F*ck Hasbro. I Am D&D.

So Are You.

What's up with these blog posts describing people shying away from saying "I play D&D"?

I play a game, and on the box it says "Dungeons & Dragons".

If someone is nerdy enough to know and care that there are different versions of D&D, it only takes two more syllables to say "I play old school D&D". Give me a break - Hasbro lawyers aren't going to break into your dining room to confiscate your Gary Gygax books. Hasbro might repress their legacy PDFs, but they can't unpublish the past. We need to fight, not acquiesce. Only through our constant use of the term "Dungeons & Dragons" can we promote genericization of the trademark. As the Old School Rebellion, I see it as our duty to do this. D&D is just too awesome and too personal to let it be co-opted by the highest bidder. It's not a simple boardgame like Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit - it's a beautiful, creative, life-long hobby we share with our friends. The dirty secret Hasbro wants you to forget is that you don't have to buy anything from them (or anyone else) to play D&D.

There is no reason to cede D&D to Hasbro. The only reason I can think of to use a silly code word for D&D is for commercial publishing - and that's what the retro-clones are for, right? End of discussion.

I play D&D. We all play D&D.

We are D&D, and D&D is us.

Understanding Crappy Dice Apologists

Pry these sparkle dice from my hands at your own peril, villain!

Let's say your elf was stabbing a mean little orc and you had to roll d6 for damage. I hand you a d7 with two "1"s on it (i.e. 1,1,2,3,4,5,6). Would you be cool with that?

Apparently a lot of roleplayers would be totally cool with this.

Indeed, this is the magnitude of inaccuracy in cheap d6s, according to this 2006 study based on 144,000 dice rolls using replicates of dice from different manufacturers. Both Chessex and Games Workshop dice showed this level of inaccuracy - actually a bit worse than this, on average.

Trivial? Insignificant? Meaningless given the small number of rolls in a session? Ummm. Not really...

The study I cite has been discussed endlessly in the various gaming forums over the last several years, yet most roleplayers still don't seem to care in the least that their dice might be way way off. I find the psychology here to be very interesting and quite different from the other gaming subcultures I've crossed paths with.

I spent some years playing Magic: The Gathering and, later, strategy boardgames. In Magic I could not conceive of any player ever being okay with slipping a fifth replicate of a card into a deck (you're only allowed four). In boardgaming, likewise I could scarcely imagine a player showing up to a game of Settlers of Catan or Stone Age with their own funky dice for their own personal use. This would immediately create suspicion amongst the other players, whether it was at a tournament or a dining room table. So why is this okay in roleplaying games?

It's fascinating to read the viewpoints of the dice inaccuracy apologists who responded to my previous post, or this spin-off discussion at RPGSite. A lot of people are quite open about how they are more concerned about the color of their dice - the way they sparkle in the fluorescent basement light or the way they glisten when coated in Cheeto grease - than how they function. One player used the RPGSite thread as a chance to show off a picture of the heavily worn early-80s TSR dice he stills plays with. Obviously these dice have significant nostalgic value to this person, which I can totally understand. I don't think this person would ever argue that his dice roll accurately, however.

Ultimately it turns out that many roleplayers value aesthetics over function when it comes to dice. Dice are symbols, "potent totems of gamer culture" as S. John Ross puts it, that players use to communicate aspects of their identities. The person with the dirty old Dragon Dice is old school... the person with the sparkle dice is a fancy-pants... the person with the 100 cheapies is well-prepared... the person with the sack of 23 weird dice is superstitious. And so on.

Upon reflection, I actually think this is kind of cool and is part of what makes the RPG world such a fun and interesting place. I love gaming with oddball eccentrics, including people that speak in funny voices and wear felt elf hats. Of course a lot of these kinds of folks are going to have complex emotional relationships with their dice. You know what? It's fine with me... For the record, I have never discussed dice accuracy at a game session, much less asked somebody not to use their personal dice. I welcome players to bring and use their special juju dice - this is a charming and idiosyncratic roleplaying tradition that I do not wish to change. I value the cultural weirdness of dice traditions more than I am concerned about a given players' roll outcome accuracy.

On the other hand, I can think of no reasonable excuse for why a DM should not make an effort to use accurate dice. I am of the traditional view that a DM should strive to be an impartial referee, and this would include allowing players to expect fair dice rolls. I would be interested in hearing a rational argument for why a DM shouldn't invest $5-10 in a set of good dice.

Forbidding Players From Using Crappy Chessex Dice?

