On the Rising Status of Gamers

From The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell:

PISSED-OFF MUSICIAN:     Never performed live to a real audience, have yer?
MUSIC CRITIC:     Nor have I fucked a donkey, destabilized a Central American state, or played Dungeons & Dragons but I reserve the right to hold opinions on those who do. Your show was a bobbing turd and I don't take a word back.

That's right, dice-chuckers rate alongside ungulaphiles and economic hitmen.  We're movin' up in the world!

Monty Python on the OSR

From a conversation overheard at a booth hawking Old School gaming accoutrements at a recent gaming convention:

REG [booth proprietor]: The only people we hate more than 4th Edition players are the fucking Old School Roleplayers.
OSR [crowd of gamers milling about the booth]: Yeah.  Splitters.
FRANCIS: And the Old School Retrobates.
OSR: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the Old School Renaissance.
OSR: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The Old School Renaissance. Splitters.
REG: We're the Old School Renaissance!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Old School Revival.
REG: Revival! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Revival, Reg?
REG: He's over there. [points to a booth across the aisle occupied by a lone gamer]
OSR: Splitter!

300th Post!

Cthulhu News: The Whisperer in Darkness

Then

Have all the recent historic and unprecedented Vermont floods been a publicity stunt for the recent Lovecraft flick?

EDIT: Oh man, that was supposed to say precedented.  Grumble.

And now

Greatest (number of) Hits: Popularity has never been more deceiving

So I briefly placed the little "best of" widget on this here blog a moment ago, mostly to see which of my little rants gets the most internet action.  I removed it for a few reasons; partly because the widget was cropping the first 2 letters of each post off, which looked really stupid, and partly because I really don't want to encourage people to visit some of these "most popular" posts, but mostly because it seemed a bit grandiose on my part to post the greatest hits for a site that sees as little action as this one.  But then I couldn't let it die a quiet death so I wrote this up instead. 

1.  Game Review: Eldritch Role-Playing System by Goodman Games.  Confession time: 90% of visitors to this post come by way of image searches which include the terms "Golgotha" or "Calvary."  Nothing like the ol' bait n' switch.
2. Primordial D&D: Eric Holmes and the 11 year old's dungeon. I assume that folks are not noticing the apostrophe "s" and think they will be reading about an 11 year old dungeon which is interesting because... I have no idea. 
3. Hello friendly Commenter(s, should others decide to speak up).  That this one--my 2nd post ever--should be on this list at all boggles the mind.  My 3rd most "popular" post was really a private message to Daddy Grognard--the only soul in the universe who knew that this blog even existed in the early days--explaining to him that I was unable to post a comment to my own post.  Why didn't I just send him an email and spare myself the humiliation of a public confession of ineptitude?  I don't know.  But apparently people really dig it.  Who knew?
4. Death Ray Enthusiasts Rejoice If you don't like death rays then you are probably a troglodytic Nazi pederast. 
   
5. Megadungeon Design Review Committee Ah yes, the ol' Design Review Committee; I wonder what they've been up to lately?
6. Castles & Crusades: Highlights and Lowlights of an RPG  This was supposed to be a precursor to my latest adventure log about our party that has now converted to C&C--sort of.  We ditched the SIEGE engine and most of the other things that make C&C different from everything else out there, but the point is that no one likes reading adventure logs, least of all me, so why inflict more of same on the world?
7. The Undead Strike Back: Turning Clerics Quick and dirty, yet it still draws people in. 
8. Greyhawk Realty: Looking to buy in the Flannaes A foray into the field of real estate copywriting.
9. Castle of the Mad Archmage Session 2 Part I: Thar be orcs!  Wow, folks do read adventure logs??
10. Sartorial Sorcery: Pointy Hats Explained So this only came out about a week ago and yet it's already #10 on the all time list?  But then, at 11th place there's a 36 way tie with 2 hits each.

Un-postworthy: B-sides and misses

My publicist is constantly pestering me to make an effort to boost my presence in the Blogosphere, and one of the tactics that she keeps harping on is that I actually post stuff more often than once every month or two.  Good idea, right?  She's worth every penny.  But where to find the material?  I did some soul searching and didn;t find anything so I went to my good ol' bloglist and realized that--shit!--I've got like thirty unpublished posts just sitting there!  Some dating dating all the way back to the first week I holed up in this here corner of the internet.  I went down the list of titles to see if any of these might be worth another look and wrote up a brief synopsis of each.  I didn't actually look at the posts; these are my best guesses.
    
