Games within games.

As I have noted before, my current comrades in gaming arms are of the 4e persuasion. This is not, however, a major source of woe for me. Rather, I find 4e a fun game. Engaging, even. But in the end it leaves me with the same ambivalence that playing Champions/Hero System left me with back in the early 90s and 3.x left me just a few years ago. Building characters makes for an interesting game within the game. Combats provide another game. Advancement yet another. Each of those provides a level of payoff and engagement, and rewards certain types of system mastery.

All that said, I miss the elements of RPGs that I have liked most: narrative improvisation, exploration, improvisation, world building and off-the-cuff play. None of this is barred by 4e per se. However, as I found in playing Hero System and in 3.x play, it's harder to get to because of the prominent rewards for mastering increasingly complex systems arising from the rules in play. It would take a fairly strong social contract in play to encourage players to set aside the rule system mastery elements of the rule set and to seek out other rewards. I'm sure that there are lots of examples of tables that run just as I would like to run mine that involve 4e, but I have see that my concerns for running 4e would involve a lot of changes to people's expectations and to the rewards structured into the game.

Not that I have time to run a game right now.

All that said, if my old friend Dean really does move back into the area, I might try to get together a group of players for some old-school gaming with a simpler set of rules (probably Rules Cyclopedia) and a slightly less weird setting than Athanor.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Recent bounties of RPG goodies.

I spent this weekend visiting Davis, California with my wife. Davis is her alma mater, which was part of the reason for the visit. Another reason was to watch her nephew Shayne quarterback the homecoming game for the Davis High School Blue Devils. The third was to travel to San Francisco for family business.

As I often do on trips out of town, I stumbled upon a game/comic book shop. This one was Bizarro World in downtown Davis. Looking through the shelves, I picked up a pait of old TSR boxed sets.

The first was an incomplete and rather battered copy of the Holmes boxed set for only five dollars.




The box included dice, the rule book...




and a pair of character sheets written on loose leaf paper.



The second was a complete Gangbusters boxed set:



Then I got home to see I had received my copies of Fight On issues 8-10 and Stonehell.

Mapping Experiment, Thanks to the Fiendish Dr. Samsara

Matt Slepin posted Thursday about the idea of using subway maps as an inspiration for more abstract dungeon mapping.Well, I thought that was a pretty nifty idea, and tried to do a similar-style map of my own. It's unfinished (level 4 rooms haven't been numbered for instance-- they are all numbered 1...) and may be more trouble than it's worth, but the experiment here was to see what it would look like.

Color-coding different levels and adding black outlines to rooms that connect levels (and ground level access in Red 1), allows for a quick map to develop that looks like it might actually be usable. The down side is that it doesn't give a sense of the room sizes, feel, or contents, which means that notes on the levels would have to be more dense with information. But on the plus side, this simple map could give you information on four levels at once.

 

It's an interesting mental exercise, and might fit in well with Athanor, with its ancient buried cities, often teeming with technology.

New acquisitions

Just got my hands on a pair of d30s and a Rules Cyclopedia. Oh, and a new job with a substantial increase in both pay and responsibilities. And, as a result, a year leave of absence from my doctoral program.

I had forgotten just how clean and compact the Cyclopedia rules can be. Where once I thought the weapon mastery rules interesting, I now look at them as adding more complication than fun. And I find the skill rules still seem to be a poor fit for the existing rules, particularly in relation to thieves. Luckily, those systems are purely optional.

It has me thinking and sketching again around gaming, generating some ideas, which is great. If only I had more time in the day!