Being Descriptive

Ripper X of "Advanced Gaming & Theory" has a nice, long article on evocative descriptions in RPGs. It's the sort of thing that used to show up every two or three years in Dragon magazine, and while most of it will be old hat to many of you, it's always nice to have a refresher on using all five senses when describing what the PCs are experiencing. (Via Musings of the Chatty DM.)

Modern-day Sorcery

What does "magic" and sorcery look like in the Real World(tm)? I imagine its always looked something like this (link not safe for work).

Maybe frequent lynchings are why wizards don't rule the world?

Fight On! #1 Review

It's more a run-down of the table-of-contents, but James Maliszewski has posted a review of the inaugural issue of the OD&D gaming magazine, "Fight On!". It's chock-full of familiar names to RPG blogging and commenting: in addition to Mr. Maliszewski, there's Jeff Rients, Calithena, and Andrew Reyes.

Great Themes in Geeky History

From Jeff's Gameblog: An Incomplete Pictorial History of Totally Rad Throwing Blade Thingies.

GSL vs. the Genie

I suspected that WotC wanted to stuff the OGL genie back in the bottle, but I didn't think they were this desperate. It appears that the new GSL for 4th edition D&D comes with a clause that prohibits companies who are using the GSL from also using the OGL in any product they currently sell. If that's correct, and I'm not entirely certain it is, it would mean Paizo would have to completely abandon the Pathfinder RPG if they ever want to publish 4th edition products. It would mean Green Ronin must completely shut down Mutants & Masterminds and True20 if they ever want to publish a 4e version of Freeport.

This, I imagine, is gonna fly like a lead brick. It means companies already invested in 3rd edition will adopt a wait-and-see attitude toward 4th edition. You might see third-party support for 4th edition by Christmas '08, but unless WotC can't keep the game on the shelves, you probably won't see much of anything before GenCon '09.

Let me rephrase that: you won't see much from established companies with a track-record. New companies might sprout like dandelions. WotC had better hope so, anyway, because there's no way Paizo or Green Ronin are going to support 4e now. Nor is support likely from Wolfgang Bauer's Open Design project or Kobold Quarterly. There's a chance it means no support from Nicolas Logue's Sinister Adventures, though admittedly they don't have as much invested in 3e and might be willing to just abandon it if 4e looks strong.

But 4e has got to look strong. Otherwise, they'll have a ton of amateur content rolling in, but nothing from the designers who gave so much support for 3rd edition. If 4e stumbles, there won't be support from outside companies to help buoy it up. In fact, we're likely to once again see a glut of bad material from third-party publishers since most of the talent is so heavily invested in 3rd edition at this time.

I honestly can't understand the thinking here. If they were worried about competition against 4e from third party publishers, well, now they've guaranteed it. This will only entrench companies like Paizo and Green Ronin in their OGL products. It will make shifting over to 4e much harder for Mongoose, Wolfgang Bauer, and Sinister Adventures. If they'd invited everyone to straddle the fence, they might have seen some support for 4e at launch. Now, these companies will be invested in competing product, and will have even less incentive to convert their products and their customers over to 4th edition. It just boggles my mind.

UPDATE: Here's the post from Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games that seems to clarify the issue. Note, however, that even Mr. Peterson hasn't seen the GSL, and isn't entirely certain he's got the true and lively word. I predict a long weekend of teeth-gnashing and garment-rending.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Nicolas "Sinister Adventures" Logue weighs in:

I know I'm just a new kid on the block, and don't count for much just yet, but this provision definitely saddens me as a publisher.

I developed Sinister Adventures to put all the BS of edition in the back seat and offer quality adventures for ALL systems (3.5, True 20, C&C, Pathfinder RPG, and yes...4E). Now I find that if I want to support one of these, I can't support the others. It definitely means I won't be supporting 4E in the near future as a lot of my customers have expressed how happy they are about the multi-system approach I'm using. Bummer...I dig on a lot of what 4E offers, and I won't be able to bring it to my adventures under the All or Nothing Ultimatum GSL.

Nick

P.S. It should be expressed: I'm not pissed at Wizards, just bummed about this. Hopefully I'll get to freelance for them again sometime soon now that the GSL is figured out.

