That gaming bug's been buzzing by my ear again...

I'll start off by making an obvious suggestion: if you're a gamer, do NOT take a night job! At the time, taking the night hours seemed like a good decision. TEDxRochester required me to meet with a lot of folks who could only meet during the day, and the night just seemed to fit the bill. Alas, the negative effects on my social and personal lives have far outstripped any benefit I'd received in the past. Thus, my goal for this year is to stop being a vampire by the end of it. But, this isn't about employment, it's about what to do when not at work.

In 1981, I won a model building contest at our local Clover store (a spinoff of Strawbridges and Clothier, which is still meaningless to those outside of Philadelphia, I think) and was awarded with a store credit of $10. That worked out well, as I'd had my eye on this for some time:

My grandfather took me over to the store to pickup my winnings, and I headed into the back to find the row of shelves that had once been over flowing with red boxes was completely decimated and only a few of the Expert boxed sets remained. Disappointed, I started to walk away when I noticed a box sitting on another shelf, obviously discarded by some child after having been seen holding it by his parent. I used $7 + tax of my winnings and we headed home with my new prize.

Little did I know how my life would change.

I got home, immediately ripped open the packaging and said "Ooooo...huh? What's the crayon for in this little bag of funny-shaped dice for??" Grognards will totally get the joke. Despite reading the books within from cover to cover, I was completely confused on how I was supposed to play this game! Although Tom Moldvay's edition of the game was written for younger audiences, it was still a bit much for me to comprehend. How does one win this silly game??

Fortunately, my mother worked with a woman who had a son about my age who already played D&D, and she set us up on a play date where I got to learn the finer points of the game. Or, at least as much "fine" as a group of teenage boys could muster. I seem to remember us taking a lot of turns looking at the image of the succubus in his copy of the Monster Manual. But, I did learn how to play and so took the game to school later that week and was granted permission to hang at the school with my friends a couple of days a week to play. Given it was a Catholic school, this was fairly amazing seeing as this was going on at the time:



After hitting high school, I found kids there who would play after school, but as we lived on different sides of the city, had to play in the school cafeteria after...much to the chagrin of the school security who didn't want unescorted kids running around the building! Eventually, dodging the man became the game we played more often than not and interest eventually waned.

I'm not sure how it happened, but late in my freshman year of high school, someone directed me to a personal ad in the newspaper looking for players. I answered and the fellow, Jim, seemed nice enough. My mother, however, was a bit concerned about me (at 13) going to meet a 20-something man she'd never met by myself. Wise council in retrospect, overprotective parenting at the time. :) However, once she learned that he was the son of a local pastor AND we'd be playing in the library of the church itself, she relented and let me go. You can find out more about my years playing with Jim by perusing my section in Plagmada.

Okay, past out of the way, let's talk future...with daylight on the plan to be brought into my life again this year, I want to start playing D&D again. Well, lots of games, really. Goodwill has overstocked my shelves with many a new game I want to try out. This will also make the wife happy and hopefully stop the "You're buying another game?? Who are you going to play these boring games with??" :) But, more than anything, I want to sit on my side of the DM's screen and make players cry. The question, though, is which version?

While I started out with the red box edition of D&D, I played 1st edition AD&D all through high school and beyond. It wasn't until soon before moving to Rochester in '93 that the switch to 2nd Edition happened, and we played that until 3rd edition which, honestly, I did not like. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot to like in 3rd edition, but it just got far too "big". I don't mean "big" as in "Fa! Everyone's playing it, it's not cool anymore"-big, but "big" as in "Holy crap, they're coming out with 463 new books this month alone!!"-big. The game had been purchased by a major corporation, and they were going to do everything in their power to wring every last penny they could out of this product line, even if it left it bland and tasteless.

I've looked at the latest editions of the game, as well as the new Pathfinder RPG, and it's just more of the same. Flash and glitz, roll-playing instead of role-playing, and volumes upon volumes of books that do nothing more than present Magic Missile in different forms. Assuming my best Grumpy Atheist Goat voice here: "why when I was a kid, we had two rule books and that's all we needed!!" If you encountered a situation in those days that wasn't covered by one of the 20 or so rules that made up the game you did something unimaginable today: you winged it. You'd come up with some wacky shit, the DM would make up a number you needed to beat on d20, and thus were legends born! You didn't go pulling out the rule book to see if this version of the feat you took is compatible with this version of the beer making skill my halfling thief with rubbersneakfeet prestige class has and would that make it work? Just roll the damn dice and let's move on! I want to go back to that simpler time. But how? Ironically, using one of the editions I didn't like.

