random adventure/module name generator. I recall having read about something like that a couple years ago, there is probably more than one, but I don’t feel like googling for them right now.
Alliteration add punch to it, like : Red River of Raging Ravenous Revenants. Although a horde of raging revenants would be silly without the proper story and narrative elements, psychobabble and circumlocutious obfuscation….
It’s not a complete set of tables to generate a module/adventure/campaign name, since I didn’t put a die and a roll with each table, just something to get started. This is more a placeholder for me to refine my idea and come up with some sort of finished product or PDF to share at some point in the nebulous future. Ah what fun a tired brain can generate! Here is the current PDF.
NOUN/ITEM Secret Night Gold Hoard Horde Clan/Tribe Idol Deep Dark Unholy
ADJECTIVE/DESCRIPTOR Shiny Adjective form of the Location Frightful Awful Awe/Awe-full Dread/Dreadful Mischievous Ravenous Raging
ALIGNMENT (Use Lawful, Good, and Neutral if you want.) Chaotic Evil
CLASS (Mix in some of the AD&D Level Titles or find a Thesaurus) Wizard/Mage/Archmage/Necromancer Priest/High Priest/Acolyte Monk Thief/Rogue Assassin Warrior Ranger Paladin
COLOR Black White Red Blue Green Yellow Ochre Mauve Taupe Plaid
WEAPON(s) Sword Dagger Staff Hammer Axe Spear Bec-de-corbin (not so much….) Arrow Club
MONSTER(s) Kobold Goblin Orc Hobgoblin Drow Pirates Lizard/Lizardmen Frog Ogre Troll Dragon Gelatinous jelly of slimy oozing spores (Now I need to stat that out….) etc.
As I explained in the About and here and elsewhere, the name of this blog comes from my brother, Robert, the DM mocking my character in his game, who hired all the mercenaries he could to deal with the large hordes of orcs in his territory and all of the troops dying, making it very difficult to hire more troops. It’s a bit like “going over the top” in WWI.
It is not lost on me the irony of the term when it comes to social media, as one wants to encourage and attract followers.
But if you think about it, whether you follow my blog or not, you will die, so don’t be like all the others who die without following my blog, join the few who die valiantly (?) in the pursuit of role playing fun!
Follow me! ….. and die!
Or as best as I can imitate the way my brother says it:
