'Broken' PC? Awesome PC!

First off, I  like playing characters that many would consider 'broken'. I'm never the guy who uses the concept of the 'dump stat' at character creation. It's tempting to give your dwarf fighter maxed out Strength and Constitution at the expense of Intelligence, Charisma or whatever (I'm using D&D stats, just because they're familiar to everybody), then you just kind of hand-wave the fact that you've created a functional moron who exists only to chop things up and take damage.

But if you were to actually role-play this kind of character, he'd be almost pitiful: he'd be noticeably stupid, or horrifically inept with people, depending on what you picked as your dump-stat. Easily tricked, quickly confused, total avatar of derpitude. I know when I see the kids down at my FLGS rolling up the XP-machines they call characters, they don't see them as these moronic meat-head axe-swingers; then again, I don't think they even see them as stalwart Gimli-types, or Conan, or Kull, or whatever. I think they see them as XP-machines, with only the fuzziest of concepts behind them.

That's annoying. That's what you do in video games, where your character is, even in the best of them, still mostly pre-defined.

INTRUSIVE NOTE: links have died since I wrote this back in the day. This post is a near-nothing. But I still believe in the basic premise, so I'm updating it a bit.

If you're gaming to kill shit and accrue experience points, go ahead and click off right now. But if you're looking to make collaborative stories that you'll remember for years, stick around.

All I'm saying is this: play to your character's weaknesses. One thing I absolutely adore is the Savage Worlds mechanic of writing weaknesses and faults into your character, and getting role-play hooks for doing it. Go ahead and roll up a character that's seventy years old: she might be shaky in a fight, but she'll be wise...and, most importantly, that's a hook you can use to play that role. Lean into it. It's a gift, I promise.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: don't gimp yourself in whatever your role is. Don't be a wizard with low intelligence, or a fighter with low strength. Be good at your role. If you do that, you're just boning the rest of the adventuring party (your fellow players). But take that 'dump stat' and use it for playing a role in the story, for standing out from the crowd. Don't be an XP machine. If you max Strength at the expense of Charisma, play an awkward, socially inept meat-mountain. 

This is old advice, and wasted on them what most needs to hear it, but remember: you're playing a character, not an optimized machine. Play to strengths and weaknesses, and you'll end up with stories that'll have you laughing years down the road, "holy shit, you remember that one time?" stories that make the hobby more than just leveling up and killing monsters.

Totally Immature, Childish GM's. Literally.

I have done my job well. I have two sons, both of whom navigate the seas of geekery with expertise and cool aplomb, and neither of them are burdened with the lingering self-conscious nerd-shame my generation was cursed with. I could end up living in a six-by-six cell under Guantanamo, and still consider myself a successful father for that alone. They like what they like, and be damned the nay-sayers.
My firstest-bornedest is sixteen, and, while not a role player, takes all of ten minutes to quit bitching about "having to play another one of Dad's stupid playtests" and totally gets into the game. He's the one that wants to keep going after four hours, and he's the one that will drive a totally dice-less session of Savage Worlds. My secondest is eleven, and he's my gamer. He plays in anything I make, along with a weekly group at his school. He paints minis and knows what a bec de corbin looks like. And he's wanted to GM since he was six.

These Nerds are tasty. Almost as tasty as
your character's slow and painful death.

THE EVOLUTION OF A GAME-MASTER
Of course, he started with wanting to push minis around on a dry-erase game mat. What the hell, he was six, right? We'd lay out a handful of the old plastic D&D minis and break out the markers and go to town. When a particular mini didn't fit the bill, out came the Lego dudes. That's Stage One: chaos on a table-top.

 "You kick open the door and there are eight Beholders!"
"Eight?"
"Yeah, I saw them in your book and they look cool."
"I run away."
"You can't. Uhh...the door shuts and locks behind you."
"Can I talk to them?"
"No. The first one floats up to you and turns you to stone with his eye attack!" (cackling laughter)

Stage One is rules. His rules. And accessories. What I realized during this phase, was that the kid was story-telling, but he wanted rules to enforce his plot idea. We'd spend hours with him basically telling me what I did and what happened. When anything deviated from what he had in mind, he'd throw monsters at me and fake-roll dice to tell me how everything magically got back on track.

Worship me, children. With dice.

I've played games with adult GM's who still live in Stage One.
Stage Two was "I love X/Y/Z and want to make a game about it". This is where the kid got infatuated with a particular IP, be it Halo or Fire Emblem or Pokemon, and saw a tabletop RPG as a way to get more of whatever it is. Again, lots of arbitrary rules, but not to rail-road his idea of a story; instead, he was actually designing rules, with increasing consistency, all geared toward capturing elements and flavor of his obsession du jour. This stage is all about detail, tons of detail, and the whole point of playing is to recreate the IP.
I've played with adult GM's who do this. Hell, sometimes I do this. Almost every futuristic military campaign I've ever written is an attempt to game-ify James Cameron's Aliens Colonial Marines.

