Squeebike, Part One: The Prologuening

I used to have a dream, and it looked something like this:

But, as I got older, I realized the impracticality of said dream.  I mean, look at the size of the garage you'd need!  Oh, yeah, and you also need a lot of money to purchase all those babies, get them looking and working as pretty as they are, fuel 'em, insure 'em, and, yes, house 'em.  So, I gave up on that dream, and revised it to something more manageable.  Like this:

NOW we're getting somewhere!  Well, WE might be, but he's not.  Seriously, don't build your motorcycle collection in your basement.  This is more manageable.  Motorcycles, even classic and rare motorcycles, will be generally cheaper than cars.  Not to mention taking up less room, and are easier to work on.  While contemplating the purchase of my first iron hog, though, the universe made the decision for me, and TED provided the answer in the form of a talk at TEDxFlourCity 2014:

Insert sound of angles singing and visual of the clouds parting*.

Matt's talk inspired me.  When I was a kid, you couldn't get my ass off my bicycle.  Mostly because that was the only way to get anywhere, but every time I sat on the seat I felt the same rush of freedom I did the first time.

To All The Bikes I've Loved Before

Digression: when I was a wee, little one, my mom bought me my first bike. It was a slick, red dealie with training wheels.  Training wheels that bent the first time I rode it.  It went into the garage, and there it sat, unused, for a couple of years.  When it was finally fixed and I decided to take it for a ride with my other 6 year old friends, I was laughed at for still having those training wheels, so again it went into the garage and there it sat until it was finally thrown away.

When I was in the second grade, I was playing with a friend at his house.  For whatever reason, I decided to be a smartass (I know, completely out of character for me), and pretend to steal his bike.  Ha ha.  Seeing as I couldn't ride the damn thing, it would be a short joke.  But, something happened.  I got onto it, hit the pedals, and after a shaky first moment or two, I took off!!  I remember looking down over at my feet pedaling as hard as I could, then looking back at the open driveway in front of me and the end of it narrowing and closing in on me.

And, I laughed.  I laughed as I roared out of the driveway and across the street into the next. I laughed as I circled the block, and made a fast flyby of my friend where I shouted "Sorry!" as I left him in the dust shaking his fist at me.  I laughed and smiled as my world shrunk down to an easily traversal distance.

I returned the bike to my friend, and headed home where I told my grandfather "I RODE A TWO-WHEELER!!!!"  Soon after, one of these babies made it into my life (except in silver):

It was my feet. Everywhere I needed to go, I went on that bike.  By the time I was done with it, it was beat up and twisted.  It showed every one of my glorious rides somewhere in the baldness of its treads or scratches in its paint.  Being 10, though, I was fairly fickle.  I fell in love with this at the store one day, and that Xmas my grandparents surprised me with it.

I know there's a picture of me looking out my front door at it floating around somewhere.  One would think it would be a look of pure joy, but it's more a "Why are they torturing me?  That beautiful thing can't be mine....can it?"

I will grant the chopper was not that practical a bike.  At the time I got it, we were living in a townhouse community that was just being built, and my friends and I spent a lot of time riding through the dirt and trees.  But, I got that thing through whatever I needed to to get where I was going.  Wish I knew what happened to that chopper.

Oh, that's right, I got older.  When I hit high school, I decided it was apparently time for me to "grow up", so I got what every bigger kid gets, a 10-speed.

Yup, mine was that ugly yellow, although it didn't have a rack.  Unfortunately, I never really loved that bike.  Probably having to do with all the times I broke my nuts on the gear shifters.  Probably had more to do with my learning how to properly navigate Philly's transit system to get around, and thus less need for a bike.

Fast forward to 1996, when I decided I needed a bike again.  I was getting a bit wide in the seat, and needed to trim it down.  Enter, the Giant Iguana:

The moment I saw it at Towner's Bike Shop, I knew it was the one for me.  Not sure why it caught my eye, but it was mine.  I got some level of use out of it.  I fondly remember the look on my ex-wife's face when I came home from a trip out with my friend Mike with a bloody leg from a nasty fall down a hill.  Unfortunately, she never really got into biking, and so it sat in the garage unused.

