The Magic-User as Doctoral Candidate

In the depths of preparing my dissertation proposal, I find myself thinking about the ways in which we conceive of the old-fashioned D&D magic-user. Typically, graduate students in the United States go through initial training, then some sort of qualifying exam (though, thankfully, my program has no qualification exam) with a dissertation proposal which must be defended, then the grad student must focus on their dissertation. The Magic-user is seen as spending time in an apprenticeship, deep in study, then after some sort of tests, he or she leaves for journeyman work in the field to master the art.

So maybe the magic-user's spell book is sort of his or her qualifying exam— it includes the spells he or she has managed to glean and master through research, and reflect an intellectual approach to magic in the world. Sure, every apprentice learns the basic principles, but one magic-user may have done his literature review in divinatory magic, and another could have done hers on fire magic. This intellectual approach (perhaps even a formalized intellectual tradition) guides his or her initial approach as a level one M-U. But to get full membership in the group, he or she will need to finish a final dissertation, present and defend it for review, and then become a full-fledged member of magical society.

Or it could just be that doctoral work is warping my brain.

Some random evening thoughts

Getting much of anything done on the blog has been hampered by work (the start of a new term is always a bit of a train wreck), school (only managed to write 25 pages of my dissertation proposal over the holiday and need to really get some meat on the bones of my methodology section), illness (a diagnosis of dermagraphia solves a health mystery, but I also have to deal with a very nasty head cold combined with tension + sinus headache). Sorry for the high level of fluff and low level of response to comments.

Saw Avatar this weekend, and enjoyed it.

Not much in the film was a surprise plot-wise, but the world of Pandora with its alien life a bit too conspicuously built into a seamless whole seems rife for explorating in a sequel (in a proper Burroughsian plot where we learn secrets of the world that the Na'vi never knew before -- perhaps that he world itself is engineered, and Eywa is some artifact of an ancient biotechnology of the Na'vi forerunners... but Jake Sully has to discover this  because of a threat from something from the Na'vi's ancient past that even they had forgotten.)

Anyway, that's me checking in. Back to the blog.

A Maudlin Post for the Holidays

The combination of the holidays and perusing my original AD&D books sends me back to Christmas, 1981. The previous summer, I had become enamored of playing AD&D with friends, and was playing every week. I was deeply obsessed, which I suspect many of you would identify with, even though I didn't even have a Player's Handbook.

That Christmas, I had a stack of goodies under the tree: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Monster Manual, the Fiend Folio, Deities and Demigods, boxes of official minis from Grenadier, a set of dice, and a set of D&D character sheets-- easily over 100 dollars worth of merchandise which, I realize in retrospect, was a huge cost to my mother. Probably more than we could really afford, actually.

I still have the books and most of the die and even had the figures up till a few years ago, and played using that rule set up through college before moving on to other things. My mother never understood my roleplaying hobby, but she saw it as a passion, and she nurtured it when she saw a spark of something good in what I was doing. She even used it to motivate me to excel in school, to write, to create art, and to keep growing as a person.

She was a clever woman, my mother. This January will be nine years since she passed away, but some days it seems like it was just yesterday that I was opening the packages my mother left for me as if I had found the greatest treasure of my life.

Finding my way in all this stuff I have created.

As the quarter comes to a close and leaves me to spend a winter break cuddling up with Bourdieu and Foucault to find a way to develop an theory of cultural and personal resiliency that explains how marginalized students create agency and places of resistance within culturally hegemonizing forces (can you tell I'm a graduate student?), I also find myself with relatively more time to work on Athanor.

I think that with Athanor, I am not interested as much in pure hexcrawling sandbox play (though I have been working on material for hexcrawling in Athanor) and I don't really find megadungeons as compelling (and I have maps for that at least). Instead, I want to find a way to "map" out interesting social settings, roleplay opportunities, and chances for adventure. So I have been thinking about the kinds of thing that feel like they are part of the right genre:

• Love interest of the hero kidnapped, heroes must pursue.
  