WHAT, NO PRAMAS UPDATE? Don't be silly; of course there's a Pramas update! Unfortunately, he can neither confirm nor deny, and is hoping to find out if this is or isn't correct soon. However, since it's Saturday, it's likely nobody will hear anything definitive before Monday.

AN UPDATE TO REPORT ON THE IMPENDING LACK OF UPDATES: Scott Rouse of WotC says:

Ladies and Gents,

I am not going to say anything else until I have the final license in my hot little hands.

I am reading the thread, absorbing all the opinions, rants, speculations, thoughts, and musings. I have chimed in on a couple posts but beyond that, sitting here on Saturday morning, with out the license in front of me, I am quickly skating into the realm of speculation and I don't not want to unnecessarily add gas to the fire that may or may not be there. Until I see the final language in the licenses I am going avoid claiming that the language will say x or y...

I am at GAMA next week. On Thursday I am back in the office and on Friday I hope to have the license in my hand. Many of us will spend a week or so combing over it, again and again, making sure we are totally happy with it, only then will we send it out to folks like Clark, Chris, Erik, Russ, and the other publishers we are talking with.

So nothing appears to be quite final yet, though they think they're in their final review of the license. More news to come, but probably not until the week following next. Let the mad speculatin' commence! ;)

WotC Talks GSL

At long last, some details finally emerge:

Wizards of the Coast is pleased to announce that third-party publishers will be allowed to publish products compatible with the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition game system under the new Dungeons & Dragons 4E Game System License (D&D 4E GSL). This royalty-free license will replace the former d20 System Trademark License (STL), and will have a System Reference Document (SRD) available for referencing permissible content.

The D&D 4E GSL will allow third-party publishers to create roleplaying game products in fantasy settings with the D&D 4th Edition rules, and publishers who register with WotC will be granted the right to use a version of the D&D logo that denotes the product as compatible with the D&D 4th Edition Roleplaying Game, in accordance with WotC’s terms and conditions. The effective start date for sales of D&D 4E GSL publications will be October 1, 2008.

The license associated SRD will be available on June 6, 2008, at no cost. A small group of publishers received advanced notice and will receive these documents prior to June 6, at no cost, in order to prepare for publication of compatible materials by the effective start date. If you haven’t already been contacted by WotC, you will be able to access the documents on the Wizards website beginning on June 6, 2008.

Wizards is also working on the details of a second royalty-free license, the d20 Game System License (d20 GSL). This license will allow third-party publishers to create roleplaying game products in non-fantasy settings with the 4E rules. The exact details for the d20 GSL will be released as they become available.

So what have we got here? First, the $5,000 dollar fee for early adopters is gone, probably because a lot of the time that money was supposed to buy you has vanished. It also looks like it's very easy to slap an honest-to-God D&D logo on your book if it's a fantasy game supplement. No details yet on just what, exactly, the rules on that will be, but I'd be surprised if there's not some sort of "decency" requirements that make something like "The Book of Erotic Fantasy" unlikely.

It'll be interesting to see how WotC defines "fantasy". Certainly, Blue Rose and Conan are too fantasy to allow under the new license. But what about True20? Or Shadowrun? Wrangling over whether or not Testament is fantasy isn't likely, but the arguments would be fun to read.

It'll be interesting to see how much this changes things. This looks like a fairly flexible license so far, though we don't have all the details yet. Still, it'll be interesting to see if any of the publishers who'd been planning to stick with the OGL swing over to 4e now that this is in place.

UPDATE: James Maliszewski is skeptical:

So, basically, lots of people are getting excited about ... nothing. We must remember that WotC has already said that GSL will be released "soon" on several occasions, stretching all the way back to last Fall. Each time they failed to deliver anything and each time they returned to the scene they said something different than what they had said previously.

ANOTHER UPDATE: EN World reports that they were among those who received the mentioned email from WotC that reported this earlier. The email includes a Q&A, however, since they are bound by NDA, they are not able to publish it at this time.

Outsider Gets Page 51!

After a long hiatus, the Outsider webcomic is back with page 51. The last panel promises something gorgeous for page 52.

Is You is, or is You ain’t, my 4e Baby?