It seems like 99% of roleplayers use the round-edged dice produced by the major dice manufacturers. These dice have rounded edges because they are dipped in paint and then tumbled. This wears the surface off of the dipped dice, smoothing the edges and leaving paint only in the numbers. Tumbling does not wear the surface of the dice evenly, however; it results in the dice taking on an irregular egg-shape. These egg-shaped dice produce a non-random distribution of roll outcomes. Gamblers call these "cheater dice". Most gamers call these "Chessex" or "Games Workshop" dice. I have one Chessex d20 that is so bad that it looks like an egg-shaped marble.

Is it fair to ask players not to use their crappy Chessex dice? I mean, if they feel that one of their dipped-n-tumbled dice is "lucky", it probably DOES have biased outcomes. Isn't this cheating?

I always bring a pile of precision-edged GameScience and casino dice to the games I run. I hand out sets to all the players. Yet some players - especially gamers at conventions - insist on using their own dice. The only other gamers I've seen using precision dice are the hardcore old school roleplayers. Why is this? It seems like if someone is obsessive enough to learn how to play a game with 576 pages of rules, they might spend a few minutes thinking about how their dice function.

This is kind of an academic question, of course. I would never kick off a session asking someone to tuck away their favorite "lucky" dice. This decreases joy. I guess I am just ranting here because I am surprised by how many people who fancy themselves as serious gamers use shit-ball dice. I am even more surprised that most game shops don't carry, or even know about, precision polyhedrals.

The thing I am most surprised by, though, is that every second of my life has lead up to this moment where I actually sat down and wrote a nerd-rage blog post about rounded vs. sharp edged 20-sided dice. Sigh...

Rant over. Thanks for stopping by!

NOTE: I wrote this post assuming it was made clear to everyone years ago that Chessex and GW dice are extremely inaccurate. Some of the comments suggest that many people still think the inaccuracies of these dice are insignificant. I direct you to this 2006 experimental study from an engineering class at ASU on Chessex and GW d6s. On average they are over 12% off.

D&D 4e: Product or Subscription Service? Welcome to the 4e Tax!

One of the huge appeals of 4e is that it's more than a game - it's a self-contained gaming community. Sure, that community is run by an unresponsive dictator in Washington (state, that is), but it is undeniably cool that you have the option of porting your character between Encounters run by different DMs all working in a shared universe. It's also nice to know that if a game store is nearby you'll always have gaming buddies at least one night a week. This is pretty awesome actually.

Things have changed slightly in the last few days, however. Now if you want to build and maintain a D&D character you will be required to subscribe to the online D&D website. It appears that the dictator has now started charging taxes! The 4e tax!

Accordingly, cries of anguish have been erupting from the blogs and forums in response to Hasbro / WotC's announcement that they will no longer be supporting their downloadable stand-alone character building software. If you want to build an official D&D 4e character you now have to use Hasbro's online D&D Insider subscription service. Greg at Weirdlands of Xhuul has posted more details and advanced screen shots here.

For those of us who like more traditional pencil-and-paper RPGs the obvious response is "So what? Can't you still use your old books, roll up your own characters, and just play?" Apparently things aren't that simple... When I posed the question to WickedMurph of the Over the Misty Mountain blog he said:

Well, the problem here is that you really kinda DO need the online tool. They have released so much errata and shit that the Character Builder is pretty much the only way to keep it all straight.

What's more annoying is that Character Builder is still a good way to release rules. All the things I said about it before are still true - it's a cheap, effective and unprecedented way to publish a game.

I don't really play 4e so none of this directly affects me, but I think it's very interesting to watch "D&D" evolving under Hasbro. It's fascinating how what was once a simple pencil-n-paper roleplaying game is now evolving into a totally novel sort of online fee-based gaming service. Between maintaining compatibility with formal Encounter "league play", dealing with complex rulesets, and keeping up with errata and rule updates players are pretty much forced to buy into the online subscription service.

Is the Nebula Best Short Story Even Really Sci-Fi?

Something that really bugs me, but that I've never ranted about on my blog before, is the basic mundanity that's creeping into a lot of modern fantasy and science fiction these days. In my fairly traditional opinion, quality F/SF should have some fantastic aspect that is absolutely fundamental to the story. For instance, if you can replace the weird setting, futuristic objects, or strange aliens with mundane settings, objects, or characters, and the core theme of the story is preserved, then it's not really F/SF.

