D&D
A whole mess of genre blook links
I’ve been collecting these, but it’s getting out of hand. So…
- John Scalzi, blogger extraordinaire and sci-fi author talks about how long it takes to get established in genre fiction. It’s an interesting read and remands me that if I haven’t started yet, I probably never will!
- There’s a new, George R. R. Martin edited, Jack Vance homage collection out entitles Songs of the Dying Earth and it’s prompted the New York Times of all places to print a lengthy homage of their own. I’ve never clicked with Vance, despite my love of the Vancian-style magic in D&D, and this article helped me realise why.
Intricate plotting is not Vance’s forte, but he artfully recombines recurring elements: the rhythms of travel; the pleasures of music, strong drink and vengeance; touchy encounters with pedants, mountebanks, violently opinionated aesthetes and zealots, louts, bigots of all stripes and boyishly slim young women with an enigmatic habit of looking back over their shoulders. His stories sustain an anecdotal forward drive that balances his digressive pleasure in imagining a world and the hypnotic effect of his distinctive tone, which has been variously described as barbed, velvety, arch and mandarin.
I’m afraid I’m all about the plots I’m afraid and writers for whom writing is primarily about the form of language have never appealed to me. The article’s a very good read though.
- Another thing I’ve never really got is steampunk, although I finished (and really enjoyed) Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of Babel today and that has some steampunk elements. The Onion A.V. Club has a primer on steampunk which gives some pointers if you’re been interested but not known how to get into it.
- On the other hand I enjoyed the first two books of Scott Lynch’s as-yet-unfinished ‘Gentlemen Bastards’ trilogy as much as I’ve enjoyed any fantasy work in the last few years – they’re the sort of rollicking high adventure that makes me laugh and keep turning the pages. If you’re the sort of person who likes to wait till a trilogy is all finished before starting, you’ve got a bit more waiting to do. I’m hoping the wait is so the book is right not because Lynch has over extended…
- Finally the Guardian had some musing on fantasy fans recently as a result of the inaugural Gemmel Awards. To whit:
even SF fans have it easy compared to followers of fantasy. These are the people Red Dwarf fans sneer at for being nerdy. They are the zit-ridden little brothers of the SF geeks, whose even-less-healthy obsessions include trolls, giving Anglo-Saxon names to phallic weapons, and maidens with magical powers.
And to think this is an attempt to be complimentary. Sigh.
I will try to be better at getting these all up in a more timely fashion in the future. Promise.
Goodbye Dave Arneson
Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons& Dragons, has died age 61 of cancer. The RPG blogosphere is full of comment from others, but I liked Ken Hite’s small obituary.
Thanks for everything Dave – we’ve all had a great time with the games you helped invent.
Brisbane geek shopping
I’m in Brisbane for a day for work and thought I’d take a break this afternoon and check out a couple of geek-related shops: Ace Comics & Games and Pulp Fiction. This is the first of my travel related shop reviews – I’ll do them as I go to visit places but please note that they’re just impressions from (usually) a single visit. › Continue reading
The sad tale of Wilgo the Blingseeker and his cousin Zilgo.
So I finally got some RPG play time yesterday.
I trekked out to Kyle’s place on the other side of the city to play in his second one shot first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Gary Gygax memorial game. There was six players (including me) and all bar Phil rolled up characters on the spot.
Kyle has strong opinions about, well, pretty much everything. But his strong opinions about old school gaming are that you should do it properly. And properly in the case of character creation means roll 3d6, six times. In order. So no swapping around stats in order to make a good character, no rolling 4d6 and dropping the lowest. No rerolling unless A) your character is unplayable by the rules or B) your character is dead.
Old School – a review of the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming
Like lots of people, I got my roleplaying start with the Red Box basic set for Dungeons & Dragons back at the ripe old age of 7 or 8. Weirdly enough, I never actually played a roleplaying game until high school, and then only once. I was at university before I took up the hobby in earnest with second edition AD&D and only really got into it with the advent of third edition in 2000.
In those early days I made up a lot of characters and read a lot of books. But that was the limit of my ‘old school’ gaming. So it was with some interest that I cam across the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming today. It’s a free, thirteen page download by Matthew Finch who wrote the Original D&D ‘retro-clone’ Swords & Wizardry and it goes into the differences between ‘modern’ gaming and ‘old school’ gaming.
I’d normally find this sort of thing slightly patronising and annoying, and indeed the Swords & Wizardry site has pretty strong elements of that, to whit:
To reawaken the hobbyist-gamer and put to rest the consumer-gamer, to break out of the miasma of RPG consumer-think, and to re-ignite the original wide-horizon view of fantasy roleplaying and its potential.
Blah.
But the PDF itself is actually a fairly fun and compelling read. It lays out different examples of play and how a modern game would run them and how an ‘old-school’ game would run them, with a modern game focusing on the skills and stats of the character sheet and the old school game focusing on the player’s imagination. One example searching a room – in the modern game the room is searched by a dice roll against the search skill and in the old-school game, it’s searched via role-play. As much as I hate to admit it, that’s been the way my modern games have gone sometimes and the Primer provided a quick way to reflect on that.
There are clearly some limitations to this – as Sophie would be quick to point out, a lot of the modern games she plays encourage exactly this sort of free-form roleplaying – yesterday’s 3:16 actual play is a case in point (it would be interesting to here how The Forge/Story Games crowd would react to being told that their games were really a return to the glory days of original Dungeons & Dragons!). But it’s clear what Finch is talking about here – old D&D versus new D&D – and so it’s silly to get too hung up on the limitations of his definitions.
I’m going to be playing in a first edition AD&D game on Australia Day for the first time in a long time and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m going to use the primer to get in the mood and frame of mind and hopefully it works!