Our Coming 'Perilous' Year...

So as we close out 2021, there's been a lot of talk here at Olde House Rules Headquarters about the coming year and how to use it. Our staff meetings involve dice and battles with pillaging orcs; but that's where our finest ideas come from. Anyway, here's the minutes from our latest adventure - er, staff meeting - to give you some idea...

And that's where it's going. Thanks everyone for a great year! Stay safe and take time to appreciate the people in your lives. We'll see everyone next year, when we'll definitely have more to say about our plans. Pits & Perils is our flagship game and a personal love that's gotten precious little attention these many years. Our apologies to the fans who've stuck it out with us. Until then, enjoy the holidays; and while we're all celebrating, let's not forget those impacted by the tornadoes. Every bit of good we do makes the world a better place...

Attack of the (Fake) Grownups...

So a few days ago, I was chatting with an acquittance on Facebook when talk turned to Holmes basic and those cardboard chits. No, this isn't a post about chits. Chits are a kink in the fabric of gaming history. Food for the grateful, thank God I don't have to deal with 'em anymore ramblings common in certain circles. My friend got Holmes basic with the cardboard chits and immediately wanted actual dice, which is understandable. And it laid bare some enduring conceits about play and the meaning of our so-called maturity.

He wanted dice, but his parents weren't on board, which I understand. How were they to know D&D wasn't Monopoly? Complete and self contained. Kids are notoriously fickle, and one week's must-have toy is next week's forgotten relic in the hallway closet. Anyway, I'm emphatically not knocking his folks, who were loving and indulgent enough to buy their son a thing he clearly wanted for Christmas. But my friend went on to describe a lifetime of family and friends dismissive of gaming (and play) as beneath any right-minded adult...

I've experienced the same. But first, a disclaimer. My friend's parents weren't this, and he wasn't deriding his loved ones. We can't all share the same interests, and accepting this salient fact seems to me the adult thing to do. But there's a snooty species of grownup that adopts a more superficial definition of adulthood; often, the negation of certain activities, while criticizing others for failing to meet their narrow criteria. Basically, people who dismiss others as deficient or immature for the (non-)crime of liking to play games.

Good-natured ribbing is one thing. In moderation. But telling people they're childish or somehow failing in their life and obligations is something else entirely. It's mean-spirited and obstructs our ability to connect with and appreciate others. This is often done with a self-congratulatory air that betrays their insecurities. I can understand this. Some people come from generations of deprivation where anything that doesn't pay the bills is seen as frivolous, and this thinking, born of an undeniable need to survive, is a guilty inheritance...

So yeah, hobbyists of any kind are a privileged lot blessed with resources to spare. But what does it mean to be grown up anyway? I'd say it's all about responsibility. And our priorities, obviously. People who only think of themselves, or refuse to own up to their choices, or make zero effort when they could. People who play first, work later and get indignant at the very suggestion that maybe, just maybe, they've gotten it backwards. These people are immature, and it's not be wrong to say so. But play is never inherently a childish thing.

Robyn's a retired opera singer who spent a year of twenty hour days caring for her dying mother. She's also an avid gamer. I challenge any brave soul to call her a child. I'm a retired Air Force officer and disabled veteran. And there's more. Ask the ICU nurse who plays to unwind after a week of keeping people alive. Or the fellow veteran who manages a business for all that implies. They're adults, which has little to do with their hobbies. Fortunately, the mainstreaming of the pastime is eroding such notions, making us all better adults...

Grenadier: The Fine Art of Ugly...

The old Grenadier line, the official AD&D miniatures from the 1980s. Love 'em or hate 'em, there were undeniably better products on offer (Ral Partha comes to mind), so you'd be forgiven regardless of where you stand. No one's accusing Grenadier of being anything close to conventionally attractive - but dammit, I loved those things. But it was decades before I finally understood why. Even as late as last week, I wrote my appreciation off as an alchemy of nostalgia and my love of all things amateur. Turns out there was more...  

At first glance, the Grenadier miniatures were just awful. Really. I wondered how they got the job in the same universe where Ral Partha existed. It was the early 80s, when Tom Meier was making gorgeous, photorealistic creations anyone would want to paint and take to their gaming table. Grenadier, with its fat, pipe-cleaner arms and Mister Potato Head aesthetic seemed a strange choice for the world's leading RPG, but here we were, reading the ads in Dragon Magazine and drooling over colorful displays at the local hobby shop.

It didn't take long for me to warm to them, though. And don't blame nostalgia. Fourteen year olds aren't generally known for that. No, I found them strangely charming; but it would be another four decades before I could mount an objective defense. It seems their figures were beautifully stylized. Art is more than lines and angles. Good art is impressionistic on some level, even the realistic stuff. And if fantasy can't draw from that subjective, emotional side of ourselves, nothing can. Anyway, Grenadier's abstract figures nailed the magic.

