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About twenty years ago I briefly made some money cranking out watercolor paintings, which I sold as craft fairs and swap meets and such. They were very formulaic, Bob Ross-style “happy little trees” things. I would knock out a half-dozen or more of essentially the same picture at a crack; when one sold, I’d wait for the customer to walk away and pull out the next one. I painted fast and sold cheap and convinced every customer that each painting was an original, which was true in so far as it wasn’t mechanically reproduced and each copy has unique flourishes and flaws.

An acquaintance at the time was a Fine Artist and was frankly appalled at the practice. It was not art, she said; it was craft. I should not call my wares are, because aside from the first iteration there was no creative spirit at work. I was merely a technician, assembling elements by rote and adding no personal touches, nothing of myself, to the endeavor. I get what she was going for, of course. Not that there’s anything wrong with craftsmen, they’ve got valuable skillsets, and what they do can certainly be considered an art form, but I understand where the line between “art” and “craft” can be drawn.

This all came rushing back to me as I’ve been reading reviews of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Now more than ever (at least, since 1st edition AD&D) the game wants to lock players into paths. you get options to build your character with, at proscribed levels. creating a character isn’t art; it’s craft. You’re cranking out yet another fighter, warlord, cleric, whatever that’s essentially the same as any other character of the same class, with a few options and variations chosen from some list or another. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, because you can build cool characters and if you’re looking for that experience it’s just fine. But it made me start thinking of various games, and the preferred styles of play of gamers, in terms of arts and crafts.

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Yesterday I mentioned in passing an idea about using Risus to play D&D. I haven’t had time to surf the web to see what other people have done, and I only just skim-read Risus for the first time in a while. Having put very little though into it, here’s how I’d do it:

Race and Class are cliches, naturally. So you can have Elf 4 Magic User 3 Thief 3, or whatever.

For spells, you can pick spell names and effects out of a D&D book of any edition, or, to be more creative, invent spells on the fly. For authentic flavor made-up spells should be named using the Name-Adjective-Noun(ish) format. “Cure Light Wounds” is boring; I always wanted to cast something like Garbledor’s Astonishing Recovery. Fireball? Feh. Try Faldoron’s Spectacular Holocaust.

Monster Cliches are their powers.

Cannon Fodder get, like 1 or 2 dice. A goblin is Goblin 1. An orc is Orc 2. Like, a band of kobolds would get 1 die between them.

When you kill a monster, roll a number of d6 equal to it’s highest cliche. So, you kill a dragon with Breathe Fire 5. Roll 5d6. That’s how many Gold Pieces you get. If you roll a 1, you get a magic item instead, because 1 gold piece is lame.

Magic Item Table (Roll 1d6)

1 Weapon

2 Ring

3 Armor

4 Special

5 Rod/Staff/Wand

6 Potion

Roll once for each 1 you get when rolling for gold piece. If you get duplicates, you can either get multiples or combine dice for better effects, if the GM is good with it. For instance, two +1 swords, or a +2 sword.

Magic items work like this: they give a die that can be added on. So a 1-die sword is a +1 sword, and you add a die to your attack rolls when using that sword. A 2-die sword is a +2 sword, and so on. Extend this idea to other magic items; a ring of Dardonno’s Magickal Frostbite will have however many dice. They’re there own cliches.

Players get Experience Points for the total points of a monster’s cliches; a 7-point dragon is worth 7xp, a dozen goblins is worth 12xp. Players get 1xp for each gold piece the gey. When a magic item is found, roll 1 die for each point of cliche it has and you get that many xp; for example, a +3 mace would let you roll 3d6 for xp.

The gamemaster should set how many points it takes to “level up”. For a short, silly game this should be low so all the players can level up at least once during the game session. Say 100xp, figuring you’ll kill at least 50 orcs in an hour or so. The number should be higher if you’re running a longer game or a campaign, say 1000xp or higher. When you level up, you get to add a point to a cliche.

And that’s how I’d run D&D with Risus. All feedback is appreciated, when I get a chance I’m going to write this out in a more prettified format and publish it as a PDF doc.

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The release of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition has made me realize how much the game evokes different things for different people. There has been so much debate about was D&D is, and what it isn’t, and everyone’s right in the context of their own fond memories and desires. For some people it’s a particular style of play — “kill them and take their stuff” (“hack ‘n’ slash” as we called it in the old days), or certain iconic spells, magic items, or settings. For others it’s the rules, they way things are done and have always been done, with some tweaks and upgrades, since 1974. For some folks it’s a combination of the two. Debate rages as to how well 4e upholds the legacy of both fluff and crunch.

While I haven’t had any direct exposure to 4e yet, I’ve been fascinated by the number of people blogging about their experiences with the original edition, aka “OD&D” or the “white box” edition. The game Gygax and Arneson created in 1974, the game derived from the chainmail miniatures rules, the game where the Greyhawk and Blackmoor setting began. I haven’t read those rules since about 1982, and I found them fairly incomprehensible then compared to the 1e AD&D we were playing regularly at the time. OD&D was pretty “rules lite” in contrast to what the game was to become. It relied heavily on readers/players understanding the basic jargon and underlying assumptions of wargaming, as well as the tropes of pulp sword and sorcery. If you read OD&D through that lens, it makes perfect sense. If you don’t have that background or experience, the game just makes no sense.