Digression over.  Yeah, I have long digressions.

So, after watching Matt's talk (remember that?  Yeah, it's way back there), I decided I needed an e-bike.  Since I had a perfectly good bike sitting in the garage, and some level of electronics skill, I decided to combine the two.  After completely disassembling the Iguana to bare metal, I mentioned to my wife how much the batteries for this thing were going to cost me.  After the fully justified "WTF??", she decided to hit Craigslist and in moments found this:

It was a 2008 Schwinn World GSE.  Owned by an 87-year-old man who rode it every day, it looked practically brand new!  When I asked why he was selling, he responded "I'm 87, and those are 27" tires.  I can't get my leg over it anymore."  Fair enough.

It went home with us, and I rode my old-man bike pretty much every night after getting our daughters to bed.  Wow!  It was biking, but with effectively no hills!  Just what my old ass needed.  I fell in love immediately with e-biking, and have continued to annoy anyone who would listen, get trapped in a corner, or read my blog about it since.

I love that bike so much, but the battery is getting long in the tooth and Schwinn provides no replacements.  The distance I could take it got shorter and shorter over the course of the summer, until winter hit and I was off the road anyway.   Then, I ran into one of these in a store one day:

Wowie-wow-wow!  What the hell is THAT?  That, my friends, is the Mongoose Dolomite, the cheap Walmart knockoff version of a recent fad in mountain biking: the fat tire bike.  Those 4" tires allow you to do everything you normally can on a mountain bike, but also do it in the snow or on the beach.  And, yup, there are e-bike versions!  I very quickly decided my next bike needed to be a fattie, so I started doing research.

I finally settled on getting a Dolomite as a base.  All of the reviews I read for it were really good.  "For $200, you get a fat bike that's as much fun to ride as a $3000 version!"  Granted, the mechanicals were always pointed out as something you'd want to eventually upgrade, but I was looking at it as a base for an e-bike and thus as a cheap frame so that wasn't an issue for me.

Winter was ending, and I wanted to go riding, but knew I'd never get this new fattie built in time for Summer so decided to instead wait until the end of Summer (when they'd be even cheaper) and I'd have a Winter project.  Obviously sensing me pining for a fattie e-bike, my wife said one night "Hmmm...let me check Overstock.com...", and minutes later...

...Oh, this is getting too long.  I should just end here.  ;-)

° I don't believe in angels, but I do believe in angles.

Back again!

Hi!  How ya been?  I've been fine, thanks for asking.  Bit busy, you know.  That whole having a job, family, TEDxRochester thing can really impede one's ability to do the things they like to do.  So, I dumped the one that was taking the most time. :)

Okay, dumped is probably not the best word.  "Backed away from" probably works better.  That thing was a lot of work, and it finally got to the point that it was either I stop doing it, or never get to do anything *I* wanted to do ever....

...like keep a blog updated with my ramblings and instructions and such.

"Ew, but  BLOGGER?  Why would you move it to Blogger?"

For the last few years, I've run this blog on Wordpress running on my own VM in Amazon's cloud, and it's worked for the 20-30 hits/year I typically get, but if I wanted to have a few more folks visit, I decided it was probably time to let those that know how to host a blog host the blog.

I started by setting it up on wordpress.com.  I got the blog setup in minutes, and since I didn't use a ton of  plugins on the old site I just exported it and imported it in minutes.  And, when I refreshed the page, I was told the blog was suspended for violating community guidelines.  They provided a link to said guidelines in the message, but I ain't got no porn and ain't advocating armed overthrow of the government, so could I get a bit more detail?  Nope.  Just a quick email two days later saying "I looked, you're good".