I will give them credit, when Wizards of the Coast released the 3rd edition of D&D they made the rules "open source". The basic ruleset of D&D was compiled into what was known as the d20 System Reference Document, and anyone was allowed to take these rules and morph them into whatever game they wanted. They could even go so far as to sell these games! The basic thought was there's a lot of commonality in all RPGs. "Someone wants to hit someone with a weapon, that other someone is wearing armor. How do we resolve if their swing hits and causes damage?" Every game has their own take on it, but something like that sentence exists in every rule book. It's the trivial specifics of how that's done that differentiates one game from another. Wizards genericized how they did it and told everyone else they could use it: "You can't say the receiver of the swing has an "Armor Class", because that's our term for it, but beyond that, here's a numerical way to represent how someone has wrapped themselves in metal to protect from swords."

It was a brilliant move, and it revived the RPG industry because now I could create my own game, and anyone who wanted to play it could...as long as they already knew how to play 3rd edition D&D. Fantasy, Modern, Space Opera, Horror. Every genre became a tweaked version of D&D. If you could play one, you could play them all. (Yes, this is an oversimplification, and it's not 100% true, but just go with me here). In 2006, Matthew Finch realized that by stripping down the SRD and tweaking some things, you could create a D&D-style game that very closely resembled the games of youth. The Old School Renaissance had begun!

OSR games, or retro-clones, are generally compatible with material from that bygone era. Grab a copy of Labyrinth Lord, for example, and you can play through module B2 without issue. You get the rules-lite feel of the old days combined with the streamlining that's occurred over the last 30 years of the industry!

Once I'd found OSR, I knew the direction I wanted to take, but looking over what's out there I still wasn't all that happy with my choices. The aforementioned Labyrinth Lord has some nice bits, but I also like the cosmology in Spellcraft & Sorcery, and the Occupations in Dungeon Crawl Classics add some interesting features to the game. And don't get me started on how cool the one-page version of D&D, Microlite20, is!

Deciding on a campaign setting's also been a whirlwind of choices. If I'm going old-school, I always really liked the Mystara setting. And since Labyrinth Lord is BECMI-compatible, that's a good possibility. But, I also always wanted to try domain-level play, ala Birthright. Adventurer Conqueror King gets the nod from some folks as being BECMI+Birthright, but now we're into a completely different rule set, and I would like to get some use out of all of those old books I have moldering in the garage!

What to do? What to do? I guess the only thing I can do: make my own. I have some thoughts of what I'd like to do, and I'm sharing them because my plan is to include the players of this game in as many of the decisions as I can. After all, it's their world, too! And, since I'll be posting this to my Facebook, I'm sure those friends who might be interested in building and playing along might join into the conversation. :)

The Game System Itself

Since I wanted to give domain-level play a try, I was thinking of creating a multi-layered system in which the characters start out as adventurers, but move up to become "nobility" (for lack of a better term) and eventually move into the political arena from time to time. It's not uncommon as part of adventures for a team to be granted land or a small keep and I think it could be fun setting aside some time to manage that aspect of their character's lives. Because this is something that typically doesn't occur until the characters are higher in level, getting the basics of the game correct first will allow us to build up to that.

The World

Although I like the idea of playing in an already published world, the idea of combing through tons of source books to capture as much detail as I can has always been a Herculean task. Almost as much as that, though, is creating a whole world from scratch. To cut down on that, my thought is I would create a general overview of the world (a couple of countries, major races, etc), and then the players can help with some specifics. They have to create a background for their character, so why not take it a step further and they create the country and culture from which they come, too? If a player wanted to play a Viking-type, well then, tell me the name of the country. Is it a theocracy? Democracy? Dictatorship? What's the major export, if any? Who are they allied with, who do they hate? Give me a couple of major cities or towns. That sort of thing. These would then be put into the world map, and they can be fleshed out as the characters travel through and build the world as part of their adventures.

Magic

Of all the things I've always hated about D&D was the Vancian magic system. Back when I started, you had a few dozen spells for all classes and that was it. Then, it wasn't sufficient to have Magic Missile, you also needed "Bart's Dancing Flying Zippy Daggers!" which was just Magic Missile with a different name. With Vancian magic, you're locked into whatever spells you have and if you don't have a spell that even remotely does what you need you're out of luck. While that can again lead to better role-playing, there's just no answer to the problem of "I need to cast a Fireball-like spell to hold these guys off, but if I fire one off it'll blow the top off the mountain and take all of us with it!" It also leads to an incessant and continuous (revenue) stream of new tomes filled with hundreds of new spells your DM will never let you play with.