This is the reason I'm painfully disappointed by this year's Nebula Best Short Story selection: Spar by Kij Johnson. It's a very short and purposely unpleasant story that describes a woman trapped in a small spaceship with an uncommunicative alien blob that rapes her relentlessly. The descriptions of alien sex are interspersed with the woman's memories of an uncommunicative husband. Okay... so the story is a paper thin allegory for the breakdown of communication in a romantic relationship. And, as far as mainstream literature goes, I guess it's a fine little tale. I feel very strongly, however, that the exact same story could have been told without the alien blob and without the spaceship. In this story the sci-fi setting is just window dressing on a generic human interest story. The woman could just as easily have been stuck on a life raft in the Atlantic getting humped by an albatross.

I'm frankly pissed off that stories like this are being chosen as the finest examples of what our genre has to offer. It's a sad betrayal of the F/SF tradition.

Why Can't I Enjoy Plush Cthulhus?

First of all, I’d like to apologize to my plush Cthulhu-owning and Miskatonic University shirt-wearing friends for this grumpy and curmudgeonly post. I admit I have an unfair and unhealthy psychological hang-up - my inability to relax and enjoy the recent campy commercialization of H.P. Lovecraft. Instead of resenting me, I hope that you will instead choose to pity me.

I’m a very easy-going fellow when it comes to the never-ending cycle of pop-cultural appropriation, re-interpretation, and commercialization. Mostly I just don’t care. I know what I like, seek it out, and tune out the noise. For instance, I’m okay with the Lord of the Rings movies - even though I think they are a pale shadow of the books, I enjoy them for what they are. I see no benefit in being a snobby purist about these kinds of things. Given this general disposition of mine, I have a hard time understanding why this thriving subculture of campy H.P. Lovecraft knick-knacks drives me crazy. You know, items like “Cthulhu for President” bumper stickers, “I Escaped Arkham Asylum” t-shirts, Munchkin Cthulhu card games, and, of course, the ubiquitous plush Cthulhus. This stuff should all be really fun and wink-wink, but I just can’t…  can’t… enjoy it.

I have been reading and rereading Lovecraft regularly for over half my life now. I know all of his stories like relatives of mine; their personalities, atmospheres, characters. I don’t really know if this is good or bad. Does it mean my literary tastes haven’t evolved since I was 12? Or does it mean I was lucky to find the good stuff early on? At this point it’s hard to untangle how much of my aesthetic fancy is simply attracted to Lovecraft vs. defined by Lovecraft. Whatever the case may be, it all boils down to the fact that some portion of my creative identity is quite intertwined with Lovecraft’s work.

I think this must be the root of my problem. Maybe when I see campy t-shirts having a little fun with Lovecraft it’s akin to strangers making fun of one of my family members. This is particularly stinging because I suspect that the whole Lovecraftian campfest probably began as a late-20th century tendency to mock Lovecraft’s writing style – especially his use of odd and extravagant adjectives (which I love). Read this 2005 New York Times “review” of Lovecraft where the enlightened literary scholar Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket – awesome credential, huh?) mocks Lovecraft’s style with precious little mercy! I find that this critical view of Lovecraft’s writing style is more widely known than the content of his fiction, a state of affairs which has frustrated me endlessly.

On top of everything, it turns out that many of the plush-Cthulhu type people I’ve chatted up have never actually read Lovecraft (or maybe they read a little and forgot – I don’t know what’s worse). Five or ten years ago I would become excited by seeing Cthulhu bumper stickers. I’d think, “Wow, here is one of those rare folks who appreciates the Golden Era of Weird Tales Magazine! I can’t wait to have a conversation about what Brown Jenkin looks like or what Wilbur Whatley’s ancestors were like!!” (Pathetic, I know.) No longer. In my experience most of these folks know of “Cthulhu” primarily as a pop culture franchise. Maybe they saw one of the movies (Re-Animator? Argh!) or maybe they played one of the licensed boardgames. Luckily, they all seem know that there is, in fact, a “Cthulhu Book” by H.P. Lovecraft, but I guess that book, whatever it is, is not worth reading for most of them. Easier to wait for the movie...

But, you know, I bear no ill will towards the people who love to cuddle with their plush Cthulhus yet have never taken even a few minutes to read The Music of Erich Zann. There’s no real reason any of these people should know or care about H.P. Lovecraft, really.  I recognize Lovecraft is very weird fiction written in an unusually baroque style that was self consciously archaic even for the 1920s. I also recognize that most people don’t really read fiction anymore anyway. There’s nothing wrong with having a cute little stuffed demon, it’s fun and funny, after all. I should just be thrilled that some aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction have wiggled down fairly deeply into the slime pit of pop culture... And I suppose I am to a degree.

