Weiner Jokes and Rule One...

The very first adventure I personally ran was B2 The Keep on the Borderlands back in December 1980. I'd just gotten Holmes Basic and was eager to test my high-fantasy chops with my brother and indulgent mother. Oh, the serious adventures I planned. What I got instead, all objections aside, was my brother's Didlo the Cleric (really; his hasty sketch was nightmarish and retrospectively hilarious) and my mother's The Great Flirt, a magic-user glad to seduce her way through every male NPC within the game's eponymous Keep...

C'mon Eddie, be serious I'd say. How can I be serious when I'm Dildo the Cleric, he'd reply, unassailable reasoning beyond mortal power to debate. Their initial parlay at the Keep's gatehouse was an endless stream of penis jokes at odds with the seriousness I thought this first session required. I got over myself, thankfully, learning to appreciate the gonzo of the earliest hobby. But in this moment I craved seriousness, at least until I decided to throw in the towel and embrace the whimsy. My pretensions gone, gameplay emerged.

So at the Keep's inn Dildo met two devotees: Dick Headley and Elmer Pudd, both bearing a large cock (rooster) on their shields. They were looking for a cleric of their kind to aid in spreading the questionable faith, and it was off to the races. Meanwhile, The Great Flirt Cast Charm Person (successfully) on a local ruffian, and this, combined with her 16 charisma, made me appreciate her character's concept as more than mere silliness. Armed with these companions, they made their way into the wilderness in search of high adventure...

What they got was the mound of the lizard men, an encounter I watered down for fear of dropping the curtain too fast. The success of the game was a reflection on me, and it stung a bit that it still wasn't taken as seriosuly as I'd hoped for. But boy did that change once the imaginary blood began to spill. Once they realized their characters could die, they dropped the act and hustled to keep themselves alive. They'd grown attached to their characters because I let them have fun and be themselves, even meeting them halfway...

And that ended the session. They asconded with the treasure and returned to the Keep, planning a future expedition supported by henchmen that never materialized. I found other friends to game with and the rest is history. Good times though, and a swift education in campaigning etiquette. First off, while your players deserve a well-crafted setting, it doesn't exist solely to pump your creative ego. Second, it never hurts to meet the players where they presently reside, reading the room while remembering rule number one: to have fun.

Gateways to Adventure...

So I famously got my Holmes Basic set for Christmas 1980, and the rest is history. That delightfully primitive offering fueled months of gaming activity until I (inevitably) switched over to AD&D, with its slick hardcovers and expanded options. Mine shipped with B2, The (now-famous) Keep on the Borderlands, which was more than enough to get my nascent campaign going. It was an incomparable mix; but there was another MVP in that lineup which really started my juices flowing, and that was an awesome TSR catalog...

OK, so this thing did its job and made me want AD&D on day one. But there was so much more; and while I probably never owned half of it, the exposure nonetheless filled me with an excitement for what my new passion had to offer. There was Boot Hill, Gamma World, and Top Secret, which spoke to the endless of possibilities and secured TSR, at least in my young mind, as an established company. And even if I hadn't eventually gotten these, their mere presence communicated a single timeless truth: that anything was possible.

But it was the stuff I never bought that sealed the deal. From the spacey 4th Dimension to Divine Right, those little thumbnails suggested bottomless universes. There was aerial dogfighting Red Baron style in Fight in the Skies and the Arthurian romance of Knights of Camelot, the whimsical Snit's Revenge, and investigative chops of Suspicion. All of this communicated the possibilities of gaming; but the fact that I never owned these made them exotic and mysterious, adding immesurably to roleplaying's mystique...

So yeah, the catalog did what catalogs are supposed to do. It moved products. But the impressive volume of offerings, their breadth, depth, and hinted-at possibilities converged to suck me in and sell me on this lifelong passion. It also conveyed the (you'd think) obvious reality that I wasn't the only gamer out there, but instead part of a community. In short, these early catalogs (every boxed set it seemed came with another) sold me on the very idea of roleplaying, making it a true Gateway to Adventure for its fantasy loving devotees.

Don't Fight That Thing...

So someone (on Facebook, of course) posted that glorious Trampier wight from the 1st Edition AD&D Monster Manual. It was an invitation to talk about level drain; an irresistable bait when fishing for grognards and youngsters alike. The former largely came down in enthusiastic favor, citing an atmosphere of dread some modern games lack. The latter were split, but mostly found the whole idea mean-spirited at best. But this week's offering isn't about level drain so much as an injunction against fighting everything you meet... 