Too late.  I'd already decided to start moving to Tumblr, as I follow a bunch of things on there, but needed to move my old stuff, too.  Found a few ways to do it, most of which entailed migrating first to Blogger and then using another tool to migrate to Tumblr.  However, once I was on Blogger, I saw they'd really upped the usability for it.  I had a couple of old blogs out there that I hadn't maintained in a few years, and so was able to pull them into one big aggregate anyway.  It was easy, and provided what I wanted, so here we are.

Am I wrong on race?

In the previous article, I made a very sweeping statement without putting any thought into it: "I won’t be doing demihumans as classes, though." As someone who likes to analyze why he does things to see if he's not wrong, I certainly blundered by making such a pronouncement before really looking into it.

While I started playing RPGs during the halcyon days of the red and blue boxes, the bulk of my playing career was with 1st and 2nd edition AD&D. As a result, my feelings of "race as class" is tainted by long exposure to a different system. People who spend a long time doing things a certain way have a hard time seeing that it might not be the best way. We like to think humans are flexible, but it really ain't the case.

Yesterday I was thinking about how I'm eliminating dwarves as a race in my campaign and so had the random idea of translating the races of TSR's first foray into sci-fi, Star Frontiers, into D&D terms to compensate. Who wouldn't want to play a sword-wielding Dralasite?? After reading that entry, though, I thought it really didn't seem likely they'd play any of the standard PC classes. Maybe a thief? Or, at least, a Specialist? I can't really see them wearing armor, so fighters would be out. They might be pretty good mages, though. Actually, they might be really cool as mages. If I'm willing to contemplate limiting them away from certain classes, doesn't it make sense that they also could be shoe-horned into a single class?

Hmmm...could I be wrong on this race-as-class thing? Is it possible for the game to be playable like that? I've done some rough outlines of the races I'd have in my game, so with the frame of mind that I'd want races as classes, I took another look at my description of elves:

The Aluunar

I've always hated the concept that elves live to be thousands of years old. It always seemed to be an impractical and unworkable lifespan. The elves of this world typically live to the age of 170-200 years instead, but with a twist: they mature at an extremely slow rate, reaching full maturity around 70, or roughly the equivalent of a human turning 30.

Around their 70th year, their physiology undergoes a remarkable change, and they cease aging as quickly. Instead of a one-to-one relationship between chronological time and their physiological ages, they age approximately 10 times slower for a full century. So, at the end of this century, they're physiologically the same as a 40 year old human.

Elves call this their "Time of Excellence" and it's when most achieve their greatest accomplishments because they are at their peak physically and mentally, and maintain that peak for a full century. Prior to achieving their Time, elves are considered immature and don't typically travel outside their homelands. In fact, most elven societies forbid those who have not yet reached their Time from leaving home at all. As a result, very few non-elves have even met an immature or elder elf.

This isolation has the side effect that once an elf is old enough to venture out, they have spent their entire lives (which was approximately 70 years, remember) isolated from the world around them. Their opinions are provincial, but also deeply-rooted in their experience. As a result, most see the outside world as inferior and full of lumbering idiots, which is where their reputation for being haughty and arrogant comes from. After a few decades, most elves get over their initial reaction to the world and come to appreciate that their species is only a part of it. Unfortunately, as this does take decades, it's typically far too late for their reputations to lose their tarnish.

After the Time, elves begin aging again at the normal rate. Thus, around 170, they typically settle down to enjoy their last decades in peace and surrounded by their families. Those who live to be 200 years old, are physiologically similar to 70 year old humans, which is around their maximum lifespan as well.

PC elves will always be somewhere within their Time on starting the game.

Given this description, does it make sense that there would be a wide variation between elven PCs? In classic OD&D, elves were essentially multi-classed magic-user/fighters. They could cast spells, even in full armor, and used any weapon type. If we're eliminating clerics entirely and making druids just a specialty magic-user, we don't really lose a whole lot by removing class options from them.

