Grog of Cthulhu

We are talking about Call of Cthulhu on my discord and I am such a grog when it comes to that game. I have zero interest in running any variant where you have government backing or special powers. You're going to play a law clerk who dies horribly. That's where the fun is! Everything else is pale imitation!

Speaking of pale imitations, I don't really see the point of all the Cthulhu games that aren't Call of Cthulhu. People sure seem to collect them, but they don't seem to actually ever play them. Frankly, Call of Cthulhu just about has that market cornered in ways that its imitators don't even attempt to compete against. System aside, it has a ton of great adventures, and the not-Call of Cthulhus don't. Call of Cthulhu also has some of the best supplements in the role-playing industry, but again, its direct competitors simply do not bring that heat to the table.

Trail of Cthulhu comes the closest to being worthwhile, but even that seems like a game trying to solve a problem (dead-end mysteries) from the wrong side of the issue. Fix that in scenario design, not within the system, you nerds. 

My groggiest Call of Cthulhu opinion? I think the 1920s is the best setting for it, hands down.

Nautical Flags as Alignment

International meanings for nautical flags. Or, alternately, I think they would do just as well as signifiers of the alignment of your character:

A: Alpha – diver down; keep clear

B: Bravo – carrying dangerous cargo

C: Charlie – yes

D: Delta – keep clear

E: Echo – altering course to starboard

F: Foxtrot – I am disabled

G: Golf – I want a pilot

H: Hotel – a pilot on board

I: India – I am altering course to port

J: Juliet – vessel on fire keep clear

K: Kilo – I want to communicate with you

L: Lima – stop your vessel instantly

M: Mike – my vessel is stopped

N: November – no

O: Oscar – Man overboard

P: Papa – vessel is about to sail

Q: Quebec – I request free pratique

R: Romeo – reverse course

S: Sierra – engines are going astern

T: Tango – keep clear

U: Uniform – you are heading into danger

V: Victor – require assistance

W: Whiskey – require medical assistance

X: X-ray – stop your intention

Y: Yankee – am dragging anchor

Z: Zulu – I require a tug

The Tinkling of Cracked Bells

"The Notifications Widget will disappear on 7 March, 2019."

The words crackled through the speaker of an old transistor radio. The man who said them sounded old and of a different era. His wavering voice should have been reporting that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, that the Hindenberg had gone down, that we should all buy war bonds for God and America. If sound could be sepia-toned, his inflection was surely mottled and brown.

I couldn't have heard it right. I picked up the radio, testing its weight, feeling its warmth. I gave it a slight shake. Not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to know that the radio was really there, in my hand, a thing that exists.

And then I noticed...the radio wasn't even plugged in. The cable dangled from the back like a useless vestigial limb.

"The Notifications Widget will disappear on 7 March, 2019," the voice intoned again, more urgently, somehow closer and more intimate.

Somewhere a cracked bell smiled and rang one final time.

Vintage Christmas Cards as Adventure Ideas

VINTAGE CHRISTMAS CARDS AS ADVENTURE IDEAS
ROLL d20 FOR HOLIDAY CHEER + FEAR
(roll and put the ideas the image gives you in the comment section)

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Don't Hate the Flayer, Hate the Game: The Rules

House Rules
99% of terrible house rules are born from wanting to add "realism" or "logic" to necessary abstractions.

Balance
"I didn't design this with balance in mind" is most often said by people who either don't want to do the work to make something balanced or don't have to design chops to even try.

Tweeting at Game Designers, Demanding Answers
People who tweet increasingly aggressive questions to game designers--or worse, people who demand new content or rule changes under the guise of asking a question--are actively trying to tell you that they aren't well suited to a game that is essentially based on the premise "make up fun stuff."

The Bait and Switch
If you tell people that you're going to run an "old-school 5e game" but what you really mean is that you added the advantage/disadvantage mechanic to Swords & Wizardry, it kinda feels like you couldn't get any players for the game you really want to run and maybe you should think about why that's the case.

Cheating
If you suspect that someone is cheating on their dice rolls, keep a tally of what they claim they're rolling. If the only roll they ever blow is for initiative, they're probably fudging and you can safely stop inviting them to your games.

The funny thing about cheating at D&D is that the stakes are so low. I get being attached to your character, but it's not like money is riding on how the roll goes--which makes me think that people who lie about their rolls are playing in your game for reasons unconnected from having fun with other people in a pro-social way.

I've never encountered anyone who lies about their rolls that isn't also bringing some other problems to the table.