Yes, this problem I have is all my own – a minor twisted tragedy in my life where my obscure literary hero has been mercilessly mocked and ultimately commercialized as a camp icon. I will now cringe in my isolated corner of the blogosphere, with tears streaming down my face, my sweaty hands clutching a small stack of sticky old paperbacks, while the smiling people move on around me cuddling their plush Cthulhu dolls.

On second thought… Maybe if they came out with a plush Yog Sothoth I’d have to get one.

CLICK HERE TO READ H.P. LOVECRAFT FOR FREE

The End of the Professional Fantasist

There has been an interesting discussion going on in the fantasy & sci-fi fiction blogs over last couple of weeks. Sparked by Robert J. Sawyers post Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?, SF heavyweights Robert Silverberg and Jerry Pournelle have made blog posts (!) over at Black Gate offering some interesting historical perspective on the topic.

Silverberg recalls a time in the 50s and 60s when there were probably fewer than ten people making a living off of writing fantastic fiction: "Poul Anderson, Gordy Dickson, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Robert Sheckley, maybe Jack Vance..." At the time Isaac Asimov was still working as a college professor. There were also a few writers like Philip K. Dick who wrote fiction full time but weren’t really making a living – they were basically living in poverty. (Jack Vance might actually fit in this latter category.) Silverberg goes on to describe a high point in the 70s and 80s where there was a lot of money to be made in the field. However, as of 2010, as Sawyers discusses in some depth, we are at a point reminiscent the 50s and 60s where only a handful of writers actually make a living writing sci-fi and fantastic fiction. This does not include the writers who make ends meet by writing commercially oriented vampire, zombie, or Tolkienesque hack serials.

The decline in fiction readership combined with new modes of information exchange (i.e. the internet) will only make things more difficult for professional writers of the fantastic. In essence, sci-fi and fantasy writing is returning to its roots as a hobby. As Sawyers points out, writers can't adopt the business model of modern musicians who make their real money as traveling performers and t-shirt salesmen (not by selling music, in case you didn’t know). Writers have to sell stories and books, and nobody is buying anymore

There are two brief ponderings I want to make here:

1. This peak of commercial interest in fantastic fiction in the 70s and 80s, followed by its decline and subsequent evolution into a hobbyist enterprise, is a lot like what we’ve seen with role playing games. I wonder what it was about the late 70s and early 80s that made so many millions of people interested in reading books and playing D&D (and painting van murals). And, more importantly, why did this spirit of the fantastic die in our culture…?

It’s very easy to demonize video games and cable TV, and maybe it’s appropriate. A lot (most?) of my friends who are interested in imagination don’t bother to read books anymore. They spend hours and hours and hours playing World of Warcraft and various console games and watching Buffy and Battlestar Galactica. I’ve checked this stuff out and it’s okay, but in my grumpy and curmudgeonly opinion it all rapidly becomes deeply boring (and depressing) and sucks compared to reading a great story or sitting around the table with friends, dice, and character sheets. Obviously I’m in the minority. Why?

2. I wonder what the fallout of the end of professional writers of the fantastic will be in terms of the quality of fiction. I have a lot to rant about concerning the quality and style of fiction appearing in the digests these days. Frankly, I don’t think much of it is as good as it used to be. I don’t know if this has more to do with the taste of the editors or the preferences or abilities of current writers. If the market can’t support professionals outside of vampire hack writing and television, I am worried the situation will get worse. We need new people who, like Arthur C. Clark or Robert Heinlein before them, have time to lavish on developing their skills to become master writers. It’s sad we have to constantly rely on visionaries like Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance, or H.P. Lovecraft to live in poverty while we let them expand the boundaries of our cultural imagination.

Old School ≠ Kill-n-Loot

“Remember the good old days, when adventures were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level? Those days are back. Dungeon Crawl Classics don't waste your time with long-winded speeches, weird campaign settings, or NPCs who aren't meant to be killed. Each adventure is 100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with the monsters you know, the traps you fear, and the secret doors you know are there somewhere.” - Dungeon Crawl Classics website

“Of course, if your players are not money grubbing tomb-robbing misfits, they are probably doing something wrong in the first place and don't deserve to level (I hear alot about these new-agey indie/story games). Isn't this a core conceit of old school rulesets? “ - Lord Bodacious (in a comment to my last post)

These two quotes I think crystallize a strong notion among many people that old school RPGs are, at their core, all about killing monsters and stealing treasure.  I have never understood this stereotype. Not only do I not understand it, I think it’s harmful to the public perception of our hobby (read this stinging and highly critical Gygax obituary if you haven't already) and I think it has very little basis in reality.