If you go here, you’ll find info on devils in 4^th edition D&D. As the succubus is not exactly known for her loyalty, it’s hardly a surprise that she’s gone over to the other side, having abandoned the demons and joined Hell’s Team. Actually, the 4e designers have said they wanted to clean up the devil/demon divide. They’ve opted to make demons more bestial destroyers and berserkers. The devils are the more human, suave seducers and beguilers. That being the case, making the succubus a devil is a no-brainer.

So far, I’ve got no problems with that. I’m not sure it was necessary, but cleaning up the devil/demon divide is a nice thing, since before there was no real theme to either bunch, and by looks alone it was impossible to tell who was on which side.

However, I’m having a bit of an issue with her powers. The 4e designers have stated that they wanted to get rid of things like level drain, which, admittedly, could be real book-keeping hassles. Since a level-draining kiss used to be the succubus’ “big gun” ability, that meant it needed to be redesigned. Here’s how it works now:

(m) Charming Kiss (standard; at-will) * Charm
+14 vs. AC; on a hit, the succubus makes a secondary attack against the same target.
Secondary Attack: +12 vs. Will; the target cannot attack the succubus, and if the target is adjacent to the succubus when the succubus is targeted by a melee or a ranged attack, the target interposes itself and becomes the target of the attack instead. The effects last until the succubus or one of its allies attacks the target or until the succubus dies.

If the target is still under the effect of this power at the end of the encounter, the succubus can sustain the effect indefinitely by kissing the target once per day. The succubus can affect only one target at a time with its charming kiss.

Ok, looks pretty straightforward, right? If you get whammied by a succubus’ kiss, you try to “catch” any swords or arrows that are flying in her direction with your face. Pretty cool power. But what else does it do?

Well, that’s the end of the description. And just from that, it appears that’s all the power does. The victim can’t attack the succubus, and will interpose himself against any attacks sent her way. But what about the long-term effects? Is the victim charmed? Or does the victim just find himself unable to let harm be done to her? If he hears about someone else planning to attack her, must he do something to stop it? What if she wants him to take up a life of crime? Or steal from his former comrades? Or sacrifice his children?

Doesn’t say. The description of the succubus herself hints, but doesn’t offer much more in the way of details:

When exposed for what it is, a succubus can be a deadly foe. It can manipulate the emotions of mortal adversaries, turning them against each other or making them slavishly loyal to it with a mere kiss.

Ok, that implies that free will goes out the window and the victim must do whatever the succubus commands. But here we’re looking at what wargamers call “fluff” or “flavor text”. This is the background, the context of the creature, and it may or may not be supported by the rules. A unit in a wargame like Warhammer 40,000 might be described as the best a planet has to offer, and made up of “battle-tested” veterans, but if it has a poor leadership score, the unit will break and flee when pushed, no matter what the flavor text says.

The problem is, we’ve got a description that’s geared almost utterly to combat encounters. We don’t know what, if anything, beyond a dispelling of the magic might free a character who has found himself ensnared by a succubus. There might be rules listed elsewhere that cover this sort of thing, under the description of charming magics perhaps, but they’re not here, and no page number is given as reference.

In 1^st edition AD&D, the succubus’ powers were identical to the charm and suggestion spells. The spell descriptions made it clear to player and DM just what sort of action might give a character another chance to try to shake the succubus’ control. The descriptions also gave you an opportunity to differentiate your character; an unscrupulous character might have no chance to resist when a succubus tells him to steal something, while a law-abiding and virtuous character would get another saving throw, possibly with a bonus.

(This, by the way, was one of the ways we differentiated two characters of the same class. Some characters would rush into a burning building to save a trapped kitten. Others would take advantage of the distraction to burgle from nearby houses. And, as you can see from what I wrote above about the charm spell, how you played your character did, in fact, make a mechanical difference.)

Now, I’ll admit, I could be making a mountain out of a molehill here. Maybe there are rules somewhere else that explain how to handle PCs that have fallen under a succubus’ control. It’s entirely possible that some elegant solution is described, maybe in the Dungeon Masters Guide, for example, that allows for everyone to enjoy the game even when a few of the PCs are now working for the enemy. I dunno. But what I do see is a tad more vague than I’d like, and not very new-player friendly. It’s already started a bit of an argument over at RPG.net about what, exactly the rules mean and how they should be used. Hopefully, these sorts of issues will be covered. This is the sort of thing that could really ruin a game, especially for novice players who might not yet have the right instincts regarding how to balance the needs of the players who require both a real challenge and the ability to make choices in order to have fun. Frankly, issues like this tie the brains of us old grognards into knots, sometimes.