With only three base classes to choose from, elves as a class only lose 1/3 of their options (if we ignore multiclasses). One game I looked at, Adventurer, Conqueror, King, provides a solution to this, though. They use race as class, but provide multiple class options for each race. For the elves, you have two choices: the Spellsword, which is essentially the B/X fighter/mage elf, and Nightblade, which is a thief/mage combo.

The argument could even be made that perhaps elves could be the new rangers? Restricted to light armor? That fits. Restricted to light weapons? Check. Animal friends? Check. Racial enmity against goblinoids? BIG check. Casts spells? Hmmm...rangers do get spells at later levels.

When we think of traditional elf tropes, they're always magical, so these combos make sense. In essence, every elf is a mage, but there's the additional skill set you take into the world as part of your "Elven Rumschpringe". Is it that you're more warrior-like, or more skill-based? We lose the ability of elves NOT having magic (straight fighter or thief), or being just exceptionally skilled at magic (straight elven magic-user), but those loses make sense in context, too.

An elf without magic is an oxymoron, and so is easily dismissed. An elf who has dedicated their lives exclusively to the pursuit of knowledge, be it magical or specialist, probably isn't likely to be delving deep into musty old tombs. They would probably see that as a waste of their Time (capital "T"). While they might adventure out into the world, they're not having adventures in that world. There could be the one-off "elven mage who joins an adventuring party in search of lost and forbidden magical knowledge", but it would seem they would only join a party for individual explorations. "You're going to the Lost Tower Of Agbar The Mad? I've heard he had some really wild magical talents, I'll come with!" That makes sense. Jumping into every random hole in the hopes there MIGHT be something down there they want does not. It would make more sense they'd be sending the party out to retrieve things.

I'm actually finding myself starting to like the idea of race as class for my campaign. I've completely redesigned the halfling in my mind, but haven't fully fleshed it out on paper yet. So, let's go there. In my next article, I'll reveal what happens when you design a race with the expectation that they don't have class options. If that happens, I might just have to do the one thing humans are worst at...

...change my mind.

A Question Of Class

As I mentioned in my last gaming article, I've got the bug to torture some RPG players again. Since that last article, I've done a whole lot of research on how I wanted to go on a number of topics, and I thought I'd share.

Before I lay out which system I've decided I wanted to use, it's probably best to explain how I came to that conclusion. As I stated in the previous article, the "feature creep" that's inherent in the basic structure of D&D is something that I've always hated.

Don't get me wrong, I loved getting my issue of the Dragon every month and finding a new, unique class to think about...but that's just it. Think about, never play. As a player, either already had a character I liked. And, besides, my DM would never let me play one of these new non-Lawful Good paladin variants no matter how I pleaded. As a DM, the topic never actually came up. At the end of the day, every class is just a variation on three basic classes (yes, there are four in D&D, we'll get to that): warrior, mage, rogue, so why complicate the issue?

"Um, stupid, yeah...hello? Clerics?" Nope, haven't forgotten the cure-carriers that cut their meat with maces. My problem with clerics is I think most people misinterpret what clerics are supposed to be. For most people, a cleric is a priest, and they concentrate on the fact that they case spells. But, the reality is they're supposed to be the warrior-priest. In D&D, clerics are supposed to be more akin to the Knights Templar than Friar Tuck.

Rightly or wrongly, that's how I've generally seen them played. Given that they're a warrior who casts spells, clerics are nothing more (to me) than a fighter/magic-user multiclass with some weapon restrictions and a lower XP requirement for advancement. If a cleric could ever cast anything but Cure spells (again, few have in my history), they'd be a formidable class, but they're not played to their potential so why bother?

"Druids?" Easy: mages with a restricted spell list and the ability turn into animals. In fact, most extra classes that are made up are simply variations on the base classes that add some kind of magical ability to make them interesting. Paladins are fighters who can cast spells and lay hands. Rangers are fighters who can make friends with animals and kick giant ass (and eventually cast spells). Bards are thieves who can charm the pants off the ladies. Or, guys, if that's what you're in to. Monks are...a whole other animal...

