Bizarre Love Triangle

I'm in the middle of a nasty love triangle, and it's getting out of hand. On one hand, I have a love who lets me be who I want to be. She doesn't confine me nor define me. She's open to whatever I'm in the mood for, and she just makes everything fun. But, on the other side, I have a new love, and she really reminds me of a junior high infatuation, but all grown up and infinitely sexier. What's a guy to do?


My quandary. Except I'm a dude. With a beard.
Otherwise, very similar.

So right now, I'm trying the John Ritter Three's Company strategy: I flit between the two, trying to balance one with the other so nobody gets hurt (especially me). But it's starting to get out of hand, and I feel this stupid urge to commit to one or the other.
My lovely ladies:





Hippie Chick.

 Savage Worlds is the one who never seeks to constrain me or tie me down. With Savage Worlds, I can whip up a Ghost Busters campaign, a Wild West campaign, a Star Wars campaign, Cthulhu (yeah, lots of Cthulhu)...hell, players have even revamped the Battletech RPG so it's actually playable...all from a single, fairly thin book. At this moment, Savage Worlds GM's are adapting every imaginable IP into slick, smooth-running games. And if you don't want to use someone else's setting or idea, write your own: it's easy with Savage Worlds. Really, really easy. Even better, the system has tons (literally tons) of licensed settings, ranging from the Weird West of Deadlands to the awesomely grim Saxon-inflected desperation of Hellfrost. 
The flexibility of Savage Worlds springs largely from it's generic framework. It's not GURPS, but it relies on character creation and rules mechanics that are common to any setting. Shooting skill is shooting skill: if you're in Mad Max, it's a gun, but if you're playing Doctor Strange versus Cthulhu, it may be arcane energy squirting out of your eyeballs. Regardless, it's aiming something at a target, and you adapt it as needed by the setting and common sense. Likewise with magic/powers/etc. A magic missile and a ray of frost are pretty much like Gambit's ability to shoot plasmicated playing cards at bad guys; the rules provide a trappings concept that customizes the framework to make it fit the application. It sounds clunky, but it sho ain't. It's smooth, and damned near effortless.

Adolescent crush. Grown up.

  But the we have my other new love: 13th Age is everything I ever loved about Dungeons & Dragons but revamped for maximum playability and fun, the love of my adolescence all grown up and made over. Unlike Savage Worlds, 13th Age is straight fantasy, and mechanically tied into an implied setting; but that setting is pretty awesome, so I'm not complaining.
It's the love-child of Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo, of D&D 3rd and 4th edition fame, respectively. According to the foreword, they got together to make a game that combines everything good about both editions, and dumps everything else into the garbage. Not only are the rules pared down, there are actual mechanics in place to encourage player agency and kicking ass: for example, you don't level up by killing little XP nuggets in the form of monsters. Instead, you fight, you play, you carry on in the face of adversity, and, after a big fight or two, you get an incremental advance to the next level. One of my favorite tweaks is discarding the voluminous skill lists for your character. Rather than picking a load of specific skills, you pick backgrounds, and you use those backgrounds to role-play why your character has specific skills. If your character has the 'wharf rat' background, you just tell the GM, "Of course I know how to mend a net, I grew up on the mean docks of Blehtown" and it's up to you to sell it to the GM and the group. You make up your backgrounds, you determine whether or not they apply, and the GM and other players are there to throw a bullshit flag as needed.
Tweet and Heinsoo also differentiate the character classes: some are mechanics light, allowing a new player to roll dice and slay kobolds without a lot of overhead, while others are heavy on the crunch, allowing an experienced player to use specific rules to really tailor their characters abilities and skills.
That being said, every rule in 13th Age is geared toward maximizing the collaborative story-telling aspect of the game, without resorting to the diceless, 'story game' extreme. It's still dice-rolling, but with a lot of player collaboration, all in the service of story. This is a massive positive, but can also be a problem. When I tried out 13th Age at the table, my group was a little overwhelmed. It can take a while to break habits of "DM presents, DM describes, I react, roll dice, DM interprets". This game heavily relies on players taking charge of their actions and story, and that requires some adjustment from some players. It is definitely not for lazy players.



So here I am, with two very different, very attractive games pulling me in two directions. My gaming time is limited, and I have a group that doesn't switch easily...but it's whiny of me to complain. There are definitely worse problems to have. We'll figure it out somehow.

Just so long as they don't hook up behind my back.



You Have My Heartfelt Thanks, Dave.

David A. Trampier, known to a generation of d20-rollers as DAT, died last week. He was 59, but most of us who keep up with such things assumed he'd been dead for years. He literally dropped off the radar after an ugly spat with TSR back in the 80's, only resurfacing recently by accident, star of a college newspaper's drive-along with local cab drivers. Yep, David Trampier, he who formed my vision of Greyhawk, was driving a cab in an Illinois suburb.
That kind of sucks, but I respect his decision. I'll never understand it, but I respect it. I owe him that much; he gave me Emirikol the Chaotic, back in the day.

