One more comment on Kobolds Are My Baby!

Dig this sweet Kobold Apprentice mini:



You can get this wee git and several of his buds from Paizo. If I could paint worth a darn I would totally get this little guy for my dream project of running Encounter Critical as a convention miniatures battle. I'm still looking at running EC as a mini's game, mind you. But with paper figures instead of lead.

The D&D Toolbox

I started gaming as a snotnose kid back in the 80's. Over the years I've talked to a lot of gamers and past gamers who started as snotnose kids back in the 80's and most of the time I hear much the same story from them. We generally all started out with either the '81 or '83 Basic D&D rules. I started with Moldvay's near-flawless '81 edit but at least as many, if not more, got on the bandwagon with Mentzer's even-better-for-newbies '83 stuff. At some point thereafter the existence of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons became known to us. We were all dumb kids in a hobby clearly originally aimed at a much older and more sophisticated audience, so we of course all had to get in on this 'Advanced' stuff.

The immediate problem, of course, is that AD&D was a LOT more game than Basic/Expert D&D, with a lot more fiddly bits. So we basically lied to ourselves. My group said we played AD&D. We had the AD&D books at the table. But whenever we found a mechanic we considered too cumbersome, we ignored it in favor of D&D as Tom Moldvay had taught us. AD&D initiative? Forget it. We used Basic D&D's super-simple group initiative rules. Material components? Naw. Our Basic D&D m-u's could cast spells without components, so why should our Advanced guys be saddled with that crap?

I'm painting with a broad brush here, but basically for an entire generation of D&D kids we tended to play Basic D&D but bolted on the bits from Advanced that we liked. More class and race options? Sign us up! Higher level spells? We'll take all you can spare! Two-handed swords that do an amazing 3d6 damage against big dudes? You know we want in on that action!

So this is where maybe OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord and such are missing the boat. As I recently proved in my own gaming group, not that many gamers want to play AD&D 1st edition as written. Hell, in a quarter century of gaming I've only met one guy that claimed his group played 1st edition AD&D exactly as written. On the other end of the spectrum, Basic/Expert type D&D can be a little too simplistic for some people. That goes right back to why my group and so many others hybridized the two games: we wanted to pick and choose a level of complexity between the two published extremes.

Changing gears for just a moment, is everyone familiar with 0one Games? (I think that's supposed to be pronounced "zero one" but I always want to say "oon".) They make some of the best dang maps you can buy. Their Caverns of Chaos is a gorgeous and utterly gameable homage to the original Caves of Chaos. And if you always wanted your own megadungeon but hate mapping, you really need to check out their series of super-mega Under the Mountain level maps. 0one is part of the YourGamesNow collective, which is a fabulous place to get gaming PDFs.

At least some of the 0one maps come with this great feature called "Rule the Dungeon!". You open up the PDF and it comes with these little clicky buttons. Let's say that the map is in color but you want to print in black & white. Click the right button and the color layers are hidden. If you like the map, but think the furniture in the rooms won't suit your uses, you can click to basically turn the furniture off. The basic layout of the map is always the same, but you can customize the presentation for your own specific needs.
THAT is what I want from an OGL D&D pdf. Total effin' customizability. Give me a bigass checklist in the front of the file, like the ones that you can find in the back of old RoleMaster Companions. Allow me, through judicious checking and unchecking of little option boxes, to drill down to the exact version of D&D that suits my tastes. Give me the option of typing in additional text, or have the output of the program be in a form that I can easily edit. Then I can print out a copy for each player in a campaign and I will know that we're all on the exact same page.
Somebody, please, steal this idea and run with it. Everybody already runs their own version of D&D. We're finally within reach of technology that should allow us to easily share our personal D&D's with all the other fans of the game.

I went to the bookstore over lunch

In the RPG section I found this:

I've not had any firsthand experience with Kobolds Ate My Baby!, but a dude I game with every year at Winter War recommends it. Assuming you're not too squeamish about the occasional baby-eating joke, this game looks like good, unwholesome fun. And I'm tempted to use some of the stupid setting info in future D&D games.

this is an improvement

The logo for the first issue of Fight On! was my first attempt to make such a thing. I was shooting for something like the logo on the earlier D&D books, the one that always looked more "old west" than "fantasy" to me. But the results look kinda hokey on the printed page. Worse yet, I made the amateurish mistake of sending the logo to the editor as a .jpg file, which caused some ugly pixelfuzz. Here's the new logo I designed over the weekend.

