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:
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!