Being vague can be a blessing, and having lots of room to play around and tailor things to the style you and your group prefer is a good thing. But one of the benefits of playing with rules should be a decrease in the number of “I-shot-you-nuh-uh-you-missed” arguments. Anytime you take control of a character away from the player, you have to tread carefully. If everyone knows what to expect, and knows what is, and isn’t, allowed on both sides of the DM’s screen, there’s much less chance of arguments and hurt feelings. Such situations are prefect places for more robust, firm rules that everyone can use to keep the game moving smoothly.

Space: 1899

This is cute, though it's disturbing how well it works:



Via Rebels of Mars. Go for the latest on bringing Barsoom to the silver screen. Stay for the Space Babes.

Read a Book! Or Maybe a Magazine.

As folks grow weary of the incessant 4th edition discussions, RPG.net is beginning to spawn all sorts of neat new threads. In addition to the previously mentioned one reading through every print copy of Dragon Magazine, there's a new one doing the same thing for Dungeon, and even one for White Dwarf! (Brian "The Silver Key" Murphy, be sure to check it out.)

The latest edition is The Grey Elf reading through the core books of 1st edition AD&D, starting with the DMG.

Use of Miniature Figures With the Game: Ah, now we get to the root of one of the biggest bones of contention between "grognards" and fans of post-3e D&D. Is AD&D a miniatures game at heart? Has it always been designed for the use of miniatures as an important (if not integral) element of the rules? Does it assume the use of such, and is combat complicated if they are not present? This section reiterates what appears in most AD&D books: miniatures are helpful and add color to the game but are not necessary for play. The rest of the book bears this out: whenever an instance requiring movement, mapping, tactics, etc., arises, the book includes what to do if you are using miniatures, but this always comes as an addition to the basic rules, which do not assume or require miniatures. This is in sharp contrast to the current edition of D&D, which specifically states in the text that miniatures are assumed and that if you don't use them, you're not going to get the "full D&D experience." The rationale for the use of the " sign is explained in the Player's Handbook, and we will address that when we get there, but it suffices to say that hit has little to do with actual scale on the tabletop, though such is taken into account.

Lots of interesting tidbits so far. Definitely a thread worth following.

EDIT: The thread just gets more and more interesting:

Were you there?

I was.

GARY.
NEVER.
USED.
MINIATURES!

Yikes! ;D Ok, ok, I think we got the message.

Licensing True20

The good folks at Green Ronin have published the rules for licensing True20 for your gaming projects. It's a royalty-free license that only applies to traditional, pen-and-paper RPG products.

This isn't a big surprise; Green Ronin's been hinting this was the plan for a while. It's kind of a surprise considering Chris Pramas' generally downbeat view of d20's OGL. Still, the thought process behind this is easy to understand. True20 has long been the little game system that could. Green Ronin never intended to publish it separately from the Blue Rose RPG. But the reaction of fans was pretty strong, and that fan-based enthusiasm has just pushed the product far beyond what anybody expected. Players have adopted it as their own in a way folks don't normally react to products, and many of the True20 fanbase feel a strong, personal stake in the system. It's since risen to be one of the more popular branches from the d20 tree, garnering support from outfits like Paizo.

With the bulk of that support being fan-based, and Green Ronin preparing to launch their "Song of Ice and Fire" RPG, an easy to understand and use license is the prefect thing for letting the fans take the bit between their teeth and really run with True20, to see just what sort of legs both the community of fans and the system itself really have. I know a number of smaller RPG publishers, feeling locked out of the launch of 4th edition, are looking to True20 to help fill the gap until they can publish current D&D material again. The new True20 license looks to add fuel to that fire. 2008 could turn out to be the break-out year for the shy little RPG that fans pushed into the limelight.

UPDATE: Mr. Pramas talks more about OGLs and their uses here.