Here's the list in reverse chronological order:


Dungeon of Liberty
The conflict of freedom of action in the confines of the "dungeon" adventuring milieu.  Or something else.

I'm Beginning to See the Light
Why newer games suck.


Kill a Rat Scenario
A rant about rules quirks of AD&D

Original 6
An obvious hockey reference in a post dating from the beginning of the NHL season, but more likely an article about the 6 abilities in D&D.


Thac0 Again?
Wherein the Dicechucker goes off on yet another youngster who gets too close to his lawn.

Ramblin' 'bout Modules
Essay about the quirks of the L-series modules; the precursor to my Restenford Project site.

Thieves Assassins & Spies
Old Guard Accoutrements totally outdid me on this topic. 

X2 Castle Amber
Essay about the non-CAS influences of said module.


Assassins revisited for the first time
Rant about the failings of the Assassin class as penned in AD&D; most likely the precursor to the Assassin level titles series from last fall.


Going to the Bullpen
The pros and cons of rotating DMs

SF: Getting drunk
Article on intoxicants in Star Frontiers.  Ripped off wholesale from the Fronteirsman.

Modified Advanced Game Rules
Satirical bit about post-1e game rules.


Zet's Tiny People
An ode to Thundarr.

DMing As critique:
I plead the 5th.

Reverse Engineered Pre-Original Rules:
Satirical bit about the origins of D&D

Pre-Scorn AD&D:
Probably a rant wherein I say in a roundabout fashion that DragonLance can suck me. 

"Cleric" is a Profession Too
It's true; look it up if you don't believe me.

Feral Hobbits:
I'm hoping there are illustrations with this one.

Greyhawk Architecture
Self explanatory.  This one eventually became the Greyhawk Realty post.

Dice-chucker
Long-winded article about the name of this here blog.  Eventually replaced with an entry in the Lexicon

First Anniversary Fortnight Fiesta

We're just cleaning up the cave here at Dice-Chucker Central after the fortnight-long bacchanalia that marked the first anniversary of me clogging up the internet with my vapid, pixelated fumes.  Thanks to all of you who came by to help celebrate.  Mrs. Dice-Chucker was most impressed with all of your behavior and says that you can all come back anytime.  And, though we appreciated the sentiment, despite the presence of vintage DM screens and my Robert Smith haircut, it was not an 80s theme party so whoever brought the Bartles & James and cocaine, we put them out on the back porch; feel free to claim them at any time.  Thanks again to everyone who dropped by this site over the past year.

An actual photo from the event.  That's me holding the flaming punch bowl.

Random thoughts: Rollin' up characters

Does anyone else do this: you see three 6-siders sitting somewhere and, in an idle moment, pick them up and roll them.  If the result is high enough (for me, the threshold seems to be 16), you think "Hey, this could be the makings of a good character!" and roll the dice 5 more times, perhaps even writing down the results on the back of an envelope or an old receipt.  I confess that I do this all the time;* after all, a good dice roll should not go to waste.  That said, I can't imagine a circumstance wherein I would actually use these archived dice rolls for a character.  I mean, I'm not about to sit down at a gaming table and reach into a hat stuffed with these odd scraps of paper and use the selected set of dice rolls for my new character; I'm gonna' roll the dice all over again!

* I have a set of 3 dice sitting by my computer with which my wife and I sometimes play an impromptu yahtzee-like game.

One of the outcomes of this habit is that my preferred D&D ability rolling method has changed from the old AD&D standby Best-3-of-4 to this technique: I roll 3 dice, if one (or more) turns up a "1", I re-roll it/them one time. If I get another 1 on the re-roll, I'm stuck with it.  I like it because now 1s become a symbol of new hope, of a second chance.  In fact, I was inspired to write this post when, moments ago, I rolled a 5 and two 1s, re-rolled the ones and--Bingo!--scored a pair of 6s.  From a 7 to a 17 just like that!  Whereas with the best of 4 method, I could have hoped for a 12 at best.  Of course, with this method, you roll three 2s and you're stuck with a 6, whereas in the best of 4 method you have a 4 in 6 chance of upgrading at least a little bit. I don't know if a method like this has ever been endorsed by any version of The Game, but I find the added dice rolling to be very satisfying without introducing a munchkinriffic element.*

* For a really good munchkin system, Unearthed Arcana, I believe, introduced a method where you rolled your six abilities using an ascending number of dice for each roll starting at 3 dice and working up to 8 dice, taking the best 3 of each set. We called it the Steroid method back in the day.

