RPG City Settings

 “A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.”

— Walt Whitman

My interest in fantasy roleplaying game city settings came soon after I discovered Dungeons & Dragons. After receiving the basic set for Easter in 1982, I saved my allowance and, when summer break started that year, went to Branchville Hobby down the road and bought the Expert D&D boxed set. The clerk slipped a copy of Adventure Gaming magazine in the bag, a nice treat for a neophyte like me who hadn’t yet discovered Dragon magazine or other periodicals fueling my enthusiasm for a new hobby. Among the wonders inside (including an adventure by Gary Gygax!) was a review of Chaosium’s new boxed set based on the popular Thieves’ World short story anthologies...focusing on the shared setting City of Sanctuary and its inhabitants. This one article opened my eyes to a new environment for fantasy roleplaying which occasionally reached out to tempt me throughout the years.

The Asteroid Game

 “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

— Benjamin Franklin

It’s a presidential election year here in America...which means it’s time for a near-collision asteroid event! I know they occur more than we’d like to admit (the asteroids, anyway). We have ever-vigilant government agencies keeping watch: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), and the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). All of which host websites allowing us to track the size and distance of approaching asteroids. Media about asteroids hitting earth has long been and continues to remain a science fiction staple. Such a situation really doesn’t figure into games, unless it causes the cataclysm in some post-apocalyptic roleplaying game setting. But the PAXsims blog recently reported on tabletop exercises (TTXs) NASA conducted to help organizations prepare for and respond to an asteroid strike on earth. This kind of activity falls into the category of “serious games” used to explore outcomes of hypothetical conditions and events, the type of simulation governments use for a variety of purposes. The Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise provides an insightful model for how such serious games can enable a variety of audiences simulate non-warfare crises.

Lifepaths & Templates

 “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Lifepaths and other background mechanics in roleplaying games help players gain some sense of the world their characters inhabit, even if they themselves just discovered it. They provide backstory and motivation, context for developing characters over future misadventures. Few games use them, despite their origins in the earliest days of the roleplaying game hobby. Many prefer to rely on genre stereotypes to define character roles, leaving the (often optional) job of developing a backstory to players, if they bother at all; some fill it in during play, but most focus on where their character is going, rather than where they’ve been. Lifepaths and templates serve as game mechanisms to provide some sense of a character’s past — even if only defined in terms of stats and equipment — but offer more story hooks to entice players to create more depth to their fictional personae.

HGR’s Notable Posts

I’ve not done any retrospective of my Hobby Games recce work in a while and wanted to provide a sampling of some of my best, most popular writing for those seeking a taste of my past work. I started blogging more-or-less weekly in November 2010. At first I’d hoped to write 700-900 words each week on some issue relevant to the adventure gaming hobby. Now the blog has more than 550 posts, with most above 1,200 words...meaning I’ve written more than half a million words here (the equivalent of about five novels). Not every post at Hobby Games Recce is my best work; sometimes finding a compelling subject and an interesting angle doesn’t quite come together (and I’ve missed weeks here and there for various reasons). Not every post engages every reader; my content ranges across the subjects of roleplaying, board, and war games, as well as a commentary on our overall gaming culture. But I wanted to highlight some of my best writing about adventure game hobby issues, both by the numbers and by my personal standards.

Wargames for Learning

 “A scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise.”

— Robert Baden-Powell

The video from People Make Games about “The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War” has caused quite a stir recently among professional and hobby wargamers. What initially started as a documentary about wargaming in the defense industry became an hour-long video essay presenting and exploring the “complete moral labyrinth” of using wargames to prepare for future conflicts. The video generated a lot of discussion, both in the video’s comments section and elsewhere; notably responses at the excellent PAXsims blog. I watched the video and was impressed with the thoughtful look at moral issues related to wargaming (despite its sometimes outraged delivery, which, I’ll admit, makes for an engaging presentation style). Frequent readers might recall I’ve occasionally reflected on the ethics of wargaming — especially with kids or hobby newcomers — usually asking questions about how we can have fun playing historical games about a real-world activity that resulted in death and destruction, how we might use them as learning tools, and how we could more thoughtfully approach this activity (once again, often with the younger set in mind). Part of me wanted to respond to various issues the video raised; which were many among the hairpin turns of the host Quinns’ at-times manic journey through the moral labyrinth. I will leave more informed reactions to the wargaming professionals (though I’ll admit I wouldn’t mind joining their ranks career-wise). Instead, after much reflection about what I might say, I felt I needed to elaborate on something the video didn’t really address. It focuses on the analysis role professional wargaming plays in military circles, creating models and simulations to explore emerging crises and evolving technology to formulate and test tactical solutions. But it doesn’t look at another major facet of professional military wargaming, and even hobby gaming: the educational role games play.

COTS Games for Learning

 “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Those in the professional wargame sphere frequently rely on simulations intended for education or analysis, wargames requiring a custom design and implementation. Not all organizations have the resources for such projects, nor are such simulations always appropriate for every circumstance, especially when introducing wargaming in a professional environment to newcomers with time constraints. Sometimes they turn to existing resources, adapting them to particular missions and situations. They adapt “Commercial* Off The Shelf” or COTS games to their specific needs. One doesn’t have to be an innovator in the professional wargaming sphere to adapt COTS games — modifying them for a particular audience and objective — for experiential learning across other disciplines.

Tiny Brush Strokes on the Larger Canvas

 “There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

People sometimes say we need to see the bigger picture, the forest from the trees, the larger canvas. Such phrases always remind me of Georges Seurat’s masterpiece of pointillism, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Stand back and the viewer takes in the entire painting, which, at 10 feet wide, is quite a canvas. Step closer and one sees the tiny points of paint which make up tge larger characters, landscape, and the overall picture. Ferris Beuller’s Day Off artfully demonstrated this during the tourism montage scenes. Historically themed games allow us to explore new perspectives, form connections with the subject matter, and hopefully gain a greater understanding of events...notably the people involved. Many such games focus on the big picture — abstracted political factions, military units, entire regions of geography, and other broad generalizations — but a contrast between that and the finer details (and everything in between) helps us better appreciate the whole on different levels.