My Online LL Group is a Treasure

Members of my "home" Labyrinth Lord group in fall 2010. 

I recently wrote about experiencing DM burnout and consequently placing both my Labryinth Lord groups on hiatus. In that post I noted that

gaming over the internet, for me, is a pale shadow of gaming live, in person, at a table. No matter how good the technology gets there is, for me, a disconnect or a missing piece that rears its head in various ways online: less spontaneous fun chatter and humor takes place, some details get missed or talked over or need to be repeated, to somewhat lessened effect. The whole thing feels like a giant, three-dimensional, full-sensory experience being strained through a small, thin, partial, two-dimensional medium.

In that same post I claimed that gaming over Skype has been a "disappointment" to me. That is indeed how I felt at the time. Yet my DM burnout was particularly intense then. I was feeling grumpy about the slow winding down of my local public game, which dwindled to two regular players late last year, then an unsustainable one this spring.

No, that earlier statement should be read more as venting than as analysis or plan. It reflected my emotional state and was not meant to condemn the concept of RPG'ing via Skype in general. Most importantly, it was never intended to impugn the members of my "home" gaming group or to devalue the wonderful gaming experiences I have shared with them in the years since this campaign began in 2010.

I am quite lucky to have such a wonderful group of gamers and if Skype is the means by which we must reach each other, so be it. We are lucky to be able to keep this thing going in such a relatively simple and straightforward way.

Our particular group is especially fortunate to include players with a wide array of real-world RPG'ing experience. We have one neophyte player, a couple three with some limited prior D&D experience, and three of us who have been playing RPGs (with varying degrees of consistency) since the 1980s.*

Furthermore, the members of this group are gaming associates and also friends. I went to graduate school with most of them, played in a band with another, have edited essay collections with one guy, co-authored scholarly articles with another, and am generally invested in all or their lives outside of RPG'ing.

Given that, it is remarkable and exciting that everybody in this unique assortment of folks is willing to make time to play Labyrinth Lord once every four to six weeks or so, despite being of adult age with families, busy careers, etc.

Most importantly, we all generally get along, in-game and out. There is a supportive, light-hearted, laughter-inducing atmosphere during our sessions. This harmonious vibe shines through, for example, in Yor's player's supportive, appreciative comment on my last session report post: "Thanks for putting these together Carter." It is, of course, my pleasure.

I still have a few minor qualms with the gaming-via-Skype format, but those aren't likely to disappear, barring major, Star Trekkian advances in technology. Probably not even then. Live at the table will always be best. But I have a good thing going here. Maybe I can re-tap into some of the feelings I had earlier on, when I wrote this celebratory post about keeping our campaign group together over Skype: "Skype is our friend!"

In any case, my "home" Labyrinth Lord group is something very special that I will be sure to nurture, appreciate, and treasure. Thanks friends!

Some of the same folks one year later, fall 2011. 

--

* One of our experienced participants is Carl Nash, who introduced me to the OSR via Mutant Future and who is still quite active in the OSR blogosphere. Check out Carl's blog and be sure to purchase his amazing adventure locale, The Fungus Forest, available for "pay what you want" here on RPGNow.

Cyborg Gaming and Witch Attack!

These are exciting times for my Labyrinth Lord group.  We are about to play our first session with a player not physically present: Hazel's player will be joining us via Skype (from out of state) for tomorrow evening's session.  Soon we will use the same technology to connect me to the group as well, for at the end of this week I move from Eugene, Oregon to Brockport, New York. I will become a virtual DM!  Shades of Brian O'Blivion!

In addition to these cyborgian developments, we are also looking at some rich story development in the next few sessions, as a couple of the PCs' haunted pasts and past deeds are going to start to catch up with them.  Heh, heh, heh. . . .

Another thing I am excited about is a SECRET PROJECT that my friend Carl is working on at present.  I am not at liberty to say much specifically about it, but Carl has let me read a Beta version of the supplement-in-progress, and WOW, it sure is going to be useful to me as a DM.  What I can tell you is that the supplement he is writing -- intended to be compatible with Mutant Future and Labyrinth Lord -- functions (among other things) as a kind of fast NPC generator, a shorthand way of quickly adding a new NPC or even a whole new class of NPC to a game, because it is a system based around Mutant Future-like special abilities (what MF calls "mutations" and what I believe Carl is calling "quirks") without regard for traditional LL classes.

