Meditation on a Visit to a Game Store

Last Sunday I stopped at Game Empire in Pasadena.

First, let me say that Game Empire is what other gaming stores should aspire to be. The retail space is well-stocked but not unnecessarily cluttered. They have current games and an out-of-print section. There are board games - including a wall of games recommended on Board Game Geek - and roleplaying games and puzzles and dice. There are miniatures and paints. The vast play area has miniatures terrain for use by visiting gamers. The staff member was helpful and knowledgeable. It's a beautiful store.

But as I thumbed through books and studied boxes, I was struck by something I hadn't really noticed so obviously before: trade dress is more important than content.

I looked at Bruges, and was struck by how much it reminded me of a dozen other resource management and strategy games, such as Doge, which I already own. Change the tokens, the cards, and the nominal setting and Bruges could be set in Antwerp or a dozen other cities as easily as Doge could be set in Livorno or Amsterdam or anyplace else with canals. Most of the games weren't about anything but rules of incredible sameness, and the trade dress of pirates and merchanters or Renaissance traders or whatever existed solely as window dressing.

On top of a book case full of Warhammer 40K books sat a copy of Avalon Hill's Starship Troopers, still in the shrink wrap - and only twenty-five bucks?! that's crazy cheap! All of the minis and army books and terrain and the meticulous and relentless art direction, just to offer the same bughunts as the board-game-in-a-box on top of the bookcase. In the future, there is only trade dress once again.

I flipped through FATE Core System. Talk about a game I really wanted to like but could never quite embrace. The core book reminded me why. Why are 'basic' roleplaying games so bloody involved? I've been playing for the better part of more than thirty-five years now, and if I'd had to read a rule book that big to start, I'd never've given up wargames. That point was reinforced when I got to our game later that day, and I pulled out my printed-out .pdfs for Flashing Blades - the core rules, the piracy supplement, and three adventures, all of which fit together in a term paper report cover. Our hobby is dominated by designers writing for existing gamers, and if this is supposed to attract new gamers, there's some serious delusion going on.

In the end, I bought some beautiful dice - two twenty-siders, two six-siders - the only products in that terrific store for which I had an actual use.

Technical Difficulties

Another frickin' meta post . . .

About a week and a half ago I lost a digest-sized Mead notebook in which I keep gaming-related notes before they're transferred either to my wiki or my blog. In it were detailed outlines for several posts, including the next three posts in the endgame series. If I seem to be slacking off, it's because I'm in the process of reconstructing what was lost.

Needless to say, it's damn frustrating.

Despite embracing technology in my gaming habits, I'm still very much a step behind in personal gadgetry. In a world of smartphones and tablets, I'm just upgraded this spring to a phone with a QWERTY keyboard, the 'C-student' phone which replaced my antique 'short bus' flip-phone. My Posse Box-sized laptop is about six or seven years old; as a friend pointed out recently, her phone has more memory and faster processing than the computer on which I do most of my gaming-related computing.

This isn't a Luddite thing. I'm a late adopter simply because I don't see the point in upgrading something that works well enough until I reach the point where it doesn't work well enough anymore, which means, for example, until my laptop finally goes tits up, a tablet is out of the question. I know there are newer, faster, more robust options out there, and eventually I'll choose one, but when I need it, not simply because it's available.

As far as gaming stuff goes, I do most of my actual composition online, but for practical reasons I still use paper notebooks for brainstorming. Very often I'll sketch out quick diagrams, and that's slower process for me on a computer, so I'm better able to capitalise on moments of inspiration with a pencil in my hand.

But paper notebooks don't auto-backup, and so here we are.

Barring any additional proto-senility mental lapses, I should resume a more substantive posting schedule next week, including the next two in the endgame series, covering building a clientele and establishing a stronghold.

Grumbler

I am a grognard.

Like many introduced to roleplaying games in the mid- to late Seventies, I was a wargamer first. I started with board-and-chit games - specifically Avalon Hill's 'Bookcase Games,' starting with Tobruk, and later Third Reich, Squad Leader, Panzer Blitz/Leader, and my favorite to this day, Kingmaker, along with several others - then added metal minis, first learning the 15mm Napoleonics house rules used at my local gaming shop, encased in plastic covers in three-ring binders chained the sandtable in the back of the shop.

Roleplaying games slowly consumed more of my free time; my Starfleet Wars Terran squadron was given away around my sophmore year of high school after I started playing Traveller in 1979, for example. The exception was The Sword and the Flame, which I continued to play through high school, publishing a few issues of a 'zine my senior year for TSatF campaigns on the North-West Frontier; rather than falling by the wayside, my TSatF scenarios spun off a couple of 'Great Game' adventures using Boot Hill, with my 25mm Minifigs Punjab Irregulars serving double-duty with some 1:72 plastic Italeri or Atlantic Pathans.