• Pursuing villains into ruins filled with terrible monsters.
  
• Weird science gone amok in the hands of a mad scientist.
  
• Intelligent but barbaric alien war-bands.
  
• Averting war between kingdoms.
  
• Sky-pirate raids.
  
• Death-traps.
  
• Gloating villains.
  
• Villains who are actually guardians of a secret history of Athanor.
  
• Exotic locales.
  
• Strange fauna.
  
• Getting lost far from home.
  

I need to put this stuff together into a set of possible encounters and come up with a relationship between all the pieces.

And then, I need to stop thinking so much about it all. Maybe run a game.

I just got my Google Wave invite. At some point in the near future, I'll have to start recruiting players. Right now, I need to do present a pilot study for my dissertation, revise my written report for the quarter, and then take a long nap.

Update of sorts

My Athanor supplement is nearing completion when I have free time. I have an original, but not particularly well-done cover for the book, and I want to revisit the skill system to see if I can strip it down more and make that section cleaner.

Most of my time is being spent on school. By the end of the week, I should have finished a 35 page-ish paper (including bibliography and appendices -- only about 25-30 pages of real content), put together a 10-minute presentation of the paper, and made copies of my video project. Then the quarter will be done and I have until January to take some "time off" from class (a values of "time off" that includes reading some Foucault, Gramsci, Freire, Apple, Illitch and miscellaneous journal articles.) I just got my dissertation committee chair and I have made a good first pass at outlining and starting to flesh out a literature review, and have a good idea of big gaps. My next six months are going to kill me, as I need to take two classe per quarter and really wrestle with methodology and the development of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposal for human research, both for access to retention and graduation data from the institution and for interviews of students.

As a result of this pre-dissertation proposal madness, thinking about gaming has not been a high priority -- even though I will be gaming tonight and in a couple of weeks with my friends' 4e groups. But playing 4e has really gotten me thinking about some of the weirdness of contemporary gaming that makes me re-think the way I have approached the hobby for the last decade or two.

When I was a wee lad arond '81, we didn't have detailed backstories. We didn't set up "3 by" backgrounds for our PCs (which, I have to admit, I introduced to the my friend a few years ago and a D&D 3.0 game). Instead, we rolled up a quick character, and slowly accreted a background as we thought about it. Starting characters were cyphers, and only gained depth with survival. It's almost as if we were trying not to be attached to the FNG until he survived a few firefights. Background information was a sign of long-term survival.

Nowadays, D&D (and this applies to 3.x, too) takes more effort to make a character, and we tend to invest characters with things like backgrounds, and ideas of destiny and future as a result. But the important things here are a) that players don't want to lose characters as a result (though my Tiefling Swordmage, Malachi Skaith has a bit of a deathwish, and I don't count on him surviving until the end of the campaign), and that getting into the hobby involves a higher commitment on the part of players. Characters take more time to make, more systems mastery to make, and more storytelling skill to make.

This isn't a rant on the evils of contemporary D&D. Certainly, this very issue of complexity and ability to make the character I wanted moved me away from D&D to other games by the time I was in college. However, I wonder if the lack of ease of getting up and running as a new player is an issue for people new to the hobby, and not an incentive to just toss together a character on an MMORPG and get the gameplay and table chatter with a lot less effort.

Apparently, Geekdo is much more thorough than I thought.

Apparently, someone has made a page for Savage Swords of Athanor on Geekdo based on my files made available on Scribd, and I have a very empty creator page there.

This strikes me as rather odd, as I don't exactly pull a lot of traffic here, but it's vaguely flattering I guess.

But it's clear to me now that Geekdo is very, very complete.

Still Alive, May Sell an Athanor Supplement on Lulu, and Some Other News

I'm still in the ugliest of the quarter, with my classes still requiring me to putting together a video project (probably a discussion of the social structural origins of the current budget crisis at my state and university and not on some of my more interesting but harder to put together ideas), as well as doing a survey, some interviews, and data analysis as part of my pilot study for next year's dissertation research. And the lit review. And clarifying my research questions. And, you know, work. And planning my wife's (let's not mention numbers, but it's an Important Year) birthday in early December.