For example, one of the "quirks" Carl has created centers upon the ability to throw curses and hexes at people, and of course this instantly suggests a Witch type character.  I FUCKING LOVE witches, and have never felt truly satisfied with their quasi-treatment as "witch doctors" in the DMG (as a kind of sub-par cleric, p. 40) nor in their iteration as a full-blown NPC class in various issues of Dragon Magazine (#5, #20, #43, and #114).  This is no fault of those articles, but rather a function of my own laziness: I am not big on rules-intensive preparation (nor rules-intensive gaming for that matter) so I rarely generate complete stats for any but the most central NPC's in my campaigns.  Therefore I welcome a system that allows me to plunk a witch into the game without having to stat up a full-blown NPC.  Rock and roll Carl, and look out all you Labyrinth Lordlings in my campaign!

Why "Game Balance" Sucks

Note: what follows is a report on last night's Mutant Future session from a player's perspective (mine). For the Mutant Lord's POV plus lots of fascinating background information, see Carl's blog.

Last night was Mutant Future night, and we had a somewhat thinner turnout than usual -- just three players plus our Mutant Lord.  I won't go into extreme detail about what we accomplished or did not accomplish -- I'll leave that to Carl -- but I want to reflect briefly on the phenomenon of real-world occurrences having a deep impact upon what unfolds in the game.

The party had returned to our "home base" town of Skinny Butt and were trying to establish an inroad to disrupting the balance of power between a few local groups: two warring factions of militaristic apes (recently escaped from Carl's megadungeon complex), and some peace-loving mutant badgers (called badders) whom my character Dataan is particularly friendly with (since we all worship Glargorion).  Since the PC party had fewer players than usual, and none of our usual mind-readers / empath characters showed up, we were in a situation where diplomacy was not going to be as effective for us as usual, yet we felt a need to intervene and stop the warlike primates from overrunning the badder's town.  So we snuck into the invaders' underground tunnel and played a commando-style session, sabotaging their vehicles, attacking them from heavy cover, and sending confusing messages over their comm-link system (a favorite activity of Dataan's).  By the end of the session, we had killed maybe four warangutans and confused a good many others, and one of our three party members was unconscious and very near death.  My synthetic android character Dataan never even entered the fray directly, but rather spied, stole a jeep, and shot some machine-guns using a remote-controlled spider-bot.  We did not have the strength in numbers we needed to mount a frontal assault on these guys --  an action I believe we may need to take next session, in order to press our advantage now that we have them confused and in retreat.  Hopefully more of our group members will be available to play next week.

But the point is, in a game where "balance" and "fairness" are valued, this situation might have seemed unjust, unacceptable, and possibly paralyzing to a party with a gamist agenda.  There was no way for us to defeat these well-armed warangutans who decisively outnumbered and outgunned us (not to mention their Terminator-esque robot friend).  But we made do with what we had, and even given our somewhat limited resources and my own character's physical cowardice, we actually wreaked some decent havoc there for several rounds, and managed to temporarily divert the bad guys from their immediate goal, i.e., blasting their way into the sub-levels of the fortress of Dataan's former masters, the Ooh-Oh Monks.  It was a deeply satisfying session, in large part because since we were under-staffed (i.e., three or four of our usual players could not show up for the session) we had to THINK and STRATEGIZE and INVENT ways to tackle our in-game challenges that much more intensely.  We had to develop an alternative strategy based upon our circumstances.  This kind of inventive response to "unfair" or uncontrollable factors is part of what sets the old-school RPG'ing experience apart for me, and I always welcome chances to play sessions where the risk factor is high (three players vs. multiple warangutan squads), much is at stake (the Ooh-Oh Monks are about to get reamed), and we have to use our party resouces wisely in order to accomplish anything and/or evade death (our commando-style approach to the session).

THANKS again to Mutant Lord Carl and my fellow players Danny and James for a killer session!

The Fun of Oracular Dice

I expect that MUTANT LORD CARL will probably cover this too (he has promised to!) but I wanted to briefly mention what a great time I had tonight at the regular Friday Mutant Future game session, particularly because we seemed to have some pretty oracular dice tonight.  There were some well-timed good rolls by myself and the party, but just as many flubbed ones, by party and Mutant Lord alike, that really appropriately fit the scenarios we were in.  Carl will fill in details on the Mutagenic Substance blog, but as usual, GROGNARDIA offers some good thoughts on the power and pleasures of randomness, a key element of old-school games that seems to have been largely drummed out of newer "point-buy" based and "balanced" rules systems.  Here is a key quote on why true randomness, as represented by die rolling, is FUN:

"There's something powerfully primal about tossing dice and waiting to see the numbers they reveal.  [. . .]  [The] real heart of this particular matter [is] the embrace of events beyond your control as an integral part of the gaming experience. This includes players and referees alike, it should be noted."