Playing 4e at Dragon's Lair

One of the joys of living in central Texas is Dragon's Lair, a very expertly run comics and gaming shop. Apparently, this afternoon, there was a 4e demo run at the Austin location. I wasn't there, but smathis of RPG.net was. And he had a lot to say about it. Here's just a taste:

I also learned:

• The new Monster write-ups are a lot easier to deal with. Though the printouts looked to be in, like, 7pt font, Brian was able to manage all the opponents in the combats well with minimal hassle over the resource management. I used to run varied encounters with multiple opponents when I ran 3e. Watching Brian closely, I can say that it looked no more difficult in 4e than 3e. Maybe even a little easier.

• Conditions are a bear to keep up with. The onus will fall on either the player or the DM. In our game, it was the player. But someone has to keep on top of them because they can get a little unwieldy. Maybe the "Conditions Tracker" will be 4e's version of 1e's guy mapping with the graph paper?

• The combats lasted longer in rounds but took about as long as I remember 3e combats taking.

• First level is more fun than it's ever been in any edition of D&D. It was quite clear to me that our PCs were buffer than any other edition's 1st level PC.

• But it was also clear that the beasties were buffer too. The city guards downed a member of the party in the first encounter. That pretty well underlined how tough our opponents could be. I mean, they were the city guard.

(As an aside, I find this very amusing. Back in my 1st edition AD&D days, my friends and I were also big fans of the first five Ultima games. The city and castle guards on those games were notoriously tough hombres, and nearly impossible to kill. Even when you got to high level, trying to kill them took forever! So saying something was "Ultima guard tough" meant it was really, really tough. The city and palace guards in our games were commonly mid to high-level warriors, clerics, and magic-users, too. Anyway, back to smathis...)

• Monsters felt a lot different in 4e. Fighting the city guard was very different than fighting Hobgoblins and that was very different than fighting a Shadar-Kai. It was nice that the monsters actually fought with different inherent strategies, making them each feel unique.

• PCs were all pretty useful and interesting. I don't think there was any PC that was just wasting space. I had perhaps the most sub-optimal PC in the bunch. I mean, my size ganked most of my Paladin abilities. My short sword had all my big Paladin smite stuff doing 8-9 points max damage (Short Sword still == 1d6). So I could really feel my race kind of working against my class in a way. Still, I had fun with him -- even though I would neveh, eveh, eveh, EVAH play this character in a real game. I always had something interesting to do (even when it only did 3 pts of damage) and I felt like I contributed a good deal.

• 4e seemed to emphasize teamwork to me more than 3e. Having the classes built towards certain roles in combat, we played off each other more than most D&D groups I've been with. In previous editions, teamwork amounted to the Cleric buffing the Fighter, the Wizard laying back and somebody distracting the monsters while the Rogue sneak attacked. In this game, we had players organizing their attacks -- like the Ranger and the Warlock playing off each other's abilities to lay the smack down on opponents. And everyone had a value in combat. As a result, no one was playing Chaotic Stupid. It felt pretty obvious that if we turned on each other, that we'd get seriously screwed down the road. I don't know if this was a design goal but it's definitely something I picked up on.

• I find playing on a grid really tedious -- more of a reminder than an actual learning. Give me GM fiat anyday.

On that note about grids, he says 4th edition might actually be easer to play without a grid than 3rd edition was. He also points to this comment by one of the designers of 4th edition on this topic.

What I find most interesting, however, is his take on skill use, and how Forge-y is. There seem to be a lot of little nods to indie game design in 4th edition. Frankly, I'm rather glad that James Maliszewski hasn't read most of the posts smathis links to, especially this one or this one. If he had read them, I'm sure we would have heard his head exploding all they way south of the Guadalupe River. ;D

Read 'em if you want to see just how far from traditional D&D the new designers' sensibilities lie. Kinda eye-opening, and does explain a lot about what we're looking at when we read about 4th edition. For some folks, I imagine this will be the dawning of a new love with the grand old classic. For others, they won't recognize the classic for all its new clothes and odd behavior.

Make Mine Metal

So we've got a Pulp D&D project in the works. What about a Metal D&D project?

