Happy Birthday TTRPGS!

 “Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.”

– Marcus Aurelius

Many in the tabletop roleplaying game community have been writing and talking about the 50th anniversary of the release of the original, three-little-brown-books edition of Dungeons & Dragons in January 1974.* I do not own any of those primordial rulebooks, but I’ve seen bits of them and reimagined versions released under the Open Game License (OGL); my own preference remains the Basic/Expert D&D editions from the early 1980s, perhaps a more clear, organized expression of the core concepts expressed in those original little books (and even then I as a 12 year-old spent every moment of an entire weekend reading and trying to comprehend the Basic rulebook). While the rules for original D&D aren’t always clear or accessible (certainly by today’s standards), we cannot deny they represent the first published roleplaying game. We celebrate D&D’s release as an inceptive moment in the adventure gaming hobby; the event represents the birth of tabletop roleplaying games as a form of imaginative entertainment. So while we commemorate D&D’s birthday, we also say “Happy Birthday!” and, I would add, “Many happy returns!” to the tabletop roleplaying game hobby.

Quick & Deadly Combat

 “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

– Albert Einstein

Back in April my son and I attended a “buhurt” medieval combat sport event, “Mead and Mayhem,” at a nearby winery. Several teams from the east cost battled in the lists in a regulated melee. Participants wore period-authentic armor and bashed at each other with blunted weapons certified to the league rules, with no thrusts, no hitting certain spots, until an opponent goes down (at least one hand on the ground). The first day teams of five armored opponents bashed at each other in the heavy wood-rail arena (the “list”) while an audience of about 150 cheered them on (fueled, of course, by wine, beer, and mead...). As a medieval enthusiast I enjoyed it; my son quickly let himself get caught up in the action, despite my droning historical commentary. Despite the rules each melee demonstrated the power and brutality of medieval combat...and showed how such fights often took less than two minutes to bring one team of five to victory. Of course in my head I started comparing it to combat in roleplaying games, particularly my favorite Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons. Although that’s a fantasy roleplaying game grounded in some aspects of the real world, in actuality trained, armored opponents clashing in battle goes pretty quickly.

D&D, Sci-Fi & Banning Books

“Goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them!”

– Professor Henry Jones

I regret to see book banning and angry mobs back in the news again. (Apologies to those who don’t come here for my occasional descent into political issues, but if you keep reading you’ll find some mention of games in the context of this subject.) Now that the furor over “critical race theory” has slightly subsided after Virginia’s contentious gubernatorial election in November and public schools start lifting mask mandates, the right-wing has fired up its angry base against books they fear question their white-privilege morals, insisting schools ban these objectionable titles, or even burn them (yes, two Spotsylvania County, VA, school board members said particular books should be pulled from school libraries and burned). Fear of the angry mob has permeated schools to the extent that an assistant principal in a Mississippi elementary school was fired for reading I Need A New Butt! Unfortunately we’ve seen this all before in some form and to some degree, though more often from the top down, from governments officially banning books and free speech rather than vocal minority mobs aggressively forcing government policy to reflect their agenda.

System -Neutral or OSR Stats?

“Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.”

– Carl von Clausewitz

I have on occasion been moved to write about the Old School Renaissance (OSR, or whatever you want to call it using those initials). A few years ago I explored OSR rules and supplements. The vast array of adaptations offered some interesting innovations among the retreads of classic D&D mechanics. Settings and supplements tied to rules interpretations provided inspiration easily ported to other games. But now I’m developing two fantasy roleplaying game supplements – an as-yet unannounced setting and the Infinite Cathedral setting currently languishing in limbo – I’m faced with a conundrum. Do I provide stats for the inhabitants in OSR format or in my established but not terribly well-known system-neutral format?

The Creative Magic of Office Supplies

 “Before all masters, necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches the best.”

– Jules Verne

The world was quite different when I first discovered the adventure gaming hobby in 1982 with the Basic Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. We were emerging from the 1970’s energy crisis into an economy was plunging into recession and high inflation. Iran had recently released American embassy hostages imprisoned for more than a year. Britain and Argentina fought over the Falkland Islands. Ronald Reagan was president and we were still in the Cold War with nuclear annihilation hanging over everyone’s heads. My life, too, was quite different all those years ago. I grew up in a stable yet frugal household where money was often an issue. We didn’t live extravagantly, certainly not in the financially comfortable way I enjoy at the moment. My parents scrimped and saved so we could enjoy some choice presents for our birthdays or Christmas. We took a modest summer vacation every year. We kept busy with after-school activities, but nothing requiring too much additional spending. We didn’t have a video game console or VCR. But we managed decently enough, especially having a few friends from school and some neighborhood kids who also liked games. During high school the adventure gaming hobby dominated my leisure activities.

Memories of D&D Christmas

At this time of year I frequently look back with a nostalgic eye on the memories of my youth, particularly celebrating the winter holidays. As I’ve mentioned before (in seemingly ancient missives like “The Season for Fantasy”), the yuletide season seems ideal for indulging in fantasy media and games. Since I’m reading Alison Weir’s history of the War of the Roses at the moment, I am, strangely enough, thinking back on the first Christmas after I discovered Dungeons & Dragons: 1982. Having received the Moldvay Dungeons & Dragons Basic set as an Easter gift earlier that year, then purchased the D&D Expert set a few months later, I’d immersed myself in the game, spending most of my after-school time and the entire summer reading rulebooks and modules, creating characters, drafting maps, creating adventures, and running games for the neighborhood kids (from whom I’d first heard of D&D). That year began a tradition of receiving at least one gift to feed my adventure gaming hobby habit for Christmases and birthdays. That first D&D Christmas I got some D&D gifts, of course, but I also received Avalon Hill’s Kingmaker, a game that broadened my horizons and sparked an interest in history.

Normalizing 4D6

“As the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions.”

– Plato

I was surfing online this weekend looking for interesting dice sets, just for fun. While a majority of polyhedral roleplaying game dice I noticed contained one each of the “standard” dice (including the D% ten sider), I was surprised to see a number of them – primarily in my search for “Koplow dice” – included four six-sided dice (4D6). I’ve seen a few sets in stores that also pack 4D6. I checked the “starter” boxes I have for Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition and realized the dice set provided with the Essentials Kit also included 4D6 (the Essentials Kit offers character creation rules, while the Starter Set does not). This seems to indicate a shift over the game’s almost 50-year history from several methods of rolling character ability scores to the one most geared toward what some might call a heroic play style; one where player-characters aren’t simply grunts sent through a meat-grinder adventure to meet horrible ends, with only the most “worthy” surviving, but where they begin as heroes who all have value in the overall storyline.

A Contentious Hobby

 “The moment we want to believe something,

we suddenly see all the arguments for it,

and become blind to the arguments against it.”

– George Bernard Shaw

I’m reading Jon Peterson’s The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity and cannot help notice similarities between the early debates about aspects of the hobby and the arguments gamers still have about those same issues today. These go beyond the foundational tensions between storytelling and game mechanics one expects between roleplaying games’ early adherents, the wargaming and speculative fiction communities, from which the hobby coalesced. They seep down into the minutia of nearly every base concept of early Dungeons & Dragons...concepts that have over time continued to provoke debate. The adventure gaming hobby community seems just as contentions now as it was 40 years ago; except now, instead of printed APA fanzines and house-organ magazines, most folks argue their points in any number of blogs and forums online (each with its own bias and self-supporting echo-chamber mentality).