So, I want to try out a more free form system. One such that I'm looking at is a 4x5 system that's pretty simple and straightforward. With this system, a wizard could cast a small Fireball by using Control and Energy and just not putting as much into it. Or, they could use Control and Energy to create a Magic Missile type effect. Point and think, just like a sonic screwdriver.

There are quite a few other thoughts floating around in the old brain box, as well as my Evernote account where everything eventually ends up! But, I'm hoping there's interest there to pique friends into getting ready for the day when I can roll some dice again!

Leadership Rochester: Program Day #4

With this year's TEDxRochester preparations getting into full swing, my time is becoming increasingly fragmented (as is my brain, it feels at times!) But, I didn't want to put too much distance between myself and this the next program day without getting something on digital paper!

Program Day #4, Building Common Ground (but often nicknamed "Diversity Day"), was held at the Quaker Meeting House downtown. We started out, as we always do, with a former class member framing a day that has the purpose of our "examining our personal beliefs and attitudes and the effects on our behavior". Immediately after we watched the Carvin Eison film, "July '64", about the race riots in Rochester in 1964. It was a powerful and moving film, and one which gave a great grounding in the events of that month. I'd heard of the riots and read the historical accounts, but Eison's film was extremely powerful in message and execution. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to learn about this difficult time in our fair City's history.

One of the most powerful images for me was one of the National Guard herding rioters using their rifles with bayonets. I was reminded of the nonchalant attitude of the officer macing students at UC Davis during an Occupy Wall Street protest just a couple of years ago. It just goes to show that while institutional racism's hold is waning, we still have a long way to go on other fronts.

The movie was followed by a panel made up of people who were there during the riots, and some that may or may not have participated. While the movie was able to present the story in a "canned" fashion, having those who witnessed events be able to answer questions was a unique opportunity I won't soon forget.

After a short break, we proceeded to the first of two "Hurts & Healings" panel discussions. This first focused on the issues of some 20 somethings in our community. Of particular note was the young man that barely managed to escape killed, although was still shot, when rebels invaded his village in Africa, but survived at the cost of being separated from his family. Through an amazing series of events, he ended up in Rochester where the people who aided him on his arrival inspired him to him to return to his home and give back through the building of schools. Truly a remarkable individual!

We then broke for lunch (Unkl Moe's! Mmm!) followed by our next panel discussion which focused on an older generation of those affected by institutional racism. Again, amazing to hear in their own words being banned from movie theaters or unable to marry they person they loved because they weren't the same race. While these issues still remain, it's easy to take for granted what others went through just within living memory.

I will admit, this wasn't my favorite day. The program administrators admitted that normally there's more diversity in Diversity Day. As it stood, African-Americans and homosexuals were well represented, but that was about it. As the panels are made up of people who graciously give up their time to be with us, it happens. Our class just got a weird confluence of events that lead to our day being less diverse than in other years. I'm thinking I might volunteer my time for future instances of this program day just so I could relive it with a wider panel.

Leadership Rochester: Program Day #3

Education Day! While I still put up the good fight for the City of Rochester, the fact is my wife and I moved out of it last year. Reason number one had to do with the random gunshots a few doors down one night while we were asleep. The second reason was our first daughter was rapidly approaching kindergarten and I didn't want to send her to the City schools. Hypocritical? Sure, but it is what it is.

The day started off early with the class meeting at East High School on Main Street. Aside from going through the metal detectors on the way in, East reminded me of my own high school in Philly. Kind of dilapidated, with no warmth to make you feel welcome. "Institutional" is the best word I can think of to describe the feeling of the place. The class met in the library, which was closed to students for the day. At first I was a little concerned with this, but I did take note of the number of times someone tried to come in. I'll have to assume the single digit numbers were due to the student body being told in advance that the library was closed rather than the lack of interest in using it.

Dr. Rick DeJesus, VP of Student Affairs at St. John Fischer College opened the day by reminding us that solving the educational problem in our country is one that's been tackled, dropped, picked up, and dropped again by a myriad of people with no immediate success in sight. But, that we were to keep an open mind through our day and to take in all we could. He was followed by Patty Malieri, Chief of Staff for the RCSD. Instead of a talk, she lead a brief Q&A session. The Qs were fairly limited as I believe we were all feeling the need to move on to the next part of the day, school visits!