Needless to say, I think OD&D would make more sense to me today then it did when I was in high school.

The thing about OD&D is that it allowed the gamemaster a lot of flexibility to just wing things. Make it up on the fly. Interpret rules to suit the situation. They were guidelines, not intended to define every situation. They were really designed to allow more freeform roleplaying, but to add some structure for combat situations. When I read those descriptions of the game, I think of Risus. When I consider what D&D means to me, I realize I could probably run a pretty kick-ass game of D&D using Risus. What’s your cliche? Magic user? You have what number assigned to that? Sure, cast Bigby’s Clasping Hand or whatever, man, that sounds cool, roll some dice and I’ll tell you what happens next.

Among the plethora of OD&D reviews and notes I’ve read in the past week or so, one comment stood out.
I wish I could source it, but I can’t find it now. It said that AD&D was the logical progression of the rules of OD&D, and Basic D&D, the Moldvay stuff that’s currently being aped in Labyrinth Lord, was the logical progression of the style of play. That’s why the two products, while similar, evolved in such different directions to the point of incompatibility. While I’ve only skimmed Pathfinder and haven’t seen 4e at all, I’m wondering if that’s what’s happening now. Pathfinder is holding onto the legacy of the rules, while the press I’ve seen on 4e seems to indicate the style of play was more important for them to preserve and expand than the underlying engine.

What D&D is to me is a complicated question. It was certainly a “gateway drug” to roleplaying. I had a hell of a lot of fun with it and really can’t dis it with any seriousness, although every edition I played left me wanting for something. I’m more inclined to fall into the “style of play” category than the “rules” category. I’ve rarely played spellcasters because it required too much bookkeeping. I’ve been aching to run Brimstone and Gall so I can run a group of pirates through a lost temple in search of gold only to have them run up against rust monsters, cloakers, gelatinous cubes, and stupidly deadly traps. That’s the D&D-ness I’ll hold onto and take with me wherever… well, wherever it’s appropriate to take it. I need a system that will allow me to make that work, of course, but that “vibe” will make it D&D for me.

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There are a lot of arguments regarding a lot of business models used in the tabletop roleplaying hobby. I’ve seen grousing about books being printed in China, based on that nation’s human rights record. I’ve seen people get indignant about the hostage model, feeling it’s a gyp if they donate to get the game written and then everyone else gets it for free. Of course, there’s no small degree of controversy regarding retro-clones and whether they constitute IP theft. Yet what I’ve seen popping up on a few forums lately is a completely new one to me: not buying game stuff makes one the roleplaying industry equivalent of a terrorist.

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Love it? Hate it? There’s already a discussion going at The Dire Cafe, come add your opinions!

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The other night I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, not one of his best films by any stretch but not wholly without merit, either. In it I found the opening I was looking for to my demo adventure. What I needed was something that started the pirates out on a boat, but got them onto land rather quickly. I’d considered using sirens, luring sailors to their doom by getting them to navigate into a reef, but I wanted to hold off on supernatural elements until a bit later in the adventure. What I did want was immediate action, a big fights scene to kick things off but without having to resort to my standard in media res schtick.

In the movie, a group of smugglers blocks coastal beacons during storms so ships end up wrecking on the rocks and shore. Then the smugglers, waiting in large numbers on the shore, kill the injured and addled sailors and loot the ship at their leisure. So for the adventure we’ll start with the crew trying to get out of the storm and to a port they’ve never been to before. The lair of another pirate captain, nominally an ally. Except it’s a double-cross, an ambush. Then a big melee on the beach, with pounding rain and lightning flashes and deafening thunder. If the player characters are losing, they can run off into the jungle to hide; even if they win, they’re going to end up in the jungle. Yeah, because it’s an isolated cove surrounded by cliff walls and they can’t just walk along the beach.  Perfect. Nice start. Action and atmosphere.

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After looking at this thread at RPGNet I started thinking about screens I’ve used in the past, including screens I’ve constructed myself. I’ve thought about how I’ve used my laptop as a screen, and various GM’s aide software I’ve tried. What I really want someone to invent isn’t a better screen, but a GM Control Panel.

The obvious superiority of a laptop over a screen is that you don’t have to have everything displayed at once. You can toggle between documents and programs as needed. It saves space. It also gives you more “space”, because your reference material isn’t limited to how much screen real estate you have. A laptop also allow you to have some multimedia functionality; I personally like being able to queue up music on demand.

The last setup I used had an MP3 player loaded with the campaign theme song, some incidental music, and sound effect. I had NPC/monster information in a spreadsheet, along with the PC’s block stats. I had a tiddlywiki where I kept ongoing campaign notes. And I had assorted PDFs I was using for any given adventure. It worked, but I want all of that in on package. I want an app with tabs that will let me toggle between things in one window with a sidebar to launch the MP3s from. Something tells me that the closest I’m going to get is finding some FireFox extensions and doing it all on a browser. Open a wiki, an OpenOffice spreadsheet, and PDFs in different tabs and toggle between them. Put all the files for a given campaign in one folder, and open as needed. Maybe create an HTML index page in that directory and bookmark it, and launch stuff in new tabs from there.

Really, I’m just woolgathering in case you hadn’t guessed. What do you use for a gamemaster screen, with or without a laptop? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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