So the slow posting is likely to continue for a little while.

Maybe I need to think a bit more about my classes next quarter.

On another front, I have been working on hex descriptions of Athanor, and putting together a new version of PDF for sale on Lulu (just 64 A5 pages, saddle-stitched. Not quite digest-sized, but in the neighborhood.) This version is formulated as a supplement for S&W Whitebox, not as a standalone game, and includes the Judges-Guild-Style Hex Descriptions I mentioned earlier. I have a test copy wending it's way to my house, and I'll see if I like it well enough to sell it. I want to contact people whose posts I have modified and included in the supplement  (Akrasia's skill system, T. Foster's wound system) before I actually sell the book. I'm looking at about $8.00 print, $2.00 PDF, and counting on not selling a thing.

I am also waiting for Google to send me a Wave invitation. My hope is to get one before the holidays and then to move on to trying out Wave for gaming, then moving on to see if I can use it for real academic collaboration, too. You can see I have my priorities straight. Actually, my point is to play and learn the ways the system can work organically, then try to force it into the context of something more restrictive, so there really is a method to my choices. The opportunity to try out some online gaming is just bonus.

But right now, I just hope to make it through the Thanksgiving weekend.

Gah! What the heck have I signed up for?

So if I disappear off the blog for a few days at a time, it's because I have five more weeks to put together the following projects:

1. I need to develop questions, identify informants, film interviews, and put together a 10-minute documentary short.
2. I need to finish an implement a quiz and 1-2 interviews, transcribe and code them as part of a pilot of my methodology for my dissertation.
3. I need to write a paper on the founding of the Preuss School at UCSD analyzed from a Gramscian perspective.
4. I need to write five more weekly reflections of 2-6 pages each.
5. I need to work on my literature review.
6. Oh, and I have my full-time job and my marriage. Those also deserve some time.

My panic right now is the fact tha I will be going to see Where the Wild Things Are on Friday, going to a U2 concert on Sunday in L.A., then heading back home and going to a concert Regina Spektor on Monday, thus losing a lot of possible study time. I think the movie may have to go just to allow myself time to get ahead on my weekly writing and reading assignments.

I'm already saying no to my friend's idea of starting a Magic: the Gathering sealed-deck league, and really still hoping to put together an actual Athanor campaign, but I think that can wait until after the quarter is complete.

Now, I might keep up just fine. These days I write blogs on the shuttle trip up to work, which means I crank something out most days. But I may find myself needing that time to crank out assignments, and may end up doing transcription or video editing on my laptop on the shuttle. (Not an activity I ever thought I would have thought possible when I bought my first computer, a Mac Plus, in 1989.)

So if I disappear from the blogosphere for a while, it isn't a big deal. (Not that most of the planet would notice.) I will be back. Consider that either a promise or a threat based on how much you like the blog.

Last Night's Dream

I can't remember more than being in a used book store and finding a huge cache of old RPGs: copies of the Fantasy Trip/Advanced Melee/Advanced Wizard, original Arduin books (including ones that never actually existed) and several 70s-era digest-sized RPGs and D&D supplements (that also never really existed), and trying to figure out how I could even begin to afford everything I wanted, especially since I knew I might never see them again!

Mapping the Undercity

As I write this, I am finishing up my presentation day at the conference. I have breakfast tomorrow, then I'm back to the airport for a flight back to San Diego. By the time I post this, though, I'll probably either be in the airport or back home.

I'm a strange social animal. Put me in a defined role in a defined place (in front of a class, making a presentation, doing an orientation program, doing my job, DMing) and I'm outgoing and very social. When I'm done, I'm back to being an introvert. So when I'm at these conferences, I have a hard time sitting in the bar doing the networking other people do. I do my talk or go to the presentations I want, talk to my wife on the phone, and go to my room to read, write, or sketch.

