CIOASIISAG Part 5: Dungeons & Dragons

August 26th, 2007 by Brack

The next lot of entries cover a lot of the games I played during secondary school. And there are a lot of them. Some of them I owned for but a few weeks before swapping them for a different game, or selling them. Dungeons and Dragons was probably the beginning of that trend, with most the rulebooks for the system I had I bought off my friend JDG. In fact I didn’t realise that the “Expert” Rules were from an earlier edition and so there were actually number of character levels I didn’t have rules for.

Now Dungeons and Dragons is the prototypical RPG, and I’m probably an anomaly for starting with something else, particularly so for that something else being Paranoia. The game is what spawned the RPG subculture and craze, and it’s an interesting insight of the hobby’s roots. Which is hairy Tolkein loving hippies who played wargames and simulation boardgames.

The “non-advanced” version was apparantly made as a stop-gap for the more popular “Advanced Dungeons And Dragons” but became a game in it’s own right. While it has some stuff that is just plain odd, namely Elf, Dwarf and Halfling as very limited character classes, it holds it’s own as a game quite well. Particularly in the “Companion” and “Master” Rules sets that have the sort of campaign rules still sorely missing from most high level (A)DnD games.

I’m struggling to remember exactly what happened in the campaign I ran with this game. I remember it started in the DnD game world “Mystara” then went to countries that I had invented myself, and ended with the characters becoming gods. The Mystara world was strange in that it seemed to have been made up by TSR as they went along. There’s a tightly packed group of countries, with lots of detail and background all in the corner of one continent. Then as they expanded the world, the details got less and less, and countries bigger and bigger.

Obviously the presence of this game here goes to show that my parents had realised that pretending to be a dwarf wasn’t going to turn me into a satanist and that stuff like “Mazes and Monsters” was scare mongering guff. I’ll discuss the Eighties RPG witchhunt when I get to Dragon Magazine or AD&D second edition, as I want to go into it in a bit more detail and what I think TSR did that crippled the hobby.

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CIOASIISAG Part 3: Red Onez Go Fasta

July 15th, 2007 by Brack

At the same time as we got into wargaming and roleplaying Games Workshop were going through something of philosophical change. They had released a new version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, they had stopped publishing a number of US games for the UK market, their shops began to stop selling other companies games and they launched a number of big game franchises. The foremost of which was:

This was the wargame we played the most. The key to WH40K success was down to one thing - the box set of 30 plastic Space Marines they released at launch. Back then, for 10 quid you can have enough minatures to play a fun skirmish with. It was cheap, accessible and fun. Much like crack cocaine. A couple of us had boxes of marines, some metal Orks, I had a couple of the plastic Land Raider tank kits, and then we’d pretty much use every other minature we could lay our hands on. This was before Games Workshop turned really money grubbing and officious, and there weren’t “OFFICIAL ARMY LISTS” you had to use. The old Rogue Trader ruleset could pretty much turn any minature into a valid WH40K unit.

When US law required them to remove lead from their minatures and switch to a pricier alloy the writing was on the wall for our love of Games Workshop. Minatures got more and more expensive, the plastic kits included, the shops became the McDonalds of games shops, and the games less and less fun. But I’ll go into how Games Workshop lost their fun, and the evils of company dictated metaplot in later posts.

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CIOASIISAG Part 2: Trust No One And Keep Your Laser Gun Handy

July 14th, 2007 by Brack

So after getting a couple of issues of White Dwarf, it was approaching my birthday, and got a year’s subscription as a present. Now at this time I guess the deal Games Workshop had to print UK editions of Chaosium and West End Games RPGs was expiring, and so when you bought a subscription you got a free game. There was Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, Runequest and the game I chose. Paranoia.

Paranoia is pretty much the reverse of every other RPG at the time. Whereas they tended to focus on teamwork and rules, Paranoia fosters backstabbing and terrible unfairness. It takes place in a post apocalyptic world (post-Mega Whoops in the games parlance), where surviving humans live in a place called Alpha Complex, governed by The Computer, an over-protective and insane artificial intelligence.