Look, I have complete respect for my pals that like to spend their hours imagining they’re running around a maze, stabbing orc babies in the face, stealing little “Gold Pieces”. This is a cool weird diversion I thoroughly enjoy myself on occasion. I do not believe, however, that this mode of play best represents the heart of 70s-style paper and pencil gaming. I think it mostly represents (1) the first early-70s experiments where wargaming began mutating into RPGs at Dave Arneson’s house, (2) early-80s D&D fad gaming, and (3) current 4e “D&D Encounters” boardgame-style play. So, yes, from the earliest days of D&D there have been kill-n-loot gamers, but I don’t detect a significant association with this play style specifically with 70s RPG culture. If anything, kill-n-loot mostly represents the style of play I see in the 4e RPGA rooms at modern gaming conventions. If you want to go by the numbers, kill-n-loot is thoroughly new school, strongly appealing to the modern generation of gamers weaned on World of Warcraft and console games.

I must admit that the only dungeon crawling I was doing in 70s was on the floor in diapers, so I have no first-hand experience of the play styles of the era. Thus, in my broaching this topic I willingly open myself to criticism and retort. I do see, however, much evidence that kill-n-loot wasn't the only game in town in the 70s.

Many printed artifacts in particular soundly reject the hypothesis that all prominent mid-70s gamers focused on kill-n-loot dungeon crawls. My favorite of these is Empire of the Petal Throne (TSR 1975) - a self-contained OD&D-based game that has pages and pages of compelling storylines, weird campaign settings, and awesome NPCs. The players’ goal in EPT is to advance in standing in a complex and socially stratified city-state. Sure, you can kill weird alien monsters and get some money on the way up the social ladder, but killing and looting isn’t the point. To me, EPT is what it’s all about. This is the spirit of the old school RPGs I love the most. There is so much more mind blowing RPG material from the 70s with highly imaginative settings and scenario possibilities: Metamorphosis Alpha (TSR 1976), Traveller (GDW 1977), City State of the Invincible Overlord (Judge’s Guild 1976), Gamma World (TSR 1978) and on and on. Kill-n-loot? What?

Furthermore, the oldest DMs I’ve played with – guys who have been gaming continuously since the 1970s using old school rulesets - all have imaginative story arcs, complex homemade worlds, and awesome NPCs. Although I’m sure they exist, I personally don’t know any 30+ year RPG veterans that run kill-n-loot campaigns. Convention one-shots? Yes. Campaigns? No. And campaigns are what it’s all about – just read the OD&D rulebooks.

So where does the loot-n-kill stereotype come from? Certainly many of the early (and celebrated) TSR and Judge’s Guild D&D modules had paper-thin scenarios emphasizing killing monsters and stealing treasure. As well, the rules of most D&D editions require killing and looting to advance in level. Okay. But there are two assumptions at play if you want to extend these facts to say “Old school RPGs are all about looting and killing”. The first assumption is that the primary goal of most D&D players is to advance in level. In my experience, this is not accurate at all. In my two current campaigns my players are showing almost zero interest in playing-to-level. It’s almost like piles of treasure are a nuisance to them. It's not just my game - as the comments to my last post and this post by Jeff Rients illustrate, many DMs running old school D&D campaigns, including Dave Arneson himself, house-rule to give experience points and allow leveling for activities other than killing and looting. The second assumption is that D&D is the prime representative of old school gaming. Now, I love classic D&D and play it more than any other game, but there was a Cambrian-like explosion of other highly imaginative RPGs and supplements in the 70s that deserve more recognition (and table time).

Ultimately, evidence and anecdote lead me to the impression that a significant portion of mid- and late-70s RPG activity was centered around creating interactive experiences where players could “walk into” a story such as Robert E. Howard, Brian Aldiss, or Jack Vance would have dreamed up. This is what I think of when I hear “Old School RPG” and this is what John Eric Holmes was excitedly trying to describe in his 1981 book Fantasy Role Playing Games. As far as I can tell, racking up Gold Piece Points in a tedious proto-videogame has no particular relationship with old school gaming.