Mashing up wargames and roleplaying games was pretty common, sometimes by design. GDW specifically integrated Traveller with Mayday, Snapshot, and Striker, of course, and I used the rules from TSR's Divine Right for resolving the clash of fantasy armies in my AD&D campaign.

Much has been written about the wargaming roots of roleplaying games. Personally I'm most often reminded of this history when discussions turn to combat in rpgs. After twelve years away from the hobby, I returned with 3e D&D, and I found myself a bit bumfuzzled by gamers who gushed about how 'tactical' 3e was, with its rules for flanking and attacks of opportunity and so forth.

I was puzzled by this for a couple of reasons. First, many, if not most, of the 'tactical' rules that 3e gamers prattled on about had their origins in AD&D. Second, and more bizarrely from my perspective, so much of what they talked about seemed to have more to do with Magic: The Gathering deck building and little if anything to do with tactics as I understand the word.

Coming into the hobby as a wargamer, I found the combat rules in games like AD&D to be simple and intuitive. Frex, nowhere does AD&D spell out the advantage of placing a rank of pikemen ahead of two ranks of heavy crossbowmen, and from my perspective it wasn't necessary for the rules to do so - the pikemen receive a to-hit and damage bonus for setting their pikes against a charge, and the ranks of crossbowmen alternate their fire, as expected from their 1/2 rate of fire, to maintain a steady barrage of bolts. The rules reward tactical thinking, provided you understand the tactics the rules are designed to reward.

But many gamers who came into the hobby after me were not wargamers. The implicit tactics of the rules were lost on them. Furthermore many learned the game through oral tradition rather than reading the rules in the first place, adding a further remove from the wargaming origins. I never realized until I started sharing experiences with other gamers on bulletin boards how exceptional my high school gaming group was: four of us rotated through the referee's chair, and we each poured through rulebooks like the DMG or Mayday, hunting for obscure rules to spring on one another during our turns behind the screen. The net effect was to give us an intimate familiarity with the rules - what the current jargon calls 'game mastery' - that many of our peers apparently never acquired.

To gamers who didn't grok the implied tactics, combat in early roleplaying games could seem sterile, as I learned from many fans of 3e on my return to gaming. But I noticed that after awhile, the 'tactics' of many roleplaying games came to resemble ordering from a Chinese menu, matching class ability from column A against supernatural ability from column B to get the free bowl of egg drop soup or a side of spring rolls. The real-world tactics that wargames attempt to model was increasingly replaced with dissociated mechanics which primarily reward game rules-knowledge.

Experience with wargames contributed to the differences between characters as well. One of the complaints leveled against early editions of the D&D, frex, is that there is nothing to distinguish two fighters of the same level, yet I never found this to be the case because different players chose to emphasize different tactics. Some players wanted their characters to fight like heavy infantry battling toe-to-toe to break the enemy's line, while others wanted theirs to perform more like skirmishers harassing and wearing down the enemy, and they would equip and play their characters accordingly, so even if they were more-or-less identical mechanically, their tactics and peformance in combat varied consistently during actual play.

Even now if you scratch my roleplayer surface you'll find the wargamer gleaming dully underneath. I can't play a game with automatic weapons without adding in rules for suppressing fire, and the fact that I frequently have to do so is a ridiculously common oversight on the part of game designers - I'm looking at you, d20 Modern. One of the reasons I chose Flashing Blades for my current campaign is that it has rules for throwing sand in an opponent's face and kicking him in the junk as well as trying to stick a rapier in his eye, and not Enhanced Mobility and Elaborate Parry. And I still like to mash up wargames and roleplaying games, like AK-47 Republic with Top Secret and Field of Glory with Flashing Blades - I need to set aside some portion of my disposable income toward building 2mm armies for FoG.

Now you kids get off my lawn, or I'll turn the hose on ya.

Bona Fides

In the fall of 1977, my best friend introduced me to a new game called Dungeons and Dragons. It came in a blue box with a picture of a red dragon on a mound of treasure and two adventurers, a warrior in armor with a bow and a wizard in a pointy hat waving a wand. I was a pretty avid wargamer - board-and-chit, particularly Kingmaker and Third Reich, and metal minis on the sandtable at a local hobby shop - and model builder for a number of years, but this was something new. Instead of a detached commander moving units across a game board on our dining table, I was a fighting man, exploring a labyrinth with a sword and a shield and an empty backpack waiting to be filled with gold and jewels, perhaps from that very same dragon's hoard I saw on the box.

