D&D: The One I ****ed Up...

Many years ago, when yours truly was a wee lad who could still fit into his size 30 jeans without turning blue in the face, he (that's me) ran what I thought would be a one-off adventure for a friend's dark elf character.  I had an ingenious idea, although it turned out I was a little too smart for my own good.  The premise was simple enough; an unwed, childless duke had perished, leaving his lands up for grabs...

But there was a catch (there's always a catch).  The Duke had a plan.  Headship requires courage, so aspirants could brave the late Duke's dungeon, stocked with exotic and hungry monsters and deadly traps.  Anyone who managed to make it through with all their vitals intact could claim the title of Duke with the honors and privileges thereof.

He almost didn't make it.  But in the end he emerged, alive, his beating heart hanging by a vein from the gaping hole in his chest.  All in all, a fun afternoon. 

And that was that.  My friend's character was a noble.  Duke Someone of Something, situated in a suitably remote part of my setting.  It was really meant as a one-time excursion, and the character, shelved after our other DM moved away, had never been my friend's favorite to begin with.  It was supposed to be a last hurrah before retirement.

This quickly proved not to be the case, and it didn't have to be.  My friend's ascension to dukedom opened up many gameable possibilities...

But I wasn't prepared for just how fully my friend embraced his newfound status.  He frequented libraries (it was a pre-internet age), studied feudalism and medieval tax schemes, and mastered the minutiae of building (and fielding) an army.  And good for him!  This is interesting stuff.  He wanted to conquer other parts of the setting, starting by inciting a civil war and becoming King.  And we were more or less cool, for a while.

We role-played his political machinations and dabbled in 1985's Battlesystem, although Swords and Spells might have been funner.  But then a creeping obsession took over, and his in-game aspirations began to overtake everything else.  I enjoy gaming as much as anyone; but I enjoy lots of other things and partition my life accordingly.  But it got to the point of getting calls at all hours wanting to talk about the allocation of grain and how to convince the Church to endorse his claims.  This went on for months.  

I began avoiding my friend and losing my temper, and it all came to a head at a group session involving vampires (or something).  Another player had gotten Bucknard's Everfull Purse and my friend's eyes lit up with unmasked avarice.  It seems the Duke was having trouble financing his ambitions.  Anyway, my friend pulled me aside.  He was literally, physically trembling, and I swear tearing up a bit.  I've got to get that purse, he said with a real, palpable desperation that blew a fuse in my brain and turned ugly.

So I decided we'd all had too much of this and retreated from gaming; and for years I imagined (assumed, really) that I was in the right.  But was I?  Who was really the problem player here, and who was the better friend?  Turns out it wasn't me...

My friend clearly had a problem, and I was a terrible friend for not seeing that.

Was he having trouble at home?  Struggling with self esteem and hoping to find it in an imaginary world where he was of noble blood?  My not-so-fully formed brain saw only inconvenience when it should have sensed a cry for help.  Life went on.  We gamed again, but drifted apart a year later; and I regret that fact as much as my reaction to what was clearly a problem.  I should have been honest sooner, made my boundaries clear and asked if anything was wrong or something.  Easy words for a 52-year old man.

I suppose I should give myself a break.  We were kids.  But it does go to show what might happen when we aren't attuned to more than ourselves and our convenience.  When it comes down to it, gaming is a human activity indulged by people who may or may not bring their assorted troubles to the metaphoric (and literal) table.  Even if it's only hurt feelings, chances are it's also a missed opportunity to do good.  There are very few activities where a little kindness and understanding aren't preferable, and gaming isn't one of them...           

Was Gary Gygax Afraid of Magic?

Read the title.  Is it on the mark?  I don't think so, at least not in the literal sense; and seasoned grognards who grew up in the man's company and played his games personally know better than anyone, certainly more than this humble blogger.  But I do know how to read, and I've been making a study of OD&D and the various supplements, which never fail to delight and inform with each new perusal.  There's always something more to discover, some fresh bit of insight revealed in its delightfully amateur pages...      

And with my latest reading, I can almost believe that Gygax was afraid of magic!

No, I don't think he was superstitious.  But he was a war gamer and mainly accustomed to managing ordinary humans who couldn't levitate or otherwise bend the laws of physics through clever spellcraft.  Indeed, the whole challenge of historical war gaming lay, at least in part, in having to operate well within the bounds of nature.  Just imagine how the Battle of Hastings might have gone with a unit of magicians armed with Sleep spells!  