Speaking of cheating, this Twitter post by Bluejay sums up why I never fudge rolls as a DM (unless I think I screwed up and added wrong, rolled too many dice in the heat of the moment, etc.):

Don't Hate the Flayer, Hate the Game: Playstyle Preferences

Preferences: everybody has them, and it's okay to talk about them as long as you aren't asserting them as objective truths or the One True Way to play D&D.

These are some of mine.

There are two playstyles I really don't enjoy. The first is what I call Old School Avoidance, where the goal is to avoid or bypass as many encounters as possible. I play in people's games because I want to interact with the weird stuff they've dredged out of their imaginations; avoiding monsters, strange objects, and potentially dangerous locations makes it feel like the point of the game is to play the game as little as possible, and that's the opposite of fun for me. This goes double if your game has a mechanic where you can roll to bypass an encounter; that feels like pressing X to skip the game play to get to the next cut scene.

The second is one I call Small Business Owners, where some of the players want to take over a business, run an inn, or just sit around in a castle they've taken over instead of adventuring. Again, this feels like a playstyle that wants to avoid interacting with any of the imaginative stuff in the game in favor of safety and mundane middle-class life. I can understand getting attached to your character or wanting to play out their self-interest, but I also think games are more fun if you drive your character like a stolen car. If you ain't come to dance, why'd you put your shoes on? If you try to play this way in one of my games I will inevitably sink your barge.

Old Beef: Disgruntled GURPS Fan is Casually Bodied by Prominent Intellectual

These are from before I started blogging, so I missed them when they were fresh, but they are still hot fire:

Disgruntled GURPs fan slams D&D for being an "endless hobgoblin holocaust."

Ta-Nehisi Coates fires back and bodies the previous guy with a cutting "Sometimes writers have nothing to say."

All this definitely beats the whatever that was between Cornell West and and Coates, which honestly just bummed me out.

Old-School Heresies

I don't think druids and bards are lame at all.

* * *

So I'm fine with druids and bards, yeah? But you know what I do think is kinda lame, though? Greyhawk. I've never been able to find anything really, truly interesting about it, and worse yet when I ask fans what is interesting about it they can never seem to articulate a reason. Sometimes I get a list of Proper Names as the reasons why it's a cool game setting, but when I press them on what's neat about those things I get back "Oh, those guys are an evil order of assassins." O...kay.

I've also noticed that Greyhawk fans also don't seem to even agree about the basic feel of the setting. I've had people swear up and down that Greyhawk is the epitome of D&D sword & sorcery...but then someone else will pop into the thread and tell me that it is D&D's best medieval society simulator...which the cover image above does do a lot to support, but come on, which is it?

I even think the names in Greyhawk tend toward the embarrassing. Fuckin' Wee-Jas, you know?

It turns out, for the record, that the official D&D settings I tend to like are the ones least rooted in traditional fantasy:

1. Ravenloft
2. Planescape
3. Dark Sun
4. Eberron
5. Dragonlance

Yes, that's right, I think Krynn is way more interesting than both Oerth and Faerun. Don't @ me.

* * *

Arguments about character skill versus player skill often seem silly to me because the "old-school tactics" held up as examples of player skill seem more like ritualistic behavior than inventive strategy. Maybe the first time lard and marbles were used to make a hallway tough to traverse was a novel event, but by the twentieth time you've seen that particular deployment of "player skill" it's just going through the expected motions. It's a lot like making the same fucking Monty Python jokes every game.

I also suspect that there is a certain type of old-school game master who prefers light, stripped-down rules just because it limits the stuff that characters get as they level up. Some people have a weird "But what if they get abilities that interfere with the adventure I wrote?" or "What if they break my precious dungeon?" or "What if they have fun I have not personally sanctioned?" vibe about them. If you're overly worried about the other players having too much fun, I admit I don't really understand your orientation toward gaming as a hobby.

* * *

I honestly think this is the least appealing cover I can remember seeing on a game book. Yeah, there are probably some worse ones made with poser art that date back to the d20 glut, but that stuff is like Teflon...it doesn't stick in mind at all and once seen it is quickly forgotten. I feel bad saying that this is unappealing because someone obviously sank time and effort into making it, but, man, I just do not like that image. 

Chubsley the Cleric, those Escher Lite stairs, that masked elf archer...no no no. I do sort of appreciate the "someone touched my bottom" look on the dwarf's face, but even that can't save this one for me.