You need only hear the chatter around 5th edition to sense that modern characters are sturdier, with more powers sooner and greater access to healing. I can't say if they're more independently able; but they're clearly built to survive their first encounters better, with an implicit (if not explicit) expectation of thrilling cinematic combats where everyone shows off their awesome builds and gets to shine. Monsters are experience points on the hoof, an invitation to throw down in exciting mental movies featuring the characters.

There's nothing wrong with this. But I had to explain to them that old-school saw things differently. Not everything was there to be fought. Play was less a movie with grand battles the characters needn't refuse and more a strategically patient process. The goal was to secure as much treasure as possible at minimal risk. You don't engage wights in melee; are you freakin' insane? Or poisonous spiders. Or whatever. Bargain, steal, and save the big guns, and your hit points, for when the payoff justifies the use of scarce resources...

Because everything was a resource, and characters were squishy. Hit points, spells, potions and scrolls. And the lives of your henchmen, enlisted to swell the party's small numbers against hostilities. The charismatic handled tricky negotiations while the dwarves and elves translated to avoid a lopsided battle. Clerics turned the undead, magic-users cleared the room, and thieves stole precious gems without alerting their guardians. Physical combat was reserved for when the party could secure the upper hand and get the spoils.

To be clear, today's sessions have this too. But when the modern consensus finds level draining too harsh, it speaks to a different approach altogether. I mean, why play the original game of heroic fantasy if you can't be a heroic badass? And you can't be heroic if some undead travesty can erase many sessions of hard-won advancement with a single sorry roll of the dice. Buried deep within is the assumption that wights should be engaged in melee, and that the encounter shouldn't bear an unacceptable risk in the name of fairness. 

Again, not a problem. It's a big hobby. And it shouldn't be lost on anyone that our games likewise eschew level draining mechanics. Lots of games do. But this old-school approach saw gameplay as a cautious, patient expedition into the dark punctuated by moments of action much like the real-world wars that inspired our fantastical play. Why wouldn't enemies be dangerous, high-stakes foes? And why wouldn't the undead, of all things, be so horrific that players, facing only imaginary wounds, pretend death, rightly feared them?

Old-school wasn't dumb. Or mean-spirited. Its characters were heroic for their relative normalcy. Its enemies dangerous. The prospect of physical combat was never to be taken lightly, for death was often one unlucky roll away. And how did characters survive when endowed with an unimpressive 4 hit points? They avoided anything approaching a fair fight, safe in the knowledge that treasure was worth more than any monster. No superheroes occupied its world, just normals possessing courage, strategy, and clever restraint...

Bye Bye, Medieval Times...

So Wizards of the Coast is doing a lot with the so-called races; namely, they no longer use race, which they find problematic, offering species as a safer alternative. Whatever. I've always maintained there's no wrong way to do fantasy (with the exception of Gor), and that extends to WotC. I strongly believe it nudges D&D towards an Iron Age Star Trek I accept on pinciple but remain ambivalent to; but there's absolutely nothing wrong with exploring a universe where this is so. Even the puerile Gor I so despise has its place... 

But medieval fare is inherently anachronistic. Now I agree we shouldn't subject our players to racism and/or sexism or certain (to-remain-nameless) violations despite their otherwise historical context. Even so, there's real value to conveying the mindset of a more primitive society. Heliocentric (or even flat) worlds are well within bounds; and viewing non-humans as seperate races seems more in line with pre-scientific times. Erroneous perhaps, but being wrong about stuff is essential to medievalism and part of its charm.

And what constitutes medieval anyway? Chainmail? Swords? It only exists in historical context; more specifically, our historical context. That said, medieval is civilization fumbling ever-so gradually out of its dark ages towards an inevitable renaissance (they're not the middle ages for nothing). It lies between two extremes, and that's part of its charm. It clings to the past while embracing an emerging, if flawed, new thinking. A faulty science of wonky syllogisms (humors, angels on pinheads) straddling both sides of the coin...

Which leads to the gist of today's offering. Modern D&D, with its artificers and scientific pretensions, may no longer be that fantastic medieval wargame. These days, it's more like a post-renaissance, pre-modern game (with decidedly modern social values) bordering on steampunk. Still, the odd throwback exists. The world is big, and there's always barbarians to crash the modern party. Now no system survives the GM, who reserves final veto authority; but we have to be honest about the default setting of D&D nowadays. 

Now I initially thought species couldn't interbreed, a seemingly glaring oversight; but a kind reader corrected me. This calls for an update. Humanoid races could certainly interbreed, producing fertile offspring depending on how we define them. But given what we've learned about genetics, the whole concept of species might bear changing, which further argues against its use as a panacea. Another chum suggested folk as a suitable alternative, archaic for sure, and in keeping with the medieval roots of a fantastic medieval wargame.