I should stop here and admit I have a bit of a bias for the first school we went to, The Harley School. My wife and I attended an open house there a few years back and fell in love with the place. As an artist, my wife was blown away by the facilities that were available to all students to take advantage of. As an engineer, I of course looked at the track record numbers of student success. :) We've discussed sending our daughters there, but alas the cost is far too prohibitive. Especially when you have to double it!

Our whole visit can best be summed up with two sentences: "WOW!" A short sentence, but it was heard a lot from those of us in the class. And, "every child should have the opportunity to attend a school like this". The latter was one of my classmates before even entered the building. Simply walking up to it, listening to the birds sing in the fields and the quiet ambiance of the grounds, is a visceral event. The school is housed in a former church, and the impression I had walking up to it during the day was "Cathedral of Education".

Inside, we were met by the Director of Admissions, Ivone Foisy and an elf. No, not a real elf. He was one of the teachers there. This was the day before their holiday break, and the school was allowing both students and staff to blow off some steam by taking it easy. Our elf and Ms. Foisy took us on a magical tour of their facility and it was nothing less than spectacular. The students could be found milling about the halls or in classrooms watching holiday movies, and the teachers and staff were all working actively to ensure the kids had a good day.

My favorite moments? First would be the art room. I imagined my daughters in there and the marvelous creations that would come from them. It's a beautiful two-story room, filled with supplies and workstations and...everything! They even have a glass blowing facility. Second to this would be encountering their "reading nook". Yes, they have a reading nook for the kids. It's just outside one of the libraries (ONE of the librarIES) tucked quietly under a set of stairs.

They have a reading nook.

Our tour actually ran quite a bit long as there's just so much to see and so many great programs and features to learn about. The pride the staff have in their school comes across clearly, and they spent a lot of time showing every amazing nook (not really continuing on that last paragraph there) and cranny. As such we had to be dragged from Harley to move on to our second school visit.

This one was to James Monroe High School on Alexander. I wrote four paragraphs on Harley. Don't expect as much gush here. After driving around the block a couple of times to find a place to park (apparently, there's only one spot dedicated for parents and other visitors), we found a spot on the street a few blocks away. On the way in, I happened to notice the nice playground area outside the school. I thought to myself how it was on par with the one I saw outside the Harley, and so I had hope. That's when one of my classmates decided to point it out and the incongruity of it being at a high school. I'll let you ponder for a moment.

Just like at East, we were greeted by a guard sitting next to a metal detector leading into the school. The principal apparently hadn't told anyone we were coming, so we had a few moments of confused reactions from staff until the principal came out to wrangle us. And, wrangle he did. After unchaining the doors, he lead us into the auditorium where he told us all about his accomplishments and the good work he had done at his previous school to turn it around. He told us about his childhood and growing up in, I believe, Brooklyn. We also got a good overview of how they came to find out the two now-racist murals on either side of the stage have been appraised at over a million dollars. Nice!

But, you say, what about the school itself? Sad to say, he never took us out of the auditorium. I don't know if it was a time constraint or not, but to be honest it felt more like he really didn't want to show us around. He did talk a little about the issues he faced there, such as the lack of parking. There was also the revelation that they have a large Latino community, and for whatever reason a large population of Latino girls who were pregnant or already had children. Thus, the playground. It was for the day care.

Having high notes to end our tours with, we headed back to East High for lunch and debrief where we learned the other teams experiences mirrored our own: the private and charter schools were doing well, the public ones, not so much. This wasn't a universal, but an obvious disparity.

After our debrief session, we got to participate in a panel discussion with students from all around the city. This was a VERY enlightening discussion, and it could again be summed up by describing two of the students. First was Denzel, a very (and justifiably) angry but extremely eloquent young man who related the horrors of attending Franklin High School. He waxed for quite some time, well past his allocated time, about what he faces. He described the uncaring attitude of staff and faculty who have basically labeled him a troubled student and locked him away in a cell disguised as a classroom. There, he's required to sit quietly and read the material he's given and nothing more. There's no challenge, no interest, no desire to help this young man succeed. When he was finished, I looked around the room in hopes that some higher-up from the RCSD had arrived early so I could challenge them to help this young man. No one deserves the life he's been dealt.

The second student was a young lady from a local Catholic, all-girls school. I apologize I didn't write her name down, but having spent the early part of my own academic career at a Catholic school she was fairly typical of students at private schools. I don't mean that in a bad way, she certainly was very smart and able to hold her own in the discussion. No, when it comes to this student, she essentially put the period on the sentence "every child should have the opportunity to attend a school like this". At one point in the discussions, Denzel was relating more of his trials and tribulations when she cut in and said "I don't understand how this can be? I mean, the biggest issue we have to contend with in my school right now is they just banned yoga pants!"