And that's the point, really.  In our non-magical reality even the simplest magical effect, however minor, would be spectacular.  The ability to magically nudge a pencil a quarter of an inch (or even less), something with virtually zero real-world impacts, would nonetheless be incredible because it would represent a violation of nature as we know it.  And it would speak to forces beyond our knowledge.  This is obvious, gee-whiz stuff, but there's a point...    

Magic, in any form, is powerful.  And in a fantasy game, where spells do have actual, measurable consequences, even the lowliest magic is spectacular.  Especially in a game otherwise designed to force its players to work through obstacles within the bounds of (Newtonian) physics.  What good is that pit trap when the magic-user can cheat and levitate above it all without a care?  And that's the point.  Magic is, at the end of the day, cheating reality of its due.  I'll say it again: game magic is a form of "legal" cheating.

So let's jump back to OD&D.  Here we have something about as close to Gygax and Arneson's gut-level instincts about game balance as we're likely to see.  And it's clear in the way spells were assigned power levels (and the torturous climb needed before the best of these finally become available) that Gary didn't want them in the hands of anyone before they started fighting dragons on a regular basis.  Oh, and these early spells were powerful and without many of the qualifiers shoehorned into the later Greyhawk supplement...

Charm Person was permanent until Dispelled.  Strong stuff.  Greyhawk would later allow targets a saving throw at shorter intervals; but it starts off pretty powerful, and in the hands of first-level characters no less.  The Death Spell killed 2d8 monsters up to 6th level or 2-16 minotaurs if you want a little perspective.  Gary clearly saw even the weakest spell as very powerful.  Some of this was surely the newness, but some of it was Gary.

Now this is all simple game-balance stuff; but the creator's perceptions almost certainly influenced the original design, and one way this might show itself is in the number of magic-user spells available.  OD&D had 70 spells divided between six levels as shown...

1st level (8) 2nd level (10) 3rd level (14) 

4th level (12) 5th level (14) 6th level (12) 

On a level-by-level basis, there's fewer 1st and 2nd-level spells, far less in the case of 1st level magic; but what a huge proliferation in the mid and upper levels!  Gary was hard-pressed to imagine any spell weak enough for those spell-slinging newbies.  But this also makes sense.  Low-level magic-users are not only limited in power, but in sheer variety precisely because magic is so inherently powerful.  This also explains the near-doubling of available spells at higher levels.  Still, it's easy to see Gary's reluctance.

Spells are powerful.  And Gygax imagined very powerful, sweeping and oftentimes permanent effects straight out of the storybooks.  This clashed with a war gaming mindset accustomed to regular people being challenged precisely because they couldn't levitate across that covered pit trap.  Of course, Gary had already done this with his Chainmail rules; but the more individual nature of role-playing meant that the magic-user could potentially outshine their peers and bypass the referee's obstacles minus any human effort.

And this was hotly debated in the early scene and made it into the pages of Dragon Magazine, where some defended the "poor magic-user" and others argued the class had enough power as it was!  It was a ongoing process of rules refinement...

OD&D was the purest form of the game in my humble opinion, and while it clearly needed some additions, it probably needed less than even the first supplement added with respect to rules and spellcraft (monsters and magic items are a different thing entirely).  Anyway, it's always a revelation to see the unvarnished version of a game and to witness the humanity of its designers.  Time and added content necessarily changes things; but sometimes, first instincts are the best instincts, and OD&D's magic system is an excellent example of this!

Ten Commandments of the OSR...

(1) The OSR is an attempt to preserve, promote, and/or revive old-school games.  

(2) Its aims can be met by playing these early games, but also by publishing content under the Open Gaming License or developing original systems in this style.  

(3) There's nothing about seeking to preserve, promote, and/or revive old-school games that suggests (much less requires) any particular political, religious, or social agenda.

(4) The fact that some people in the OSR behave badly says nothing about the OSR as a whole.  Some are good, others bad; but all of them can like older games.

(5) If you want a positive, welcoming OSR, be a positive, welcoming person.  Splitting off into ideologically pure communities just might be the worst possible way to achieve this.