The other thing I've started doing is adding up the total net bonuses of the "characters" I've made in this way.  First you need a universal bonus set up to use.  For a while I was switching between several universal bonus systems: the Old School +1 for abilities 15 or higher, and a standardized system based on AD&D.   But I've settled on what I call the "Post Modern" system; you're probably familiar with it: 9-12 = 0, 13-15 = +1, 16-17 = +2, 18 = +3 with symmetrical penalties at the lower end of the spectrum.  Castles & Crusades and, I think, Labyrinth Lord, use an identical arrangement.  I add up the total bonus/penalty to get a nice, neat assessment of how good the "character" is, attribute-wise.  What's been shocking to me is when I roll up a character that, in my AD&D trained eyes, looks like a total Fudd but ends up being a pretty decent dude in the final analysis.  For instance, I rolled up one character with a 15, four 13s and a 12.  Using the old AD&D bonuses, you'd immediately slap that 15 on your Dex or Con and take the AC bonus or an extra hit point, and then you'd have 5 meaningless scores to spread across the rest of your humdrum character.  Using the Post Modern bonus system, this seeming Fudd scores a +5 total bonus, which I can say with confidence, after assessing at least a hundred "characters" in this fashion, is pretty excellent.

As an aside, the dice in the illustration* above are ephed up: or at least the one in the middle is.  Everyone knows that the numbers on opposing faces of a 6-sider always add up to 7, and yet there you see the 3 and 4 sitting right next to each other.  Amateurs.

*Thanks, by the way, to the Folks at the National Parks Service for providing this image in an item about the historic game "Farkle"  which was apparently a popular dice game in the colonial era.  I'm more familiar with it as a drinking game played by snooty grad students.

Quit euhemerizing and get back to work.

euhemerism: the doctrine that polytheistic mythology arose from the deification of dead heroes; the system of mythological interpretation which regards myths as based on real people and events. 

euhemerize: to believe in or practice euhemerism

Just came across this word in the ol' dictionary; a huge plus of hard copy dictionaries over the online variety is the serendipitous vocab exercise one experiences by leafing through the pages.  Anyway, I wanted to write it down in hopes of retaining the meaning in me noggin.  Feel free to sprinkle it in your own conversation to spice things up a bit at the water cooler.

Up to Eleven!

 

Eleven followers!  I never intended to surpass James Maliszewski--the egghead laureate of the OSR--and his excellent Grognardia blog in popularity but watch out Jimmy, here I come!  Thanks to all of my devotees for opening yourself to public disgrace for being affiliated--even in such a tenuous, non-binding manner as the Google "Follow" function--with my halfhearted rantings.

PS.  I asked Google if they would change the title from "Followers" to "Sycophants."  They have not as yet responded.  Probably Larry and Sergey are mulling it over as we speak.

New friends! Cool.

Welcome to my new followers Fantasy Cartographic, Talysman the Ur-Beatle and Grodog. Just when I was thinking that I might as well post my little ditties on the backside of my water heater for all the action this little blog was getting, along come these three fine folks--not to disregard Daddy G.--excuse me, Humber G.--and James for their early support, of course. Thanks for stopping in all of you!

L4 New Lendore Isles release

For those who know me well it will not come as a surprise when I confess that I am very nearly giddy with excitement about the news that Len Lakofka has released Module L4 Devilspawn and L4C—the Lendore Companion. I haven’t opened the files yet, but I read at Beyond the Black Gate that they offer a hefty amount of info on campaigning on the Lendore Isles and that they revisit the old Restenford/Garroten adventuring axis. Lakofka's L1 Secret of Bone Hill and L2 Assassin’s Knot—along with the World of Greyhawk Folio—have provided more fertile ground for my imagination than any other gaming accessories.

What I absolutely love about the Lendore series is the flavor of these adventures. I love that towns are such a prevalent part of Lakofka's adventures, I love the odd little NPCs who inhabit these towns, and I love the loose ends he left hanging in his two original adventures. More so, I’m glad that these loose ends have flapped freely in the breeze for nearly 30 years, as they have provided me with countless opportunity to attach my own tangle of webs.