She stopped there, but it was obvious from her face that she got it. We all did. In fact, that's where I'm going to end the description of the day and take us right into the opinionated portion of the article. There were two more panel discussions afterward, but the disparity in our educational system revealed by The Crisis of the Yoga Pants really speaks more to the problem than anything else. Some people are given the opportunity to better themselves and prepare them for success. Others are dumped in a room and told to keep quiet until graduation. If they happen to learn anything along the way, it's most likely by accident. The dividing line seems to be drawn in right around the same spot as a person's net worth.

I should clarify that my intent is not to place all of the blame on the RCSD, either. Despite my getting into a brief shouting match with one of the superintendents over misunderstanding one of my questions, I fully understand what they're up against. As she pointed out, the RCSD has to pay for busing kids around the area. They also have to take in every student, which includes those with mental disabilities and problems, and care for and attempt to educate those students. They face a diminishing budget and a populace that can't or won't take the time to fully understand the issues. That's of course assuming they're even able to get access to the right information on which to base a decision. From what I gathered, it appears the school district is TRYING, but are hindered by costs and political crap.

I left this program day with my world view intact. However, I did find the scope of the issue to be so much larger than it was before today. You see, as a parent, I've got my own opinions on education. My view is the education of my children rests 100% on me (well, and my wife, of course). The teachers and schools are there to set the curricula and schedule. That's it. If my children, for example, somehow made it to the sixth grade without being able to read...the typical consensus is to blame the teachers and the school system that failed them. That may be politically expedient, but it really would have been ME that failed them. It's MY responsibility to ensure they're learning what they're supposed to. It's my responsibility for them to know what they're supposed to know when they're done with school.

But, politicians can't get on TV and say "we can't fix the education system until parents start taking the responsibility on themselves", can they? Of course not! Can you imagine the outrage that would erupt from a statement like that? So, the responsibility for the failure falls on the teachers and system. Perhaps if we tweaked this, pulled here, moved this over there and...oh, yeah, let's REALLY vilify the teachers! Hell, they have a union, that's pretty much the mark of Satan right there!

This isn't a "responsibility" thing, so all you neo-libertarians in the audience can stop jumping for joy. Let's face it, if you're a parent who is making minimum wage and working three jobs to put food on the table how are you supposed to spend hours every night checking your children's homework? Frankly, most people in that position are probably lacking in the educational experience themselves to ensure the kid's gotten it right. In other words, until we "fix" the poverty problem in our country the education issues aren't going anywhere. Study after study has confirmed that 80% of what determines a child's academic success is the level of parental involvement. With that 80% not being brought to the table, how do you make up the difference with the remaining 20%?

It's nice that we won't leave any child behind, despite the fact that legislation like that only ensures more do. And, those that do succeed don't know squat compared to those who were educated prior to its passing. This doesn't mean, though, that we ignore the obvious and glaring short-comings of our education system, but it means we start having a meaningful dialog that actually addresses the issues instead of what's politically expedient to blame.

It also means we leave the damn teachers alone until we've solved at least SOME of the actual issues that are out there. Good teachers can't thrive in an system that prevents them from educating their students. Kids can't be educated under a system more interested in testing the teachers than the students, and using the students as proxies to "get" the teachers. You can't put a pile of manure on top of a flower and then blame the flower for not smelling as good anymore. Until we get a handle on the system, there's no real way to distiguish the good teachers from the bad, and I admit there are bad teachers out there. Let's fix that, and stop with the blaming.

On a final note, I'd like to mention that I do have some serious problems with the educational system as a whole and the direction it's headed. The problems are fundamental to the fact that life in the 21st century is going to be dramatically different than life in any time prior in our history. Looking at current technologies, and those that are on the horizon, it's very easy to see that within the next 20 years you'll be able to get a chip implanted into your brain that will give you 24/7 access to the Internet. That changes the landscape of education away from reciation and regurgitation. When kids have instant access to all of the world's knowledge, expecting them to memorize it becomes superfluous.

As such, we need to modify how we educate to focus even more on experiential learning and critical thinking skills. Students need to be taught how to find the right information in a sea of conflicting viewpoints. They need to understand how to apply the knowledge they have. And, they need to be taught the emotional intelligence necessary to use that application for the greater good. No small undertaking, to be sure. But, if we're going to put the effort into redesigning an educational system shouldn't we do so to prepare for the future instead of trying to fix the past?