I think there's plenty of room for icey Nordic wastelands filled with viking giant-slayers to the north, giant-cat-riding amazon and dinosaur-infested jungles to the south, and the crumbling ruins of a forgotten empire ruled by the last in the line of a dynasty of mad god-kings in the east...I'm picturing a collection of petty kingdoms in the center, with constant battles waged between psychopathic warlords. Bandits and humanoids plague the once great roads that have fallen into disrepair, and a few struggling communities dot the landscape, each ruled with an iron fist by one of a rogue's gallery of necromancers, demon-cults, dragons, vampires, and whatever else I can think of. And to the west is the great sea, underwhich lie the ruins of an ancient civilization who's artifacts are still happened upon from time to time in the most secluded parts of the world...talismans that drive men mad with power and bring the entire world to the brink of destruction...

I sooooo wanna play in this campaign. Even if it is 4th edition. ;)

Blood and Protons for Arioch!

Are we on the verge of opening up the multiverse? Might we all soon get the chance to be a sailor on the Seas of Fate like Elric?

Crazy as it sounds, there's a scientist in Hawaii who fears it may just be so:

More intriguing are the quantum possibilities, raised by Doctor Arkani-Hamed, who told a nervous New York Times reporter that 'because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening'.

The Collider, he mused, "might make dragons that might eat us up."

Quantum dragons?!? Whatever will we do? The Geeks at the Brisbane Times have the proper, gamer response to such an event:

I however, remain bullish on the quantum dragon question. I doubt there is a dragon problem that couldn't be addressed by the liberal application of heat seeking missiles.

Booyah! Ok, setting aside for now the cool vision of Raptor jetfighters versus quantomfire-breathing dragons, the more intriguing possibility is the opening of a gateway to, well, infinite worlds:

An exciting side issue to Wagner's lawsuit, is the possibility raised by other less... uh, flamboyant... scientists that the collider might be a first step to opening up a grand highway to other universes. Granted, some of them would be hostile, because the laws of nature which make life possible here might be written entirely differently on the other side of the portal. Or, the universal clockwork might tick in the same way, but human history could have turned out very differently, a favourite example being a universe where the Nazi's won the Second World War.

Potentially, an infinite variety of such worlds could exist, and sure, you wouldn't want to go blundering into a universe populated by supernazis, but how cool would it be to grab up a whole bunch of alternate Earths which were entirely empty of people; the same planet, but unoccupied by troublesome tenants.

The possibilities are potentially endless. And if there really is an infinite number of them, that means there's nothing to prevent each of us getting our own private world.

And you thought the housing market was in trouble before!

Evil DM Productions is Online!

Speaking of the Evil DM, the web page for his RPG production company is up and running. It's still a work in progress, so check it out, then head over to his blog and offer any helpful criticisms you might have.

Best of luck, Evil DM!

Busted Confession

Shelly Mazzanoble, being the lucky sort she is, has gotten to play around with the Character Visualizer at WotC. The Character Visualizer is a tool that lets you create a computer portrait of your D&D character. You can then use this portrait to create a virtual miniature for use on their digital tabletop, or just use it as a snapshot so people can see what your character actually looks like.

It's not yet ready for prime time, and the final results will probably look like refugees from Second Life, so I doubt Storn is in any danger of being replaced by a robot any time soon. Still, I'll bet it's a lot of fun to play with, and I suspect the Evil DM will have a hard time, er, resisting certain temptations:

New DM clicks on the female human, and we both snap backward and gasp like grandmas at a Snoop Dog concert. "Nice . . . orbs," I say.

"This is the alpha version, don't forget," he says. "Soon we'll have a bust slider. That way, men will be able to depict the female characters they want, and women will be able to depict the female characters they want."

"This girl needs a visit to Dr. 90210 before she does a face-plant onto your keyboard."

New DM turns every shade on the top row in a Crayola 64-pack, and honestly, I'm also uncomfortable with him seeing human Tabitha like this.

"They're fake," I tell New DM. "You know that, right?"

"Whatever you say," he says. "Can we move on?

Yeah, I'm seeing like entire months of Wednesday babes coming out of this.* ;D

*I tease, of course. The Evil DM clearly prefers his Wednesday beauties to be flesh-and-blood. :)

Mona in Fear

The guys at Fear the Boot do great interviews, and their latest is with Erik Mona of Paizo. He talks about Paizo's plans for the next few years, working on Dungeon and Dragon Magazines, and confirms my suspicions that the delay of the GSL was an important contributing factor in the decision to create the Pathfinder RPG. It's an excellent and entertaining interview all around.