I know, I'm oversimplifying here, but that's the point. If I cut down to three base classes, and from that can create a cleric-like creature by simply having the player multiclass, why do I need a cleric class? I don't, so they're gone. I will avoid discussing the fact that in the campaign world I'm putting together, there's no gods anyway, so they're doubly pointless. :)

This isn't about me being against classes. I like classes, I just don't need so many of them. Classes make it easier to explain to fellow players what your character's role in the party is. When I tell other players "My cousin, Joe, played a paladin named Luckfudge, and it was the best-played paladin I've ever seen", they know that I'm talking about the restrictions placed on paladins and what I mean by that simple sentence. Their only follow up is "Luckfudge??"

Now, granted, trimming out all other classes and using multiclassing to make up the difference, you do lose some of that. But, Luckfudge was about role-playing. The restrictions aren't really placed on the character so much as on the player themselves. Joe knew better than to say "I'm going to slowly cut the throat of the orc's wife until he tells us where the camp is". He also knew that if someone else in the party said it, his only response should be "I'm attacking his character if he tries that."

Trust me, you did NOT want to be on the wrong side of Lucky.

But, those are decisions made by the player based on the restrictions placed on what the character code do. A good role-player doesn't need those restrictions spelled out for them. If Joe played a magic-user/fighter with a code of honor, he'd get most of what he could do as a paladin.

Let's also not forget, my plan is to recreate more the feel of playing old-school D&D (red boxers represent!) than AD&D. Most of my playing has been with AD&D, but I'm good with taking it further back. My goal is to induce role-playing over roll-playing. When your character is defined more by the way it's played than what the numbers on the page are, it becomes very difficult to fall back to the easy route. Lucky would be Lucky, no matter what his character sheet said.

So, given that, and a few other things, the game system that most fits what I want is Lamentations of the Flame Princess (yes, that's the name of the game). It's gained a lot of reputation since its debut, and not all of it has to do with the soft-core, grindhouse-style porn that graces its interior. I grabbed the free no-art version, so I've never seen the fun stuff, unfortunately. Overall, it's deservedly well-received as a well-constructed OSR retro-clone. It even has demihumans as classes!

I won't be doing demihumans as classes, though.

Trimming down to just three core classes was 2/3 easy. Fighters represent everything that has as its major job requirement "Must be able to knock things down through brute strength. Brains optional." Magic-users, um, use magic, and can stand in for clerics, druids, sorcerers, witches, or wizards. It all depends on the source of their magic and how they wield it, which is a role-playing decision anyway and is a whole other article.

But, thieves, that's a different story. I won't go into the permutations that I came up with, suffice it to say when I saw Whitehack I was enamored of his interpretation, "The Deft". It's essentially any class that depends on knowing how to do things (aside from cast spells and knock things over). However, while Whitehack is a neat hack I will be borrowing from, The Deft was not what I was looking for. It's TOO open-ended.

LotFP's Specialist, now there's my thief/bard/ranger!

Once I read through and saw the elegant simplicity with which the author had differentiated his four classes (in a nutshell: fighters are the only ones who get higher combat bonuses as they go up, everyone can try basic thief skills and such, but only specialists get bonuses as they go up, etc), I knew this is what I wanted to base my game around.

Of course, I'm going to have to pull it apart because he's got those stinky clerics in there, not to mention the demihuman classes (ick), but as far as mechanics go it's pretty much what I was looking for.

With all of this in mind, I've got the core of what players would need to build their own class. There's a lot of other material I haven't covered, but trimming down to three base classes is a fairly radical enough change for a single article....

...but, once we get to the campaign world, I'll introduce you to the fourth class that all player-characters will be required to multiclass with. :)

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?