Cal-Con and International Traditional Gaming Week

The local gaming convention, Cal-Con, is held during the final weekend (March 26th-28th) of International Traditional Gaming Week. Last year was the first time I had ever been to a con and I had a great time.

I have been pondering what I am going to run at the con this year and I decided that I am specifically going to run two separate things:

1. I am going to run two sessions of either A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity or S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth using Labyrinth Lord and the new Advanced Edition Companion. Which do you think I should run and why?
EDIT: I am also still considering running Stonehell with the base Labyrinth Lord rules.

and





2. I am going to run two sessions of Keep on the Borderlands using 4E.





I am also a herald-level DM so I will likely get roped into running some RPGA stuff as well.

Open vs Closed Gaming

The last few D&D games I have been part of have all been "open" games. By open I mean that they are played with varying participants. The Northern Marches campaign was specifically designed to be open. It was created to accommodate busy adult lives and was designed so that it did not matter who showed up to play from week to week. The 4E games I am running at the local meetup are by necessity open and the skype B/X game is open in that I just made an open invitation for people and accepted a couple more than I expect to be able to make each scheduled session.

An open game contrasts with a closed game which I think of as how I have previously mostly played D&D in that I was part of a set group. Closed groups may or may not play the same game from week to week but they a fairly consistent in who shows up to play.

Whether a game is open or closed has an impact on social aspects of the game, the campaign design and the game mechanics themselves.

1. Social - a closed game has a slightly different social element than an open game. This is pretty evident since in an open game you never really know who might wind up sitting down at the table. I have found two interesting social dynamics in the open games I have run. The first is that I had the first fight between players during a Northern Marches game. The players did not know each other and it stemmed from a roleplaying incident where a character reacted to having another character accidently gunned down by friendly fire. I don't think that the reaction would have been the same if the players knew each other and had been party of a closed game. The second, an honestly one I tried to cultivate for the Northern Marches, is a bit of competitiveness between players. I wanted to try to get people to want to play frequently by giving them FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). If they new that another player's character found a magic sword during a session they were not able to atend maybe they would be more inclined to show up the next session.

2. Campaign Design - If a DM doesn't know who is going to be at his game, it makes it tough to carry on a plot. I think this leads to one of two reactions from the DM. Either they railroad the adventure to make sure that their "story" gets told or they adopt a sandbox. A sandbox doesn't have an overall plot so continuous attendance isn't required. An open game also encourages more episodic play with each session being more self contained.

3. Game mechanics - I find that closed games lead to more house rules. If you have a long standing group, everyone gets to know preferences and can take the time to learn house rules. Open games make communicating a long list of house rules more difficult.

What do you think? Are there other aspects that are impacted by open or closed games? Are there advantaged to open or closed games? Which do you prefer?

A few thoughts about my 4E game

I was going to put together a long post about the relative aspects of 4E vs B/X and then decided that I wasn't going to use my time in that fashion. Instead here are just a few quick thoughts about the 4E game I ran a while ago:

1. It is rules-light - I don't know what proportion of page count in 4E books is rules vs powers (rules exceptions) but it is heavily, heavily, heavily skewed in the direction of the later. No DM can remember all of them. If you have a regular group then the DM can remember the 20 to 30 powers the party has. But for a walk-in game during a meet-up, you don't even know what races and/or classes will be at the table much less the powers. The players just have to tell the DM what their powers do. But the framework upon which all of these powers hang is pretty simple.

2. I tried to keep a semblance of narrative combat - and I was surprised how easy it was. Before the session began I took a look at everyones' powers - not for mechanics (see above) - but instead for the fluff. I made a note of some key points of the fluff about each power and used those to narrate the effects in combat. It was much more than "I move to here and use my Vorpal Viceration power". The player may say it that way but after the dice were rolled I gave the narrative of dodging through the combat and their shining blade slashing through sinew and tissue using some of the adjectives from the powers themselves.

3. I incorporated the "Ming Vase" - and I was very liberal with giving out bonuses and penalties for rolling 20's and 1's. Another thing I did was allow of other effects if someone rolled a 20. For example, if the character was using some power that did not include the moving of the target but rolled a 20 I figured would be fun to move him anyway.

4. I kinda like Skill Challenges - but then again I like subsystems. In a lot of ways the skill challenge is just a formulaic way of doing a reaction roll or some other roll that is already present in B/X.

5. I find the races annoying - I like the fact that B/X is humanocentric. I like the archetypes of race as class. I did not have one human character at the table and while I have read the races sections of the 4E PHBs, I still don't know what archetypes many of the races are suppose to fill.

6. I converted one of Paizo's Pathfinder Society scenarios designed for organized play and it was really easy.

7. The session went faster than I thought. I feel bad about this one. I thought I had lots of material given the feedback I have heard that combats take too long. This was only a 1st level scenario so maybe this changes.

All-in-all it was fun. My biggest complaint was the loss of the archetypes of the various races and classes but I also know that OD&D and Dr. Holmes also say that players should be able to play races other than those presented in the books so maybe I should have a more open mind.

Edit: JB just made a comment on our Online B/X game blog that made me realize the other complaint I have with 4E. In B/X part of the feel and fun is the fact that your character is an average Joe that may become a hero or maybe not. In 4E you start off as a hero and are expected to do heroic things.

Are You My Petri Dish?

