Gygax is gone.

After a smashing session last night with Team RTS, I was greeted this morning by the news that Gary Gygax has passed away.

This has made me completely rethink tonight's Team Tuesday game.

Paperclip Character Sheet Hack

I hit upon this little gem somewhere during my web trawlings, and brought it up to Team RTS, who seemed to appreciate its low-tech simplicity.

On the vertical margin of your character sheet, start at the bottom and make some short lines, all the way up.

During play, you can use a paper clip to keep track of your current hit point total by sliding it down the side of the page each time you take damage. Fighters and other classes with larger hit die should space these marks accordingly. You could even number every five ticks or so to get your current total at a glance.

The genius of such a simple idea reaffirms the relationship between geeks and gamers. It’s a brilliant idea, and as a staunch advocate of other luddite hacks like the Hipster PDA, I love things like this.

Grognards & Greybeards

In an effort to replenish my once ridiculous collection of rulebooks, I’ve been frequenting the role-playing section at our local used bookstore. The selection varies greatly, but some supplements/source books never seem to leave the shelves.

One tome that taunts me is the Rolemaster (2nd Edition) Character Law/Campaign Law. Its red spine sticks out like a sore thumb against all the mottled-marble-bound RMSS supplemental annuals. I used to have quite a substantial Rolemaster collection, but I think the only books I still own are a handful of the Companions and Creatures & Treasures. I’d really like to run a Rolemaster game again, especially now that the gaming group has become more accustomed to the concept of role-playing, but also because I always enjoyed the sheer face of its learning curve.

But in the event that I can’t get my Rolemaster Collection back up to speed (and I just noticed that the old 2nd edition has been revamped and re-launched on the ICE website as “Rolemaster Classic”), I can always try to track down Tunnels & Trolls and my Arduin Grimoires for some slightly more gonzo gaming. But for a short series of sessions called Grognards & Greybeards, I’d probably prefer something that combines a respectable age with a significant degree of rule-complexity.

A Character Generation Option

This is an option I stumbled across somewhere else (precisely where escapes me at the moment) but I'm making a note of it here for future use.

Instead of having each player generate their ability scores/point buy/etc individually, consider trying something like this:

Each player throws the standard 3d6 six times and records the results. The players are then able to compare these scores and mutually decide on which scores they will all share for character generation. The same six scores will be used by each player, but the players assign these ability scores according to their own desires. This would create a party that is quite balanced in terms of ability scores, suddenly removing the bragging rights associated with that statistically improbable lucky "18", and potentially saddling the players with at least one less-than-stellar score. Variation and flavor provided by character class requirements and player's fiat.

Six ability scores, arranged in different ways have the potential to create over seven hundred characters if the horrendously under-used math skills I'm channeling are to be believed.

Charismatic Spray

I tend to be bothered by Charisma as an Ability Score. Not just because I see players everywhere dump their lowest rolls into that last ability, but because certain things that D&D does with it just don't sit right with me.

Take for instance, the dreaded Dwarven Charisma Penalty. Yes we're balancing out a racial +2 Con boost, but I have a hard time imagining the Dwarven Race functioning as a Society under this stringent genetic disadvantage.

To combat this, I've borrowed from GURPS in a roundabout way, by using a relative Charisma. Sure, at character creation that Dwarf loses two points to his "dump" stat, and we use this new score for virtually all topside social interactions, but among Dwarvenkind, suddenly that effective Charisma is two points higher.

This House Rule is dangerously expandable though, and I have to exercise as much restraint as possible to prevent myself from drawing up extensive “Social Interaction” charts, penalizing Races according to racial and cultural flavor. Take for instance our Dwarf from above. We’ll give him a Cha of 8 (the effective Charisma among humans), among dwarves it’s an average 10; yet among elves/goblins/orcs it’s 6. Charisma becomes a nebulous score, on paper it’s based on the dominant paradigm of the most populous race (Humans in this case).

Mechanically, Charisma never really seemed to do enough in D&D, although Third Edition has helped a little by expanding Cha based skills and character classes that derive spells from the stat. But unless you're a Cleric (Turning Checks!), Sorcerer (Spells!), Bard (Perform!), or Paladin (Divine Grace!), Charisma is still almost guaranteed to be vying for a player's lowest ability score. Until higher levels that is, when Leadership and Followers start becoming appealing…

Poor DM's Almanac (part II)

Sadly, I was thinking ahead with my choice to run a 3rd edition campaign. I knew that I could hook at least two other casual LAN gamers with the “close to Neverwinter Nights” selling point. I had abandoned the Realms as a campaign setting long ago, and already my long slumbering DM-brain was beginning to bubble with heady Homebrew.