Is the a Ray of Frost or a Magic Missile he's shooting at the hapless town militia? Who knows? Who gives a shit? He's kicking major ass. Is he evil? All we know is that he's not only chaotic, he's totally the chaotic.

I guess I'm bummed about Trampier's passing because so much of what sucked me into AD&D was the illustrations. Seeing his work, or Jeff Dee's iconic bell-bottomed badasses, or Errol Otus's strangely helmeted characters, they all immediately put me back in seventh grade, sucking down Mountain Dew and eating Twizzlers and burning through page after page of graph paper and #2 pencils. These guys supplied visions of another world, and their visions were the springboard for my own imagination.


So here's my question: how much of a game's impact is flavored by the art? Would I still look back on the original Tunnels & Trolls with such affection if it weren't for Liz Danforth's art? How much of Steve Jackson's early success was based on Denis Loubet's art? I can tell you for a no-shit, I loved TSR's Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Queen of the Demonweb Pits in large part for the separate books of illustrations. Would Tomb of Horrors suffer if you didn't have an illustration of a leering, open-mouthed demon to show your players right before they died without even getting a saving throw? I'm thinking not.


Conversely, sometimes no art makes a game. I was a HUGE fan of the old GDW Traveler, the famous Little Black Books. They were practically devoid of art. Even the books themselves were plain black books. Occasionally you'd get a single illustration, usually of some mundane object like a laser rifle or the ubiquitous grav sled. You never got pictures of aliens, or space battles. And maybe that was part of the draw. Traveler was written by Marc Miller, son of an admiral, and was grounded in engineering as much as it was science fiction. I mean, we're talking about a game that used hexadecimal notation for character stats and ship ratings. Miller threw out displacement tonnage like it was common knowledge, and be damned if you had to look the terms up. God knows I did, back in 1982.


Okay, end of rambling reminiscence. I guess I just wanted to draw some attention to the impact that art has on our hobby, and how maybe, sometimes, we take for granted the doors these people open in our collective imagination. Now I'm bummed out, and I'm going to have to drink beer and read some old AD&D modules until I get over my funk. But I'll leave you with something upbeat, something from one of my favorite artists of the era (and still kicking ass these days), the incomparable Phil Foglio:

Why Any DM Not Using Google+ Groups is a Moron

No snark, no transvestite gamer-guy pictures. Not this time. Why? I know everybody loves that stuff. But not tonight. (Nope. No transvestites tonight. Except yours truly, but that's another story, and it was for a good cause.)

I just want to put out a quick bunch of links for all you die-hard geeks, the ones so indelibly marked with the geek-bug that you not only play tabletop RPG's, you make tabletop RPG's: you draw the maps and stat-out the NPC's. Yeah...you, the Dungeon Master, the Game Master, the Storyteller, whatever monicker you pick, you're that guy. Or, rather, this poor bastard:


"You Cheeto-fingered morons, that princess won't save herself."

So you're working on your story, laying out intricate plots and story hooks and detailed NPC's, knowing all the time that your players will only remember "that one time when we killed all those dudes and I got that badass sword from the old guy". It's a thankless job, hours and hours of prep work that ends in a feeling of coitus interruptus when your players totally ignore your OBVIOUS hooks and decide to go left instead of right.

Don't worry, brothers and sisters. I feel your pain. The cavalry is here:

• Maps: Did you ever waste an afternoon with a sheet of graph paper, a sharp #2 pencil, and the old 1st edition Monster Manual? Yeah, me too. I love maps. I love drawing maps. I want to draw badass maps. So I asked the wise gurus on Google+ to help. Map-Making in Games is a Google+ group full of people whose talent is only matched by their willingess to help stupid people like me. I posted a desperate plea for help, and had a page full of links within minutes. Literally minutes. If these folks can't help you, they'll quickly point you toward those who can.

• Worlds: Okay, you have your map, thanks to the badasses linked above. But what's a map if you can't provide any details. Your players want to know things like:

What's the climate like? History? Who's the king? What kind of money do they use? How much does a good hooker cost? How much does a bad hooker cost? Can I trade my +9 Holy Avenger sword for a good hooker?

 These are important questions that your players will probably want to have answered. Well, again, Google+ is the place to be:  World Building Group  This is a crowd who knows how to make shit up. Be it fiction, gaming, or just mental aerobics, damned near every post and link on this group is chock-full of hooks to get your creative gears turning.

Tordek, our quest is to find a hooker willing to service your ugly ass.
(please don't sue me, WotC)

• Last, a shameless plug for my favorite game system and favorite Google Group. I said in a recent post that Savage Worlds has ruined me on gaming, period. Lucky for me, there is a group on Google+ who feels the same way: Savage Worlds on Google Groups.