Stage Three arrived this year. That's where it all starts to come together, and Actually Fun to Play becomes a real consideration. He surprised me with a zombie-apocalypse game that grew out of Call of Duty Nazi Zombies, and ended up being a RP-light mostly-board game that was shockingly fun to play.

Disclaimer: don't get me wrong. It's fun playing with your kids. Better than fun. It's part of the tapestry of them growing up that you'll look back on when you are old and crusty and incontinent and it's absolutely frigging priceless. They do silly things, and it's fun to watch their little brains work. But, in the early stages...let's be honest: if it wasn't my kid I was playing with, it would have been excruciating. Which brings me (finally) to my point:
Pretty much every stage in the kid's gaming career is a legitimate way to game. The kid was on track with what a lot of adults pass off as gaming. The big difference between the kid and the adult is two fold: first, fun for players wasn't a concern when he first started. He was having fun, and of course that means it's fun for everybody, right?

Except this guy.
He thought the combat mechanics sucked.

The second thing that made his early games 'immature' was strictly that: he was immature. He lacked experience, and (most especially) the tool-box that a good GM brings to the table. A good GM can rail-road a game just as egregiously as any six year-old, but she has the back-log of plots, stories and situations to camouflage the rail-roading. A good GM can artfully lay out options that really aren't options, and can gently nudge the random actions of players back on story-track.

So I guess my advice to any dual-class parent/gamers out there is to let the little monsters have fun. Let them run amok and run rough-shod over the concepts of rules and balance. Let them trap you in a room with eight Beholders.

Because what I've discovered is that kids don't really need much teaching when it comes to gaming. They already have it figured out. They just need practice, and to build that story-telling tool-box. And the best way to encourage that is to keep having fun.

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.

Back to the Table Top, Fools.

Alright, I've been on an Xbox binge. Like I said previously, I loaded up on cheap games, and I spend all my free time playing these awesome cheap games. But all the Xboxery has been at the expense of my true love, and that's making up shit for table-top RPG games. And 2012 has seen my RPG relationships rocked to their very foundations by some serious adultery.

First some groundwork:
Back in the day, I dated a girl for many months, and she was a mixed bag. She was great when she was okay, but she was a righteous pain in the ass when she wasn't. In hindsight, her main problem is that she was All About Herself.  Then one day, I met another girl, and she was everything the other girl wasn't: she wasn't complicated, she didn't punish me for not reading her mind, and she went out of her way to make me happy. Once I got to know her, I couldn't ever (ever, ever, NEVER) go back to the first girl, even though all my friends assured me that Girl #1 was 'way hotter'. 

Here's where I tie the analogy together in a flash of brilliance:

Old and Ugly

Here's my  Bad Old Girlfriend, the standard of the industry, Dungeons & Dragons (tm). She's hot, sure, and she meets with the approval of the world at large. I can go anywhere, and somebody in the crowd at least has heard of good old D&D. That's been my go-to since 1980...love some Pathfinder, liked some Tunnels & Trolls back in the day, old school GDW Traveler was a junior high obsession...as far as I was concernced, D&D was the apotheosis of gaming.

New and Sweeeeet
 

But then I met my new honey: Savage Worlds. Better yet, let's call it SAVAGE WORLDS. It's the Linux of gaming, it's my kind and sweet new girlfriend of gaming, it's the be-all and end-all as far as I'm concerned. It's open-sourcey, in that the basic core rules are generalized. I don't mean 'generalized' like d20 was, where you had to buy a half-dozen setting specific books to play anything. I'm talking no-joke general, as in "if you have an idea, here is the basic rules framework to help you make a game of it". No joke.
I started reading it. I started buying some of the products (none of which are strictly necessary). And now I'm hooked. Hooked, I tell ya. Like Rush Limbaugh on Oxycontin, there's no looking back.

I ran an on again / off again 4th edition D&D campaign for the wife and kids. Mainly just a test bed for ideas and working out mechanics, but it was fun. Let me restate that: IT WAS FUN. But now I've gotten Savage Worlds stuck in my brain, and I can't go back to D&D. It feels restrictive. It feels burdensome. It feels like I'm wearing women's underwear, with no room for my junk.
It's a bad feeling.

Savage Worlds doesn't demand that I spend $300 bucks with every new edition. Savage Worlds doesn't tell what I can't do. Best of all, Savage Worlds doesn't tell me that she doesn't know if she really loves me, and then leaves me dangling for months, unable to committ but unable to move on with my life.

Sorry, that's called over-extending the analogy. Got stuck in the wheel-ruts of memory lane.

Upshot: Savage Worlds is cheaper than what you're playing now. Savage Worlds likes you for who you are. And Savage Worlds has an active, supportive community that really enjoys sharing ideas and news. Check Google+ for Savage Worlds, or go to Pinnacle's site. Hell, just Google it and be amazed at the love you'll receive from people who love gaming more than they love bitching about which edition is best.

Don't stay in a bitter, codependent relationship with your game. Move on, already. Savage Worlds is waiting for you, with open arms and a big plate of brownies. And beer.