The players play Troubleshooters, agents of The Computer who deal with treason perpetrated by mutants, secret societies and above all, Commies. Because of the threat of these dangerous traitors, The Computer kindly has everyone cloned six times. It turns out though that everybody in Alpha Complex is a mutant and member of a secret society, Troubleshooters included. And so the actual game play tends to merely hang on the thinnest excuses of plot, instead focusing on the players’ attempts to secretly commit treason, while attempting to accuse/incriminate/kill every other player.

For all but one of our gaming group back then, this was the first RPG we’d played. Some might say it’s worst possible game to start with, but I disagree. A couple of us were into drama at school and I think this game appeals more to that sensibility of mine than some of the other early RPGs I played.

Here’s what I love about Paranoia from a purely gaming perspective:

Disrespect.

Paranoia fosters a disrespect in the GM for both rules and plot. The rules in the 2nd Edition are, for the most part, deliciously simple and grossly unfair. Because they are so simple you can freely bend them as you see fit with little complaint.

But it’s the disrespect for plot and narrative that I think is more important. I like playing roleplaying games mainly for character and dialogue. Not only do I think that an overly structured narrative is unnecessary to the enjoyment of a game, I think it is more often than not detrimental to the enjoyment. The great thing about Paranoia is the narrative structure is pretty much the same every adventure, you just have to think of characters to slot into that structure. You don’t even have to worry about how to move from one scene to another - you can just have the nigh omni-present Computer order the characters to do something - even if they don’t you’ll likely have more fun as the players start reporting one another of insubordination.

To talk about RPGs generally for a moment, I tend to “write” my own adventures rather than run pre-written ones. I’ve known folks who are great at running those sort of adventures, but it’s not for me. I find them to be too limiting, requiring too much preparation, and have too many long paragraphs of non-fun descriptions to read. As a player there’s nothing I hate more than having to hear a description of a building, countryside or town that goes on longer than a sentence. My approach is to write out a list of scenes and list things I want to have happened in each scene, then wing it from there. That way you can’t get upset if the players completely ignore that place you spent an hour mapping and writing flowery descriptions for. Also you can easily put in stuff you think up on the spot, or get suggested to you by what the players say or do. I won’t go too much into that now as there are some later games I will talk about that I think support this approach wonderfully.

Back to Paranoia. As much as I like the simplicity of the rules in general, there is one place it gets a bit clunky, and it’s not a place the players ever really see. I’ve a thing about keeping the maths as simple as possible on any given gaming action - and while to the players it seems a straight over or under d20 roll, in the case of damage the GM then has to do deletions and chart cross referencing, and that slows the pace a little in what is supposed to be a zippy game. The latest edition Paranoia XP, as good as it is, annoyingly makes it even more complicated. It’s still real simple compared to some games, but not as polished as I’d like.

The creators of Paranoia were Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber and Eric Goldberg, with Ken Rolston and Paul Murphy additionally getting credit on the 2nd Edition. XP was by Allen Varney, Aaron Allston, Paul Baldowski, Beth Fischi, Dan Curtis Johnson and Greg Costikyan. There was the jokingly named “Fifth Edition” in 1995, but by that time the game had become a shadow of it’s former self. The original game was very much a product of the Reagan-era and can be seen as part of the post-apocalypse pop culture that threaded through the Eighties. To have it return in 2004 made perfect sense as a reaction to the US politics of today.

Of the original developers, Costikyan is probably the most noticeable today for his various essays/rants on game design/games industry and the founding of Manifesto Games. Rolston, who was one of my favourite games writers, recently retired and is probably more well known today for his work on Morrowind rather his tabletop games work.

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Cut it open and see if it swallowed any gems.

July 11th, 2007 by Brack

And so begins my new, long, meandering project. Talking about tabletop games. Most will be RPGs, but there will be a few wargames and boardgames on the way. Like this wargame - the one that started this whole hobby for me:

When I was 12 and in the second year of secondary school, Friday afternoon was set aside for “hobbies”. I picked “Wargames” having been enamoured by the small metal dwarves I had seen on sale in the local toy shop “Little People”. This shop was part of a shop called “JT White’s”, it mostly sold porcelain figures downstairs, but upstairs had toys and models. And also hairdressers. In my olfactory memory I will associate Citadel Miniatures and TSR games with the smell of perming chemicals.