* * *

Anyone who says that old-school D&D isn't concerned with balance is lying--if only to themselves. Old-school D&D is obsessed with balance; you can tell because it uses a ton of different ways to try to achieve balance between character classes: mechanical differentiation (this class gets a d10 hit die, this one gets a d4), advancement rate (this class needs less XP to level up because it's weak but you'll get more hit points quicker), mechanical restrictions for gear (this class can wear plate mail, this class can't), roleplay limitations (paladins get tons of powers but they are constrained by these moral restrictions or they get punished), etc.

So it isn't that older editions of D&D aren't concerned with balance, it's just that they're pretty kludgy in the way they go about the business of a balancing the game. 

* * *

When a game reviewer associates themselves with a particular community or small niche within the gaming world, I find that I can't trust their perspective. The politics of minor difference and tribal thinking creep into everything. 

But then you realize that the "luminaries" in any small niche of the hobby will have an impassioned defense mounted for them no matter what they say or do, so it becomes harder and harder to even sympathize with the kind of sadness that lets these cults of personality flourish in the first place. People, by and large, seem to crave the intersection between authority and validation in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Related: I don't trust any manifesto or primer about "how games were played back in the day" written by someone with books to sell. As a wise man pointed out to me, the "old-school" way of playing games presumes a way of playing that has probably never held a majority stake in the hobby anyway. 

Similarly, I think there is a certain type of gamer who makes a show of trying games from outside their "camp" only to crap on them performatively. "We gave it a shot, we played their game, and look how bad it was!" is such an obviously disingenuous move.

* * *

I think Gary Gygax got lucky when he captured lightning in a bottle with the creation of D&D rather than it being the results of skillful game design. None of the games he did after are noteworthy, and there's a lot of badly explained concepts in OD&D and a megaton of cruft in AD&D. 

Bonus outrage fuel: I think the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide is a disjointed mess of boring random tables, poor advice that might make your games worse if followed, and amateurish writing.

* * *

Attempts to make 5e D&D "old-school" almost always seem misguided to me, especially since actual old-school versions of D&D have never been more available. Sometimes it feels like people need a game to be tagged as explicitly "old-school" in order to feel like they have permission to enjoy it.

Also, repackaging the free basic rules for 5e as "old-school" and asking money for them is the opposite of a sound old-school ethos, just sayin'.

But when someone writes the history, that will be the shape of the narrative: when people smelled blood in the water after a couple successful Kickstarters made bank, something was lost in the old-school gaming community in the transition from homo reciprocans to homo economicus at the drop of a few stray coins. History repeats itself, I suppose; consider the Jekyll to Hyde transformation from the Gary of OD&D ("Don't let us to the imagining for you!") to the Gary of AD&D ("You must buy official AD&D products to really be playing the game.")

* * *

I truly believe that some of the best advice on how to run a D&D game is found in books that don't say D&D on the cover. Check out the stuff on fronts in Dungeon World, the advice on failure on Fate Core, the general principles outlined in Apocalypse World (first edition, haven't read the new one) and Blades in the Dark.

Note: I'm not saying that these newer games invented better ways to play. I am saying that they offer clearer explanations of good practices that people have been doing since the beginning of the hobby than we have had in any edition of D&D.

* * *

Many dungeon-based adventures, hexcrawls, and "sandboxes" strike me as railroads in the sense that none of the options presented in them ("Do we go left or right at the intersection of these fairly featureless corridors?") represent meaningful choices for the players to make.

Funny thing about actual sandbox wargames: they weren't completely open "you can go anywhere" scenarios. A sandbox has hard limits because it has walls to keep the sand in the box. There's a good metaphor in there if you want to find it.

* * *

Yeah, I don't think wands look silly either. 

Bewildering Attitudes I Have Encountered in the Wild (part 7 of Jeeves, show these gentlemen the door)

• I am so surprised that WotC isn't supporting this setting that ranks low in their polls of settings that people want to see support for! 
• Using a grid map ruins my immersion. Excuse me while I get my action figures miniatures and set up my playset Dwarven Forge.
• I am going to phrase the reason why I play OSR games in the form of a religious conversion narrative because my preferred way to play elfgames is a load-bearing pillar of my identity as a person.
• My small niche of the hobby has won because of X! (Footage of what was won and why this is important unavailable at this time.)
• This character build does four fewer points of damage per round than this other build. This game is unplayable and broken!
• I approach diagesis diagetically, which is to say, I got nothin'.

Bewildering Attitudes I Have Encountered in the Wild (part 6 of SWEEP THE LEG!)