(6) We desperately need values, but we'll have to look beyond the OSR to find them; and when we do, shouldn't they apply to everything and not just our gaming?

(7) As long as people remain fascinated by older games, the OSR will never die.

(8) Things like Sword Dream and The Inglorious OSR are at best subsets of the OSR; and far from signalling the death of the movement, they speak to its diversity. 

(9) The OSR has no leaders.  Some are louder and more vocal, but they can only speak for themselves (and that includes yours truly).  Feel free to add your voice to the mix.  

(10) If you've fled the OSR only to run your weekly OD&D game, you haven't escaped the movement at all.  Indeed, you've aided it's sole purpose.  Long live the OSR!

On the Slow Death of Shock...

Okay, so James Raggi, shock maestro of the OSR, offered a clever play on the whole Kids on Bikes game with Kids on Pikes.  Yes, the cover of his GenCon catalog depicts dead children impaled on pikes, seemingly for our amusement.  I've seen worse in real life, and while I find it distasteful in the extreme, I'm not clamoring for censorship.  These things inevitably correct themselves, and James isn't helping himself.  I've never played his game, and the gross marketing tactics don't communicate anything informational.

Dead kids bleeding on wooden pikes!  Will the ideas never cease?  Seriously though, this latest non-controversy does at least invite a conversation about how we're supposed to view violence in games where the whole point is to stick pointy things into others and take their money.  How do we enjoy this and have any issue with Kids on Pikes?    

Birth, sex, and death are part of the human condition and impossible to ignore.  If you’re reading this paragraph, you were born.  And if you aren’t having sex now, the smart money says you’re the product of it (and very likely seeking your next encounter).  Our desire to survive and reproduce is indelibly hardwired, so much so that we omit these things from our narratives to our peril and to the detriment of the concepts we hope to explore...

I get it.  I'm not some prude who wants to play tea party.  Orcs pillage the countryside, slaughtering all in their path.  Lust reduces men to quivering jelly, makes them the lovers of demons (or maybe their own sisters in Caligula's case) and worse yet, predators of the topical sort who populate our news cycles all too often.  Indeed, these realities elevate our fiction and our games, and their omission would suck the humanity out of our efforts and leave a huge, unsatisfying hole in its wake.  Candyland doesn't interest me.

But that's the rub, isn't it?  When do our narratives go from being stories about humanity which just happen to involve death and sex, even if prominently, and when do they become death and sex for its own sake divorced from any context?  This distinction matters...    

So first, let's partition sex and violence.  Sex between consenting adults is nothing to oppose or censor so long as it's basically responsible and hurts no one.  But once it becomes non-consensual it devolves into violence.  And let's extricate death because this, in and of itself, is the natural end of our cycle, however painful it can be to the survivors.  We can disentangle these things and distill that which any considerate human should rightly reject...

Namely, the suffering of others as an end unto itself and offered up as entertainment or a clever marketing strategy.  And this is why I'm ultimately turned off by Kids on Pikes.   

Pain and suffering are things that happen in our narratives.  That doesn't mean we should find them cool or entertaining for their own sake.  Now I totally get that the grindhouse genre playfully exploits blood-spattering gore.  It's basically dark humor, and I was raised on the excellent Creepy and Eerie horror comics of the 1970s.  But these stories were surprisingly moralistic in their approach and never suggested that we should enjoy, much less find humor, in the suffering of helpless innocents, as horrific as they could sometimes be...

Feel free to disagree.  Free country.  For fans of Raggi's work, it's entirely consistent with an unbroken trend and maybe even good marketing.  But for adult gamers, human suffering shouldn't be amusing or diversionary fare.  Not when real children die in depressing numbers every day.  I don't care for (most) Quentin Tarantino movies because only a pampered and protected millionaire would find graphic suffering amusing*.  Again, that's just me.

There's no easy way to partition the fact of violence and the enjoyment of it, especially when the lines are so easily blurred.  We're rightly horrified at actual violence against children, including James Raggi (who obviously doesn't condone it), while simultaneously devouring splatter flicks.  It's the whole duality of man thing.  But live long enough and see enough actual suffering firsthand, and maybe the smile fades a little and we move on; and this is the slow and inevitable "death" of shock.  These tactics will eat themselves alive...

*From Dusk til Dawn and Pulp Fiction were decent, but the victims sort of had it coming!