Anyway myself and a few friends started playing this game after I purchased a second hand copy of the second edition from some older boys. It would have been 1987, so the 3rd edition had just come out making this redundant somewhat. I can’t recall us ever having that many miniatures for this game. I had a couple of dwarf single figures (back when they cost 60p each and had lead in them), a box set of metal “Dwarf Lords” and the box of plastic skeletons. I really can’t remember what my friends had. In fact that whole year seems a vague blur. I remember getting my first issue of White Dwarf (issue 100) in April 1988, and a year later I lending it to a kid called Lenny Oliver and I never got it back.

I remember my parents (read:mum) being a little wary about this whole endeavour as there was the fantasy RPGs = satanism thing going on at the time. Somehow I think it being a wargame and being British-made reassured them I wasn’t going to be a satanist. Of course within a year I had become more enamoured with RPGs than wargames. Albeit one that definitely wasn’t being turned into a scapegoat.

It turned out that was the last year the school had “hobbies”, but by the summer of 1988, my friends and I were meeting every Sunday afternoon for spikey chaos thrills and I was the proud owner of a subscription to White Dwarf, which came with a free game that changed my life.

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Five Awesome Links

February 27th, 2007 by Brack

Sumire, Age 17! - a review of what appears to be an odd and awesome and awesomely odd manga about a strange middle-aged ventriloquist who pretends his dummy is a 17 year old girl called Sumire. Apparantly there is a sequel, Sumire 16. Which you may be able to get fan translations of here.

Dave’s World - Home Of The Games Animal - Remember bandana’d, Dominik Diamond-mocked, talking head Dave Perry from Gamesmaster? Well here’s his website. Apparantly he is the GAMES ANIMAL! An object lesson in self-promotion.

Windows version of MB/GW’s HeroQuest boardgame - Remember when Games Workshop really tried to go mainstream with HeroQuest and Space Crusade? Well here’s one of those games as a Windows program.

Japan’s Anime Culture - A Foreign Press Center Japan briefing from Ryusuke Hikawa, the presenter of Anime Maestro. Talks about animation history, before discussing Mamoru Hosoda and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

Lucha Wiki - It’s a wiki all about people who have wrestled in Mexico at some time or other.

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Five Awesome Links

February 10th, 2007 by Brack

Great Pop Things - Great Pop Things was a comic strip that ran in the NME around the time I started reading it regularly. 1992 I think as Father Ted writer chap, Arthur Matthews’s  “Doctor Crawshaft’s World of Pop” cartoon was running at the same time. GPT was the creation of Colin B Morton and Chuck Death. Chuck Death being a psuedonym of the Mekons’ Jon Langford. It was great. My brother and I still refer to Steve Albini as “Steve Albundy” to this day because this strip.

Ghost In The Shell Lego - It’s the crab tank thingy from the end of the Ghost In The Shell film. In Lego.

Moriyama Miki and The Honkytonk Devils - Another Japanese country band. I’m kind of fascinated by the Japanese country scene as the best I can tell, it seems to work exactly like the British country scene.

The Usuta World - A fansite for the works of humour manga author, Kyosuke Usuta. The most well known work of Usuta’s in the west is “Sexy Commando Side Story, That’s Amazing Masaru-san” through the fansubs of the late 90s anime. And when I say well known, I’m guessing it’s known by a couple of thousand people at most. Currently running in Japan is the strip “He Blows Like PYU! Jaguar” which hasn’t made it to anime yet, but has a number of video games and CDs out. Usuta’s humour is along the lines of something like Cromartie, but is more surreal and fractured, with a less of a reliance on hammering a joke into the ground.

Marvel Super Heroes - Scans of the old TSR Marvel RPG, known fondly as the FASERIP system after the seven stats it used. I ran this on and off from the late 80s in secondary school, until the much better SAGA system came out in, I think 1998 or 97. The books produced were more bad than good. I know this, as until recently I owned all but 3 of the products produced for it. The Advanced Rules, the Ultimate City Campaign Set, the Ultimate Powers book, the MX modules, and the MT modules are probably the only essentials. The Gamers handbooks are nice if you want to play specific Marvel characters. Those MT modules by Ray Winninger are awesome adventures, with the best meta-payoff I’ve ever seen.

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