• D&D should only ever be about medieval European settings. Any other influences are ruining the hobby. (Especially anime!)
• The things I like just happen to coincide with how the game is meant to be played; any other way of playing the game is wrong because, um, err, aesthetics.
• D&D settings should be weird! And by weird I mean they should fit within this narrow confine of things that many people are already doing that I am choosing to call "weird."
• This game should be stripped of the following... (But those are the things you enjoyed when you played that game?) Yeah, but they should be taken out because the important thing here is realism and purity, not fun.
• Games should be purposefully designed to provide a specific gaming experience, even though I've never run a game without hacking it extensively to do something it was never intended for, like, say, Twitch streaming.
• Railroading is the worst DMing excess. (minutes pass) The Great Pendragon Campaign is the best campaign ever written.

Bewildering Attitudes I've Encountered in the Wild (part 5 of to the moon, Alice!)

• Other people's issues are just a distraction; my issues, however, are very important.
• I don't judge a game by its rules-as-written; I judge it by the terrible house rules I've added to the game.
• When I say "Lovecraftian" I mean "what I imagine Lovecraft's fiction to be like because I haven't read much, if any, of it." I do, however, own a Cthulhu t-shirt.
• I HATE this game, even though it is the only game I talk about in every thread I post in at rpg.net. I don't like anything this company makes, but I follow what they put out more closely than any of their fans.
• I have a very aggressive avatar, but will react like a sensitive hothouse flower to the smallest perceived slight.
• You know you had a good session when no one had fun at the table. (Two days pass.) I don't understand why I can't get my gaming group together to play again!

Bewildering Attitudes I Have Encountered in the Wild (part 4 of old-school.txt)

• This set of abstract mechanics is okay, but this other set of abstract mechanics breaks my immersion. Disassociated!
• When I talk about reading old D&D books, I use the word exegesis because these are ~sacred texts~.
• OMG I can't believe the prices that WotC and/or Paizo charge for these books! The hobby doesn't need these huge books packed with artwork! (minutes later) I just dropped a hundred bucks on this 300+ page, profusely illustrated book from my favorite OSR publisher!
• You want to run a game full of characters options, modern design sensibilities, focused on character interaction? Have you considered using OD&D or Swords & Wizardry for that?
• This person's horrible personality and inexcusable behavior are worth putting up with because he made a good blog post five years ago. I mean, we're all gamers, right?

Schismatic Spray

Evocation

Level:	Sor/Wiz 7
Components:	V, S
Casting Time:	1 standard action
Range:	60 ft.
Area:	Cone-shaped burst
Duration:	Probably forever
Saving Throw:	See text
Spell Resistance:	Yes

Evocation

This spell causes seven shimmering, intertwined, multicolored beams of light to spray from your hand. Every creature in the area must make a Charisma saving throw. On a failed saving throw, each creature begins to bicker with others who share some form of group allegiance with other creatures who have been affected. 

For example, if two creatures who fail their saving throw share an interest in old-school D&D, they will begin to argue about their hobby; one will accuse the other of some sort of bizarre payola scheme, the other will then accuse his fellow of being a troll. Accusations will fly about being out to get the OSR, of being an alt.right political reactionary, of frequenting the wrong websites, etc. Someone will get called a grog, someone else will get called an edgelord, etc.

Everyone who makes their save will feel vaguely embarrassed about the actions of those who failed their saving throws, but may otherwise act normally. Those within a circle of protection from drama have advantage on their saving throw. Those who have cast map the OSR, 10' radius have disadvantage on their saving throw.

Bewildering Attitudes I Have Encountered in the Wild (part 3 of y'all be cray)

• There is no gate-keeping in the hobby. Here is my list of people you shouldn't listen to or talk to.
• We must decry the lack of imagination in this company's products! But we should discourage critical reviews of products coming from our camp, I mean, it's not like reviews matter anyway.
• Characters should only ever be generated by random rolls. Here's my house rules for swapping stats around to get the character you want.
• Games with disjointed mechanics are more streamlined than games with unified mechanics because you only have to remember ten ways of doing things instead of one.
• Gamers are more well-read than other people. I have only read books listed in Appendix N of the first-edition Dungeon Master's Guide. 

Bewildering Attitudes I Have Encountered in the Wild (part 2 of god-damn)

• Politics should be kept out of gaming, unless they are my politics in which case that's just common sense, man.
• Yes, I know this guy lies often and forcefully, but I have no reason to believe he would lie to me.
• The free content this company is putting out doesn't count as supporting their product. It needs to be published in a glossy hardback so I can complain about how much it costs.
• That guy isn't a racist! I mean, yeah, he hated a lot of minorities because of their racial backgrounds, but it's not like he killed anyone!
• I have zero experience as a lawyer or a businessman, but I feel confidant that any major RPG company or IP would be better off with me at the helm making the important decisions.