Dragon Magazine: Taking it From the Top

Over at RPGnet, (un)reason has chosen to read through every issue of Dragon magazine in the old archives CD set, and possibly most, if not all, of the ones that came after:

So this is where I'll post my reactions and comments to each issue as I go through them. I'll try and mention any important points, and the topics they cover in each issue.

It's a very cool project. (un)reason is doing one per day, and has posted the first six issues of The Strategic Review, the proto-newsletter thingy that eventually blossomed into the Dragon Magazine of yore.

Keeping up with the Pathfinder RPG

Over at RPG.net, they've posted a summary and review of the first alpha release for the Pathfinder RPG. It offers a nice summary of the proposed rule changes. The review is less than positive. However, I suspect the reviewer wasn't too keen on the whole idea to begin with.

Whither D&D?

Over at his new blog, Grognardia, James Maliszewski has posted his thoughts inspired by an MSNBC piece on Dungeons & Dragons and the computer games it has inspired. Mr. Maliszewski starts off by reminding us that the rise of D&D in the public consciousness was a fluke. Like other oddities of those days, such as KISS and the Rubik’s cube, events beyond the control of mere ad agencies and marketeers conspired to turn the bizarre into pop culture phenomenons.

He then goes on to explain how computer games now give “the vast majority of people who, in the past, might have turned to D&D for their fantasy escapism what they want but without the fuss of complicated rules or funny dice or even having to find some friends with whom to play the game at all.” Again, he’ll get no disagreement from me on that point. Computer games give you all the trappings of fantasy, packaged around a rather narrow focus of activity that I imagine is very inviting to a large number of people, certainly larger than the group of folks who prefer more varied and demanding hobbies.

In fact, I’m not certain I at all disagree with what Mr. Maliszewski has to say. I might just be quibbling here over a matter of emphasis. However, when he concludes by saying his “only concern is that, in their quest to regain something that can never be regained, D&D's current custodians will sell the game's soul and history for a bunch of magic beans,” he appears to be arguing that attempts to market D&D beyond it’s current circle of fans are at best pointless, and potentially harmful.

Frankly, I disagree. I do not feel that the fate of RPGs is set, and that the hobby can expect nothing better than to go the way of “model railroad building or playing bridge”. In fact, I’d counter that there are vast, untapped markets out there full of people who would love to play RPGs, only they haven’t been given the proper invitation or introduction to the hobby.

It is, of course, cliché to mention women as an untapped market for RPGs. There’s good reason for this. The hobby is still heavily, predominantly male, in spite of the fact that women seem to buy and read more escapist fantasy than men do. Even if we’re to limit ourselves to a discussion of D&D, the continued popularity of authors like Mercedes Lackey, Anne Bishop, and Jacqueline Carrey would seem to indicate that there is a market for women who enjoy their escapism with a healthy helping of high fantasy tropes.

Speaking of clichés, there are also a great number of cliché excuses offered for why more women aren’t playing RPGs. I consider most of them to be bunk and nonsense. (Seriously, if you think slapping a scantily clad, size-zero supermodel wannabe in a pose that just oozes sex on your cover dissuades women from buying your product, then you are willfully ignoring reality.) The more I look into this, the more I’m convinced that the problem isn’t the hobby, but how it’s perceived by the world. RPGs are the domain, so says the popular wisdom, of young boys and middle-aged men who refuse to grow up. There are real “permission barriers” between women and RPGs. It’s not that women look at gaming and then reject it as not for them. Rather, women don’t even consider gaming as something they would do in the first place. So long as that is the case, even a flood of games like Blue Rose won’t alter things. Nothing short of a full-scale campaign to get Hollywood to change the way it depicts RPGs and their fans is likely to work. This is why Ryan Dancey feels that the first thing we need to do to save roleplaying games is to jettison the name “roleplaying”.

Ignoring women as a potential market is a traditional failing of the hobby. That WotC might do so as they launch D&D’s fourth edition is hardly a surprise, and might even be a smart move in the short run. (However, I also have to say that Confessions of a Part-time Sorceress might be a move in the right direction.) What’s more disturbing is the apparent abandonment of the traditional golden years of D&D play: ten to fifteen-year-olds.