• Did I say last? No such luck, foolios. The only real way to end this list is with the group that keeps their priorities straight. If you don't spend all your money on gaming crap, that leaves more money for liquor and dwarven hookers. So, for all you drunken Dwarfophiles out there, this group is here to help:  Gaming on the Cheap. This is where you go to get the heads-up on free PDF's, good old rulesets that have gone the OGL route, tips and tricks for terrain...you name it. Be a cheap bastard and still run a kick-ass game.

Okay, dinner's ready and a cold Shiner Bock is sweating a nice condensation ring on my lame hand-drawn map, so I guess it's time to roll. Check out the links, make up cool shit, and try to not hate your players...unless your players are the Honey Boo-Boo family. Then hate 'em all you want.

Can't We All Get Along in 2013? (Don't taze me, bro...I'm just the messenger.)

I like RPG's. I like both CRUNCH and fluff and I like graph paper and pencils. I like goblins, and I like Wayne Reynolds. I won't go so far as to say that RPG's are my only diversion (there's always Xbox, and...did I mention Xbox?), but it's what I enjoy doing most.  There's only one small hangup with this otherwise blissful situation: I don't always like RPG people. And...it pains me to admit, I don't always like Xbox people, either. Or cosplayers.
Okay, I'll admit it: I'm a geek who often doesn't like other geeks. I get hives thinking about interacting with them, with people I should adore as my own chosen ones, people who are definitely US rather than THEM.
I'm not talking about the stereotype of Gamer Guy:


Credit: G4TV (for giving me oddly arousing nightmares)

Yeah, his type is present in both video gaming and tabletop gaming. Yes, we do have our share of obnoxious people in gaming: but take your ass out to a sports bar on Monday night to watch a ball game...the NFL fanbase has waaaaay more obnoxious, socially inept people than the RPG community could ever be blamed for. No, I'm not talking about just obnoxiosity quotient...I'm talking about what it means to be a geek.
To me, when you are a geek, you are totally into something; thus the verb geekin'. It's a state where you want to know details. Everybody knows Imperial Stormtroopers wear white armor; but the true geek knows why they don't wear standard Republic Commando armor, and why they aren't all clones of Jango Fett. The true geek can name you every Doctor Who, and when they played the iconic Doctor. The true geek not only likes Half Life 2, but she can rattle off Gabe Newell's curricula vitae. To me, being a geek is about a willingness to immerse yourself.
That's what I love about being a geek. That's what marks me as a proud member of the clan. But that's also what annoys me about my brethren and sistren:

Geek Rule #1

No detail is so small, nor any point so trivial, that we're not willing to form a seemingly random opinion about it...and argue that position for-fucking-ever.

 

I get it. I swear, I get it, I understand passion, and loving what you love so much that you're willing to defend it. Being a geek, by my above definition, puts you outside the mainstream: you are willing to delve into some subject way beyond the 'norm'. I get the defensiveness that comes with putting yourself out there on the lunatic fringe. But for Chrissakes, let's quit arguing about stupid stuff:

• D&D is stupid, and anyone who plays it sucks.
• 4th edition D&D is stupid (and evil), and anyone who plays it sucks (and is evil).
• Xbox rules, PS3 sucks, and Wii is retarded.
• PS3 rules, Xbox is full of rabid douchebags.
• Star Wars is awesome, but Star Trek is a bunch of idiots.
• Fantasy RPG's are all a bunch of LARPers, running around in the woods.
 

Please, for the sweet baby Jesus' sake: we're all in this together. Star Wars, Star Trek, Xbox, PS3, D&D and Savage Worlds and Doctor Who and BSG and Pathfinder.

 

We all share some mania for things that most of the world considers trivial.

 

While most of the people I know are out in the woods, hunting deer (and duck, and turkey, and anything else that moves), I'm upstairs playing Halo until 3AM. Hey, guess what? That PS3 guy is playing The Last of Us while his friends are out at Buffalo Wild Wings watching the Cowboys get pummeled (again). And that makes us brothers and sisters. That means we're kin. He's not some enemy.

D&D vs. Pathfinder people...people are still arguing this on message boards across the interwebs. Guess what, kids? To most of the world, both sides of this argument are stupid. Both groups are wasting their time playing trivial imaginary games, while they could be sitting on the couch watching Here Comes Honey Booboo like the rest of America. So quit arguing. The girl who really likes D&D 4th edition? Yeah, I hope one day she'll see the light and move on to Savage Worlds. But, until then? Welcome to the family, sister.

 

We're making progress, people. I promise. I'm 43 years old...I remember when science fiction, video games and Dungeons & Dragons got you beat up on a regular basis, when the opposite sex treated a d20 like it was an open, oozing leprosy sore. Thank you, Bill Gates, Wil Wheaton and The Big Bang Theory for making our passions at least a little more palatable to the rest of the world. And one day, I just know it, one day...we will overcome. The day will come when everyone in the world will know the name Malcom Reynolds, and nobody will remember what a Honey BooBoo even is.

But until then, quit arguing about stupid shit, and make 2013 a banner year for all of us.