Auto-Ethnography of a RPG'er

I have been a role-playing gamer since 1981 or ‘82 when I got my first "Dungeons and Dragons" boxed set as a fifth grader. That was the very popular 1977 Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set with the blue tinted cover depicting a magic-user and a fighter confronting a red dragon—I had one of the later (post-1979) printings that included module B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. As wikipedia.org says of that Basic D&D rules set, it “focused on only the first three levels of play, and was intended as a bridge between the original D&D and the AD&D rules rather than a simple introductory version of the game. Although this Basic Set was not compatible with AD&D, players were expected to continue play beyond third level by moving to the AD&D version, [. . .] even though the basic game included many rules and concepts which contradicted comparable ones in the advanced game.” As this passage suggests, it would not be long before I would be exposed to Advanced D&D.

Indeed, after playing Basic D&D for six months or so, in the sixth grade I met friends who were already playing AD&D, so due to their influence and at the aforementioned urging of the Basic D&D rules manual itself, I began to play AD&D almost exclusively and bought my own copies of the three core hardcover rulebooks. Interestingly, that same sixth-grade year, a friend introduced me to Ken St. Andre’s Tunnels and Trolls: a few of us would reserve a conference room in our elementary school library and play T&T at lunch and recess. My interest in T&T did not last long – I was still pretty big into AD&D then – but T&T's less-is-more, “rules-light” ethos (not to mention its sense of humor, something I enjoy a lot in my RPGs) would come back with dramatically increased appeal and impact for me within a few years.

Sometime around the time AD&D 2e came out in 1989, I realized there was no way I was going to keep up with the world of published AD&D products, not in a whole new edition anyway. I was still a high school / college kid with very little money, so buying a whole new set of hardcover rulebooks felt out of reach to me. Plus, I had no real interest in updating or changing the rules I was playing by. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I thought, and so my friends and I continued to play by the first-edition rules of AD&D, for awhile. . .

Throughout late high school and college, I started drifting away from AD&D altogether, instead playing other RPGs in different genres: Traveller, Gamma World, Marvel Super Heroes, Paranoia, and Shadowrun, to name a few. I also got pretty heavily into Steve Jackson’s Car Wars for a few years in there. Finally, unable to find a game that I wanted to stick with long-term, I co-designed a homegrown fantasy RPG called “Crimson Blades of Ara” (hereafter CBOA) with a friend, David Miller. Dave and I worked on CBOA starting in summer 1988, when we were on a camping trip together discussing all the things that disgruntled us about AD&D and other RPG rule systems currently on the market. We thought we could design our own game with a skill-based rule system and a well-thought-out campaign setting (called Ara) that would be much more fun for us to play with our friends than any game we could buy. So we designed CBOA and played it pretty much exclusively from about 1990 through 1998.

Then I stopped playing RPGs altogether from roughly 1998 until 2004, mainly because I moved around and led a nomadic lifestyle during those years that made it difficult to find a group with whom to play RPGs. After moving to Eugene, Oregon in 2002, I found and joined a group in 2004 that played D&D 3.5e. I have had some great times playing with that group, and it has been fun to return to my roots in D&D, but I admit that the 3.5e rules feel awfully cumbersome to me: for example, I still don’t really grok why there are both skills and feats in the game. I don’t say this because I require an explanation; it is more of a rhetorical statement meant to convey that at a certain core level I feel alienated by the WotC take on D&D, since it does not evoke or emulate the beloved TSR versions of AD&D and Basic D&D that I remember and love so well from the 80’s.

In fact, in light of recent events — i.e., my discovery of the “old-school” gaming community — it is clear to me that the answer had always been right there in front of me, provided by TSR in that 1977 boxed Basic D&D set: my flight from AD&D, and my participation in co-writing a homegrown rules system, were all inspired by a need to escape cumbersome rules, to instead play within a system that was “rules-light” and allowed for the most player-referee flexibility. Obviously, once my friend Carl turned me on to Mutant Future a few months ago, I realized that Old-School Gaming is for me! Now I will begin development of my own OD&D campaign using the Labyrinth Lord rules. My campaign will take place in the setting my friend and I developed for our homegrown game: The Lands of Ara. I now commence the work of converting that campaign setting and its denizens into OD&D terms; this blog is where I will share the fruits of my labors!

Hello, my name is. . .

This blog, still under construction, will be my forum for discussing my recent triumphant return to "old-school" role-playing gaming. I have been a player in a GREAT Mutant Future campaign (which has its own blog) for a few months and am now completely hooked on retro-clone old-school gaming! I will use this blog to discuss the reasons for my return to classic gaming, and to outline a campaign setting, THE LANDS OF ARA, that I will be using to referee my own Labyrinth Lord campaign in the near future. Stay tuned!