And it’s for that reason that I am hesitating to open the freshly downloaded PDF that will potentially tie those loose ends off. Will he explain away the motivations of the mysterious party that has infiltrated the village of Garroten? Will we learn more about the participants in the siege of the castle on Bone Hill? Will the Duke of Kroten finally show his true colors, whatever they may be? I have too much invested in all the Lakofkaesque foibles of Lendore to lightly step across the threshold into L4. But I will.

What’s going on here?

At long last I have coerced my friend Bob into playing D&D. More specifically, the original D&D as published in 1974. Well that’s not quite true either, we’re going to play Swords & Wizardry, a—pardon me—retro-clone. Man do I hate lingo like that, but that’s what the kids are calling it these days. Since I am a card carrying absurdist and a contrarian of the highest order, I have decided to refer to the game—both my game specifically and all other versions, be they the original or an homage version—henceforth as “Old Style.”

It all began when Bob and I started spending the occasional Saturday night—after the wives and kids go to bed—getting together to play games and drink beer. Usually they’re games of strategy: Chess, Stratego, Risk, Axis & Allies; crap like that. And usually Bob beats me pretty handily. I tend to take either a ridiculously conservative approach and lose in a long, tedious war of attrition or else I take humongous, ill-conceived gambles that, though they sometimes make the game interesting, have yet to result in victory for the good guys.

Anyway, we both played a lot of (A)D&D back in the day (80s) but haven’t really played it or kept up with the hobby since. A few years back I invented this thing called the internet and, at first purely for nostalgic reasons, started loitering in RPG boards, seeing what people had to say. I found some interesting facts. Apparently TSR kept publishing more gaming material after 1986; I had no idea. Also, there was some magic card game in the 90s that was so popular that it ate D&D like a giant frog swallowing a halfling. Stranger still, the company that bought TSR was located in a shitty suburban office park within walking distance of where I was working in the late 90s. I was that close to Lake Geneva West and had not a clue.

Eventually I got married and settled down and found myself with free time in my evenings that had, for many years, been occupied with beer drinking, show-going, laid-getting and various other activities of young adulthood. That’s when Bob and Saturday game nights come in.

So anyway, Bob and I had often reminisced about our D&D days though neither bothered to broach the notion of playing such a game. Then about a year ago, after losing my 237^th consecutive strategy board game, I finally had had enough. “Let’s try D&D, man,” I said.

I had secretly been working on some Byzantine house rules for AD&D in my basement laboratory and when I presented them to Bob for possible playtesting, he scoffed. I won’t go into details, but he had every right to do so. I had cobbled together an ink and paper golem from vintage 80s rule books that I’d been slowly acquiring over the last 5 or 6 years. Besides D&D I have DragonQuest, MERPS, GURPS, Fudge, Heroes, Call of Cthulhu, Champions… you get the picture. Though in my opinion I had created a Frankenstein’s monster akin to the Mary Shelley version—strong, fast, sinister, yet eloquent and introspective—Bob felt that it more resembled the Mel Brooks rendition: clubfooted and a bit Abby Normal in the head.

The relative worth of my house rules aside, the real problem was that Bob had his own ideas about how he would re-make the game in his own image, and they differed greatly from mine. After a few rounds of verbal taunting and outright mockery, we both agreed that we couldn’t really sit down and play AD&D without drastically altering the rules, nor could we agree on how they should be altered.

That’s when I came across the blog of a one Mr Grognardia. His little piece of the internet is chock full of really cool content: book and game reviews and retrospectives, interviews with historic figures of the game, opinion pieces that are informative and enjoyable to read—not like anything you’ll see here—and posts on his own campaign, which he is running using the original D&D rules as published in 1974, Old Style gaming at it’s purest. Also, he just can’t be beat for the amount of content he chucks up every day.

Now neither Bob nor I have ever played Old Style—we started with Holmes and/or Moldvay Basic back in the very, very early 80s—so we thought this would be enough of an unknown entity that we could look upon it with fresh eyes yet it’s also the root of the game that we gleefully wasted our adolescence playing so it’s familiar enough that we’ll know what we’re doing.

That’s where this here bloggy thing comes in. I decided to document the development of our game as we play it; mostly for my own nefarious purposes but I’m putting it out there on the old intertubes as well ‘cuz I’m an exhibitionist at heart. If, somehow, someone manages to extract a milligram of amusement from this, then I’ll call that gravy.