I am a villain of the basest sort.

I went to Free Comic Book Day and didn't buy a damn thing. I will offer up two points in defense of this churlish behavior:

1) You would not believe the money I've spent at my local shop on Bronze Age comics. Sure, it wasn't much per issue, but since when did The Human Fly sell for more than cover price? Three bucks a mag is way more than anyone should pay for that sort of thing.

2) The 501st were out to promote the event and my daughter was absolutely freaked out by Vader and his homies. She's actually a big Star Wars fan, but anyone in a full-body costume tends to give her the jibblies.

Anyway, below is one of my favorite panels from this year's Simpson's freebie. In the previous panel superheroes have just been banned from operating in Springfield.
I'm still working through all the stuff I nabbed, but Atomic Robo and Tiny Titans were both fun reads. The Archie freebie seemed a little off, as it spent some time explaining to readers a method for stealing valuable comic books. WTF?

Help! WoAdWriMo!

Next month I'd like to do Worldwide Adventure Writing Month again, but since Martin put Treasure Tables on hibernation I need a new host. I had hopes that theRPGsite would be the new home of WoAdWriMo, but the present server crisis and need for better software makes that a no-go.

I'll make a new Yahoo Group if I need to, but does anyone have any other ideas for a place that can host the finished adventures and maybe a discussion forum? The forum was relatively low-key last time, but the download section needs to be able to handle at least a couple thousand 5 or 10 MB downloads over the course of a week.

Incidentally, the WoAdWriMo challenge will change in one regard this year. I had originally called for people to try to write adventures of 32 pages in length. In retrospect, I think that parameter discouraged more people than it motivated. So I'm removing that limit entirely. If you want to contribute a single brief encounter to the WoAdWriMo effort, we'll take it. Anything you want to submit that might help a GM where the dice hit the table is welcome.

Look out! It's the wizard's ghost!

My buddy Stuart likes to doodle while he plays. Usually he does abstract geometrical stuff, but last Wednesday he produced this:

He left it on the game table so I had to scan it in. Stuart talks a bit about this session over on his blog. I'm kinda bummed to see our Gygax memorial campaign end with the conclusion of the Moathouse. Certainly, a good pile of the blame lies at my feet. Endeavouring to play AD&D 1st edition by the book is generally an exercise in masochism. The starting spell charts and training rules were like an albatross 'round the campaign's neck. And Wednesday I discovered first hand what a pain in the ass the weapon type versus armor rules can be. Maybe if we had something like the old Judges Guild product Dungeon Tac Cards that would have sped things along a bit, or simply having a slick character sheet where you could record all the modifiers. As it stood, I was just doing lots of extra look-ups on a chart with no real fun added to the game.

The back half of the session was fabulous. The players figured out that brute force was not going to work against the evil cleric Lareth the Beautiful and his soldiers. So they started getting creative, like setting ambushes with flaming oil. I really dug it when removed a door from its hinges and then used it as a mantlet shield to force their way in, toppling several of Lareth's men. Finally it came down to just the PCs against Lareth and his nigh-impossible-to-hit Armor Class.

That's when Doug declared that they were going to attempt to overbear Lareth. Bless their miscreant hearts, that was the first time I've ever been in a AD&D game that actually used the overbearing rules. And it worked, too! Four PCs (two were down by this point) against a single man was just overwhelming. So congrats to them for making Beggar Mobs work in their favor.

It was beautiful. Knocking down orcs or whatever is always a good time, but what really excites me is when the PC party starts looking for creative solutions, when they go from being a thrown-together gang of stumblebums with swords to an elite cadre of well-organized crimefighting criminals.

Unfortunately, that's not exactly where my players go to get their buzz. There's a bit of a gulf growing in my group as far as preferred playstyle. I would have happily ran lots more AD&D, or some OD&D, or Castles & Crusades, or lots of other Retro Stupid games. Stuart and Doug seem more interested in the modern kung-fu-superheroes-with-swords mode of 3.x and Exalted.

I'm not prepared to run that sort of thing right now. Or maybe ever again, I dunno. So Doug's going to take a turn GMing Exalted, but with an alternate setting involving the great frozen north. That ought to be interesting, especially considering that the dice pools used in White Wolf games make no friggin' sense to me whatsoever.

Here's my character idea in a nutshell: a caveman who found one of those 2001 monoliths, but in handy daiklaive form.