But there's more; and here's the new revelation: those Grenadier miniatures did a good job capturing the game's source material. At this point, D&D still had one foot in its amateur origins, a fact reflected by its then-official artwork. So much of the Monster Manual's stuff was semi-amateur, with its grainy black lines and imperfect proportions. Deliberate or not, the official miniatures were nothing less than three-dimensional renderings of Otus, Sutherland, and Trampier, among others, which was a big reveal when it finally dawned on me...

Sure, some things are just crap, and I'm not sure we should elevate every warts-and-all effort to the status of Da Vinci. But sometimes, ugliness succeeds where beauty fails, especially when it's earnest and channels enough emotion to compensate for skill. We can't bottle this, at least not reliably; but when it happens, the chemistry is clear. Looks-wise, early D&D wouldn't pass muster in today's watermarked environment. But the early stuff carries on for good reason; and for a brief while, the game had a set of miniatures to match its charm.

Amateurs Against the Wine Snobs...

So last month, a certain (famously cranky) blogger eviscerated The Ruined Abbey of Saint Tabitha.  I don't care about that.  Hell, I requested the review knowing what I'd get.  But he crossed a line when he asserted that we don't understand the craft (wtf) or even our reasons for the choices we make, which is simply bizarre.  Olde House Rules has a mission we've proclaimed vocally from the start.  It's on our website, in the pages of the free previews of all our relevant titles.  It's present here.  Simply put, we make amateur games.

That speaks to the what.  But as to the why, we do it because we happen to think these products engender a style of play not possible otherwise.  Now here's the thing: amateur is more than just poor visual production.  It's what happens when people without advanced tools, a staff of editors, or professional freelance support make stuff anyway because they like it and -gasp! - just want to have fun.  This combination of deliberate and inadvertent elements gives rise to an emergent experience tied up in rulebooks...

Amateur rulebooks represent the initial state of the hobby. This alone lends them a certain historical value, and our attempts to relive the past an enduring legitimacy.  And they're certainly nostalgic for those of us who remember them firsthand.  But they're also quite exotic at this point, because they harken back to a time when the very means of production was fundamentally different.  Manual type?  Actual (physical) cut and paste?  I imagine the older stuff looks like an Egyptian papyrus to those born of the modern internet age.

But isn't this just skin deep?  Probably.  Except that amateur design and production had a material impact on the way these games were approached and played.  Again, we're talking about a fundamentally different experience here.  Their primitive style felt more accessible, like a peer-to-peer exercise.  This burrows deep into one's psyche, which lays the foundation for pretty much everything that follows.  And there's plenty to talk about...

First off, the amateur artwork left something to the imagination.  Do we really need to see everything to the smallest, perfect detail?  Yeah, there's some great stuff out there, and professional artwork helps bring a game's imaginary universe to life.  My gatekeeper's hat is at the cleaners, so I won't even try to say otherwise.  But when people are left to fill in the blanks, informed by their dreams and fears, we get something like true wonder.

Moreover, the earliest games were open ended.  This was most likely accidental, as the hobby was still in its infancy and too new for what would come later.  But often enough, this happened in the absence of experience, not to mention any sort of professional template, meaning the earliest publishers didn't know what to include.  At least not yet.  But deliberate or otherwise, this encouraged the emergent, work-it-out-at-the-table approach that would later come to define what should be recognized as a distinct style of play...

Now to be fair, our cranky friend never criticized our physical production.  But we're well beyond that now.  We're talking about an experience that permeates how a game's disparate elements are actually used.  Modern D&D mechanizes everything.  It absolutely imposes itself upon gameplay at the deepest level.  Amateur rulebooks from the 1970s did the same, albeit in reverse.  Crude art, omissions (deliberate or otherwise), and even the verbose Gygaxian prose brought the players in and redistributed the balance of elements.

Our friend (I like the guy) is free to disagree with this approach.  But he isn't free to pretend we don't have a deep, abiding philosophy behind our design choices.  There's a certain snobbery present in some (not all) modern circles.  Like we're sipping wine at the Cité du Vin instead of just having fun.  This comes with a cold, mechanical precision that shuts out the kind of organic, on-the-fly interactions humans are known for.  There's no wrong way; but we can agree that old-school, fueled by amateur production, is a viable choice...  

And that's what we do.  And why we do it.  We make amateur-style rulebooks meant to bottle an experience worth preserving.  The old days in amber.  It won't appeal to everyone (the reverse is definitely true); but we don't do it for them.  And we sure as hell don't do it for those who see the past as necessary for sure, but best left behind - or worse still, those who only understand the past as a failure to do better.  To them, amateur is skin deep.  But this mixing of ideas, omissions, and outright flaws enables an experience only amateurs can give.