Now I know a lot of you are going to be confused by this. What on earth is the Trollsmyth going on about? Of course D&D is going to be aimed at the young gamers. It always is. And you can look at the art, or how they’re simplifying this rule or that system, to prove it. All of that may be true, but honestly I’m not seeing it. Or, rather, what I truly fear is that the folks making D&D 4.0 might think they’re making a game that will appeal to young teenagers, but really have no idea if they’re doing it right or not. Have they done the market research to know what that generation wants? Do they know what appeals to them? What do they think of when they talk about fantasy, or dragons, or wizards?

The art is one of the reasons I ask this. Wayne Reynolds is, as I’ve already stated, an accomplished artist. If I was marketing a game to appeal to people who already play D&D, Mr. Reynolds would be at the top of my list. But that’s exactly where I see a potential problem. Does he have the same sort of appeal to ten-year-olds? I think the cover he’s done for the 4^th edition DMG looks great. I love the subtle nod to the Otus cover of Cook’s Expert D&D. But will third and fourth graders or junior high kids feel the same way about it? They won’t get the visual link to a game published back in ’81. Does that cover look like adventure and imagination to them? Again, I have no idea. But if those covers had been vetted by proper marketing research, I would have expected something a bit more revolutionary in design, rather than the more predictable, evolutionary choice of Reynolds.

And then there are the books and rules themselves. According to Amazon, the PHB clocks in at 320 pages. Add in the DMG and MM, with 224 and 288 pages respectively, and you’re talking about a serious load of reading somebody needs to do before you can play the game. Now, I’ll be the first to admit, there’s nothing to stop an interested 3^rd grader from reading books that large. I tackled The Hobbit sometime around that age, and the kids who grew up reading Harry Potter are no strangers to hefty books. But that’s a lot of dull, dry text to get through to play a game. Maybe it makes sense to require that level of commitment to the game right off the bat. Maybe it creates a certain sense of buy-in for the reader. Perhaps part of the fun is feeling that you’ve mastered these thick tomes and their arcane material. But I’m one of those who got started with Moldvay Basic, and at a mere 64 pages of rules, spells, monsters, and magic items, it was plenty complex for me. The game was a snap to learn, and it wasn’t hard to get somebody who knew nothing about the game through creating their first character and right into tackling their first dungeon. As an adult, my brain screams in agony at the thought of trying to walk an utter neophyte through the lists of skills and feats necessary to create a 3^rd edition character. I know it can be done. I know people who have done it. But that’s a much higher hurdle to clear than what I went through helping my younger brother and our neighbors roll up our very first characters. So are we really seeing a game that’s been crafted to pull in a whole new generation of gamers? Or are we merely seeing evolutionary tweaks designed to appeal to a certain segment of the current gamer population?

I worry about this because I think RPGs may already have missed their best shot at a Renaissance in popularity. Was any generation better primed to love D&D than the one that grew up reading Harry Potter, made Eragon and The Golden Compass best sellers, and who packed the movie theaters to watch Jackson’s LotR flicks? If that’s true, then what happened to them? Even if we assume all but a handful hundred of the girls would ignore D&D, even if we assume the vast majority of the boys would find their fantasy needs satisfied by computer games, where are the rest of them? They should be sweeping through the hobby like a rising tide, their interests and influences having a profound effect on the games being produced, the art being chosen, and the topics discussed on the message boards. Where are they? Am I just blind that I don’t see them all over RPG.net, or ENWorld, or the Paizo boards? They could all be hiding at WotC’s boards, maybe. I don’t go there very often. It could be unconscious selectivity on my part that only sees twenty-and-thirty-somethings on the boards, talking about games, and making games. And maybe I’m just looking too hard, and Exalted and Pathfinder are exactly what this new generation of gamers wants. I’m willing to be corrected on this score. But all I see is a bulge of middle-aged gamers passing through the hobby, with a tail on either end. And if that, in fact, is the reality of RPGs, that’s troublesome.

EDIT: Welcome readers of the Silver Key! You might also be interested in why I won't be playing 4th edition, and why you might want to.