And that's how my fascination with roleplaying games began.

At the time I started, Dr. Holmes' basic set and the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual were TSR's flagship products. The brown box was still around, and we used the supplements as well as related books like The Arduin Grimoire. We were still months away from the release of the AD&D Players Handbook and about a year-and-a-half from the Dungeon Masters Guide. In the realm of fantasy roleplaying games, D&D's competitors were Tunnels and Trolls and Chivalry and Sorcery, but the early hobby was already expanding beyond the fantastic realm to science fiction with Metamorphosis Alpha and Traveller, with its striking black box and the plaintive mayday of the Free Trader Beowulf. In the corners of the hobby were a variety of smaller titles, one of which - Bunnies and Burrows, based on Richard Adams' brilliant novel, Watership Down - I would play often in those early years.

And that was pretty much that. Gamma World and RuneQuest wouldn't appear until the following year. Boot Hill was a tabletop miniatures game; it wouldn't be repackaged as a roleplaying game for another two years.  Melee was a skirmish game as well; Wizards was about six months off, and The Fantasy Trip nearly three years away, along with Bushido, Rolemaster, Top Secret, Space Opera, and a host of others.

En Garde! had been around for a year or two when I started playing and buying tabletop roleplaying games. I remember thumbing through it at The War Club, a hobby store in La Cañada near where I grew up in the foothills of southern California. I was intrigued by the idea of roleplaying a swashbuckling swordsman in the vein of d'Artagnan, but part of the appeal of roleplaying games for me was miniature models, and while The War Club stocked Napoleonics and medieval knights and dragons and monsters and starships and spacemen, I couldn't find a single plumed cavalier on the glass shelves in their display cases, so the slim, digest-sized En Garde! went back on the rack.

Fantasy roleplaying games were quickly eclipsed for me by other genres. Boot Hill, Top Secret, and especially Traveller were my favorites, followed in the early Eighties by Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes, Chill, and Flashing Blades. Like everyone else, I played AD&D because, well, everyone played AD&D, but what I enjoyed most was trading on the Spinward Main, or raiding the floating island of Dr. No, or prowling the darkened streets of Mad Mesa. I was never a big fantasy literature fan - through my parents I was introduced to science fiction, particularly Robert Heinlein, and from prowling the sci fi section in our local bookstore I read Professor Tolkien's works, some story collections by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, and Gordon Dickson's The Dragon and the George. A family friend introduced me to Edgar Rice Burroughs by giving me a half-dozen of his first edition copies of Tanar of Pellucidar and John Carter of Mars novels. Through my dad I picked up an interest in men's adventure - Talbot Mundy, H. Rider Haggard, and Clive Cussler - and Westerns - Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey. When I was about six or seven, I bought a copy of Treasure Island at a garage sale for a nickel, which turned me on to Robert Louis Stevenson, and in sixth grade I did a book report on The Three Musketeers, from an abridged edition released with the classic Richard Lester movies. Fantasy doesn't resonate with me in the same way as science fiction and historical fiction, and my taste in roleplaying games reflects this.

Toward the end of the Eighties I played MegaTraveller, Marvel Super Heroes, and a little Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, but by 1989 I was done with roleplaying games. Work and school and the woman who would become my wife took up most of my time, but the truth is, I simply lost interest. Most of my original gaming books - many of them first editions - were destroyed in a flood a few years later. If I could have back a moment in time, it would've been moving my boxes of game books into storage in my parents' loft.

For twelve years I rarely gave tabletop roleplaying games a thought - I missed all of 2e AD&D, all of T:NE, all of World of Darkness - until I moved to Fullerton and (re-)discovered The Game Castle. In 2001 I picked up 3e D&D and started playing again, with a group at Cal State Fullerton. As before, I played D&D because, well, everyone played D&D, but the release of d20 Modern and Mutants and Masterminds opened up opportunities for me to move into the genres I really wanted to play. Around 2005 I had the wild idea of releasing a supplement of stock d20 Modern non-player characters, inspired by 1001 Characters for Traveller. I found a copy of 1001 Characters on eBay, to use as a reference, and flipping through the pages I was struck by how simple and efficient character stat blocks are in Traveller compared to d20 games. It was only a week or two later that I ordered the reprint books from Far Future, and my personal 'old school renaissance' was under way.

In 2008 I picked up an anthology of Robert E. Howard's 'Oriental' stories, historical fiction set in the Near East. One of the stories, "The Shadow of the Vulture," set at the siege of Vienna in 1529, inspired me to track down the Fantasy Games Unlimited cape-and-sword roleplaying game, Flashing Blades, and since 2010 I've been running a campaign set in 1625 France.

But enough about me.