I am thinking of conducting an experiment. I would like to rerun the scenario that I ran for yesterday's 4E game but using B/X. Is there five hearty souls out there that are willing to subject themselves to my gruesome experiment? It would be using skype and Gametable again and I would like to run it some evening this week. If you are interested please email me at p_armstrong [ at ] email [ dot ] com. It will likely only take a couple of hours. Here is the background I gave the 4E players (note: that it is taken from one of Paizo's Pathfinder Society organized play scenarios)

You are in a pub known as “The Tails”; a dingy, brine-soaked shack covered with swordfish tails located in a rundown section of town called South Reach. There, bitter longshoreman coming off the graveyard shifts pile in and slam rounds of a potent shark-fin liquor, cursing and complaining until they’re drunk enough to be carted home by noon. The disparaged scene has few prying eyes—the ideal place to pass along covert whispers.

The cloaked man across from you leans across the table and whispers with a rasped voice, “I’ve word that the accursed pirate Darsielle Du Moire has anchored his much sought ship, the Hydra’s Fang, in the harbor. Everyone’s looking for that vermin. He carries with him some ancient tablets of extreme historical value. Unknown to most, Wittlestone, the small town Du Moire razed to the ground, was also home to Myraxus Threeshadows, a noted but aging sage and mystic. Among Myraxus’s possessions he kept ancient forgeries of several tablets used in ancient arcane rites. When Darsielle destroyed the village, he slew the mystic and took the tablets, hoping to pawn them to one of his buyers here in Portown. The tablets are a priceless archeological treasure, one I greatly desire. In fact, just prior to Myraxus's death, I placed several bids to purchase the tablets and so naturally I was one of the first to realize they’d gone missing. You must race to get Du Moire and recover the stolen tablets before his pursuers find him or he flees port."

“If my sources are correct, I’ve learned that he owes a substantial amount of money to one of the Consortium’s more ambitious Enforcers, an importer named Lubor Staizkal. Likely he needs to settle with him at some point. Go to Lubor’s shop on Meldon Lane, near the docks, and see if you can pick up Du Moire’s trail from there, then do whatever you can to get those tablets. If you bring them to me you will be handsomely rewarded.”

My 4E One-Shot

I ran the 4E one-shot at my local D&D meetup this afternoon and I had a fun time. I am going to simmer on it for a day or two and post some thoughts. But this I know - B/X is my favorite.

A Weekend on the Dark Side

There is a very active D&D Meetup group in Calgary that meets a couple of saturdays each month. I have been working the crowd there for quite some time to see if there is enough interest to set aside an Old School table - so far to no avail.

I was talking to one of the organizers the other day and they mentioned that a couple of their DMs were going to be out of town for the next meetup and they asked if I could run a 4E one shot to cover. I decided that I would give it a go. Time to put my preconceived notions aside and actually get my hands dirty. I have been a player in five sessions of 4E over the last year. None of those games have been to my taste. But then again I always prefer to DM than play. I am actually looking forward to it even if I am somewhat apprehensive. I am interested to see how my old school sensibilities mesh with a 4E game - what will the game be like if I try to run it like one of my B/X games but with different rules? Not withstanding the mechanical and power level differences, I don't think I run a C&C game that different than a B/X game. We will see...

I guess I kinda owe 4E an apology

I was recently flipping through the 4E PHB and the DMG and I think I have to apologize for the direct or implied criticism I made back here and here that 4E is not a rules-light game.

In looking a little closer at the rulebooks I would say that it is in fact a rules-light game. The core rules a DM needs to know to run it appear to only be about 70-80 pages in the PHB and another 100-ish pages in the DMG. The pages and pages of character racial and class powers - which make up the bulk of PHB and PHB2 - and the monster statblocks in 4E are not really rules the DM needs to know to run the game. They can just be referenced as needed. That is just a little bigger than my beloved B/X (of course the 128 pages of B/X do include monster statblooks).

So my apologies 4E. I am still not too sure what I think of you otherwise but I do now consider you rules-light.

To the Core Addendum

I now understand that that the D&D Insider will contain exclusive material and that the subscription price is about to go up.

From the WotC website:

This month, we kick off a new rollout of exclusive material for the Dungeons & Dragons game that you can only get as a D&D Insider subscriber. This exclusive material won't appear in any core rulebooks or supplements, but it will be totally official...

How can they have official, which I take to understand as core, material that does not appear in your core rule books?

To the Core

I am going to be honest with you...

I own a number of 4E books.

I find the whole philosophy and structure of 4E interesting. I have mentioned a number of times that I love the gameist nature of B/X - the fact that it is unabashedly a game and not a theatre improve session - and I see many of the same things in 4E. I can also appreciate the math behind the system - call it a by-product of all of my years of investment banking.

However, I do not like the business model that goes with 4E. I understand that the Character Generator available on the DDI service will begin to have pieces of the Players Handbook 3 available this summer. PHB 3? Already? Didn't #2 just come out? And these are "Core" rules?

Now, I don't blame Wizards of the Coast for how they are trying to generate revenue but from a consumer perspective 4E is unlikely to get any more of my gaming budget. I know there are a bunch of gamers that are more than willing to spend money on the latest rule book available and I do not begrudge them their fun one little bit.

As time goes on, I find that it is not so much the "old school" rules I enjoy but the fact that they are "rules light" games. The mass that will quickly become the core rules for 4E just does not appeal to me. I have found a number of new games over the past year that I enjoy including Savage Worlds, RISUS, etc. B/X is still by far my favorite but it is nice for some diversity.

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons

I actually like a lot things about 4th edition D&D especially compared to 3.5. As I mentioned previously, I am a math and systems guy. I can appreciate the structure and math behind the game's systems.

Three things I do not like are:
- It ruins the narrative of combat for me by taking it out of the DM's and characters' hands and putting it in the rulebook;
- It requires minis - which is a deal breaker for me.
- It encourages a sense of entitlement in the players. The rulebooks say that the DM should get a list from each player of what magic items they want. You have got to be kidding me?