I swallowed my pining for the past, abandoned the days of THAC0 (and the associated low-means-good Armor Class), and repurchased the three Core Rulebooks. I longed for that fleeting “feel” of the olden D&D of yore, and resolved to make this campaign as flavorful as possible. Within days, I had my first three players assemble for a character generation session. With each of them, I discussed character options at length, begged for backstory, and sternly supervised the ability score rolls.

They were given the following choice for determining ability scores:

• 3d6, 10 times, remove 4
• 4d6 (drop lowest), 8 times, remove 2, but keep one low score.

The players jumped at the second option, which on the surface, does tend to produce higher-powered characters, but with the heroic harmatia of a low score dangling from their necks.

The outcome of this first session was three characters, two of which still play to this day:

Brunnor Coalbeard – A dwarf’s dwarf. The party Fighter. Played rather archetypically by Steve.
Wilhelm Arkam – The Magic-User/Archaeologist with a decidedly dark bent. Played by Woody.
Arun – A Shadow Elf (GAZ13, I dislike Drow, and prefer the other flavor) Assassin, with shades. Played by Dave.

A small start, but fairly well-rounded, with Muscle, Magic, and Miscreant. They would eventually need a Cleric. Already, curiosity was beginning to swell as we chatted at length about the characters around the kitchen table. Word travels fast in this circle of friends, and another former gamer was piqued and picked. Many others would soon follow suit, all with virtually no role-playing experience. I would have my work cut out for me.

Poor DM's Almanac (part I)

The recently resurrected current campaign has been quite a roller-coaster ride for DM and players alike. Its miraculous genesis took place over five years ago, and if memory serves and I can bring my racket up in time, the next few posts will concern how this campaign came about.

A large group of friends found themselves assembling at least bi-weekly to enjoy percussive bouts of quality LAN gaming. It began, as LAN games often do, with Starcraft and evolved steadily into Warcraft III. Each grew into masters of their chosen race in due time, and soon we began to grow tired of the repetitive nature of Real-Time Strategy. I slyly suggested that we try Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights (as we needed a game that had been ported, and was compatible with Cody’s Mac), and the cooperative nature of the game was a quick-sell. I was carefully steering them in the right direction.

I had been nurturing my love for pen-and-paper role-playing games in secret for several years at this point, and whenever a “Gaming Mood” struck, I consoled myself with sighs as I thumbed my way through my tattered copies of the Arduin Grimoires. I made excuses to separate on bookstore jaunts, quickly scanning the spines of the Role-Playing Section in secret, before returning to the more “respectable” Reference section. It was during this shameful double-life that I learned of Wizards acquisition of TSR, and after much internal debate, snapped up used copies of the three Core Rulebooks. I devoured them in a fit of nostalgia, and with lip curled in disgust at what had been done to the system I loved, I sold them back.

But the bug didn’t cease biting that easily. I found myself deflecting questions from the Girlfriend about the prodigious number of oversized tomes that I had tucked away below the bookshelves in a vain attempt to keep them out of mind.

“GURPS? Oh, those are just books for a game I used to play. Nothing special. You probably wouldn’t be interested in it. Although here’s one that’s about Discworld that you might like…”

Perhaps I was just ashamed of my past, but that fateful summer, as five of us were steadily slogging through the second expansion for Neverwinter Nights and beginning to grow increasingly bored with its hack-and-slash repetitiveness, something inside me snapped.

I knew from careful conversation coaxing that at least a few of the guys present had been former gamers when they were much younger, so after quietly retreating home to retrieve my big box of plastic polyhedrons, I began muttering the incantation for summon soapbox.

I’m assured by those present during this speech, that the rattling of die and the fervor with which I evangelized pen-and-paper’s superiority to scripted computer games must have been quite a sight. Somehow, with my loud litanies and conviction, I convinced three of the former-players present to participate in a game.

But what game? Oh there were so many. It had been years since my first long-running campaign transitioned from Moldvay Basic to the shiny Rules Cyclopedia with all the Gazetteers. I was only told that it had to be Dungeons & Dragons, because it was the only system they were willing to play. It was to be a short one-off game or so, probably more to silence my rants and for kitsch value than anything else. A short one-off is all I needed though. I wracked my brain for a system.

My internal debate was louder than a herd of 1st level adventurers stumbling through the caves of Quasqueton. Neverwinter Nights used a heavily hobbled version of the shiny new d20 system, full of feats and skills that only focused on the hack-n-slash nature of the game. But how I loathed what I had read in those Core Rulebooks years before. Mystara forever. I knew there was no way I could sell them the concept of Demi-humans as a Character Class. AD&D was also an option, but I had only a ratty PH and DMG left in my old collection.