Bewildering Attitudes I Have Encountered in the Wild (Part 1 of shut up)

• Forget social niceties and a basic level of politeness, I have a point to make about game design!
• The products I'm making? They are options that are creative and fun. The products they're making? Bloat that will eventually destroy the hobby.
• Old games are better. No, I can't really explain why, except something-something creativity. No, I'm not talking about nostalgia!
• My game is a player-driven sandbox; the conclusion of it will be listening to me narrate what happens to your characters and their won't be a damn thing you can do about how I've decided the game ends.
• Old-school D&D is the game you should use for everything. All your fantasy needs, obviously, but it should also be your go-to system for spies, sci-fi, westerns, horror, superheroes, cyberpunk, and the drama of the lives of Chilean miners. Old D&D is all there is, and all there should be.

The Two Things I Want Cover Art to Do

Should the covers of RPG core books be designed to serve a purpose? As a thought experiment, I propose that core book cover art should be designed to answer two questions: who are the characters and what do they do?

(I also want the art to be good, but that goes without saying.)

Let's see how a bunch of RPG covers stack up according to my rubric:

Moldvay Basic D&D 
The gold standard of D&D covers. The game is called Dungeons & Dragons, the art shows that the player characters are fantasy adventurers who go into dungeons and encounter monsters--like dragons, for instance. Easy win.

3.5 Dungeons & Dragons 
Absolute failure. What is this game about? Also: ugly and so very brown. If anything, the only vibe it gives off is about what the player, not the character, will have to do in this game: it might be a warning saying "This is a textbook, get ready to study."

Pathfinder
Cover art is a place where Pathfinder smokes 3.5 D&D. Borrowing a page from Moldvay, we get fantasy adventurers versus fantasy beasts in fantasy dungeons. It does what it says on the tin.

4e Dungeons & Dragons
We get a sense of who the player characters are on this cover, but not of what they do. You could argue that it looks like they're exploring subterranean depths, but it looks way too cautious for the big set-piece battle style that 4e supports.

5e Dungeons & Dragons
A return to form for D&D cover art: adventurers fighting monsters in fantasy locales. The slightly over-the-top heroics of the cover compared to Moldvay Basic give a fairly good indication that D&D isn't a necessarily a meat grinder anymore.

1e Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
The characters depicted on the cover look like they were rolled off of random tables, stuck together in a party, and are now facing a tough battle that will leave some of them dead and others hideously wounded. I'd say that's a good encapsulation of the WRFP experience, actually.

7e Call of Cthulhu
It is usually the case that earlier editions of Call of Cthulhu have moody, evocative covers that show Cthulhu being generally menacing and whatnot, which really doesn't give an indication of what the game is about. The newest edition does a better job of this by splitting the game into two books, and thus has two covers. The cover of player's guide shows investigators getting way over their heads by discovering a cult idol--a pretty good indication of how the game is likely to play out.

Deadlands
I love the Brom painting on the cover of this book, but...you're probably not going to get to play a harrowed gunslinger so it feels a bit like false advertising. 

1e Shadowrun
The cover reads as "fantasy Flock of Seagulls steal data and do violent stuff in a cyberpunk dystopia," so it nails the premise fairly well. It may also hint at the idea of the party's hacker going on their own Matrix adventure while everybody else does other stuff.

RIFTS
So, we play the alien-chicks version of Charlie's Angels trapped in that one Rick Springfield video? No? Oh...in that case, this cover doesn't work for me; it really doesn't tell me anything about the player characters or what they get up to. Also, I know this is a beloved piece of RPG art, but I've always found it really static and a bit ugly.

Savage Worlds RIFTS
Okay, the amount of trade dress on the cover is excessive, but this gives me the impression of playing a post-apocalyptic punk with crazy weapons who fights robot Nazis, which is actually much closer in spirit to what RIFTS is about than the original cover.

Burning Wheel
Yeah, I would have no idea what this is about if I saw it on a shelf. Ridiculously uninformative. The cover is actually really attractive, especially when you see it in person, but it doesn't get me excited about the premise of the game itself.

Swords & Wizardry Complete
I'm not going to go to hard on this one since it's already been a lightning rod for grognard ire, but it suffers from the same problems as the Burning Wheel cover above. While I really like the image, it doesn't really indicate that the game is an OD&D clone.

Traveller
Seriously, go fuck yourself.