This trip, I took some time to start sketching out old-school megadungeon maps. I have 4 done, and may have more done by the end of the weekend. I'm hoping to put together 9 of them. Keys will come much later. Hell, I still haven't put in doors and the like yet.

This has been an odd experience for me since I haven't really run a dungeon crawl since I was eighteen. That's almost twenty-four years. I stopped because I had decided at the time that dungeons were silly and illogical, and that I had better things to do with my GMing time. Diving into other games for quite some time, the dungeon never came up again.

As I started thinking about Athanor, I put mentions of the Undercity into my early notes because I decided that the dungeon allows for something I had wanted to do with Athanor -- include elements of the gratuitously bizarre and alien. Stange monsters, horrifying traps, and alien architecture would seem out of place in the middle of a city, even an ancient city filled with crumbling ruins of buildings like Zamora. Why would people allow them to continue to exist? Wouldn't someone just demolish them? Wall them off? Burn them down? But in a strange and dangerous underground, such weirdness takes on a mythical quality. Odd things are under the city, like baby alligators grown to huge proportions or C.H.U.D in the sewers. The dungeon transforms from a silly affectation to a weird mythical underground.

So I've started mapping it out, at least. Just need to figure out what to do with it....

Some Thoughts on Playing Fourth Edition, As If You Cared

We are several sessions into a mid-level D&D 4e campaign, and I don't hate it. Don't love it either, but I enjoy the group, and there are aspects of the game I do like and others that seem flat. None of it deeply offends me, though. But I do have some basic impressions that have developed with experience.

It is Both More and Less Complex Than 3.x
You heard me, I'm trying to have it both ways. The complexity of some combat rules are simpler to track (grappling, tripping, standing), the skill system is cleaner, the classes clearer and less easily turned into weird multiclass munchkin combos, and less likely to have one or two classes outshine other players in "screen time." There are fewer buffs and debuffs. But tracking marks and conditions takes a lot more work.

Combat is Long
I'm not convinced it's much longer than 3.x edition, and it sure isn't much worse than a typical Champions game, but none of those statements really does much to provide a good comparison. While increased hit points and slower, more steady increases in damage are part of the issue, so is the lack of save-or-die effects. While this does eliminate the anticlimactic 3.x dogpile on the one big monster tactic which will result in a one-quarter monster death, it can make simple fights drag out and do create less time for non-combat things.

Some of this is also DM encounter design. If I were running the game, there would probably be a bigger use of minions in large numbers with a few major monsters to create both interesting tactical dilemmas and opportunities for controllers and area affect attacks to shine. And to provide opportunities for badassery by PCs followed by having PCs handed their asses by non-minions. We seldom see minions, and often face big battles rather than several encounters over the course of a session.

Combat is Still Deadly
We have at least one person making death checks per game every game. As the party defender, that person is usually me.

Resource Management is Still There, It's Just Different
As a side note, this sort of encounter undermines the interesting but very different management issues of the game. Rather than managing spells, equipment and hit points as absolutes, play now involves managing per-encounter abilities and hit points; and daily powers, items, action points and healing surges. This makes a different tactical play style, but not alien to the earlier versions.

Teamwork is Key
And learning to synergize abilities, control and move across the battlefield, and use the team to set each other up to advantage is more closely integrated into the rules.

Defined Rules Lead to Ignoring the Really Cool Flexibility on DMG p. 42
The stunting rules and the page 42 table to figure out how to adjudicate them are one of the coolest things in the game. Getting my friends to see that is a challenge. It would be easy to blame them, but I think the very defined ruleset contributes a lot to the lack of desire to fudge things. This is very sad.

Hacking the Game isn't as Easy
Some parts are actually fairly easy to hack. New feats and races aren't so hard, though the tight balances assumed in the basic rules mean that finding mechanical ways to distinguish different races or feats may be hard to achieve. Coming up with new classes is downright hard. Coming up with a class means not only class abilities, but powers structured over 30 levels, including at least two paths in the class... which sounds more like work to me and less like fun.

Summary
In the end, it's a decent game. It's not crazy to see that it is an evolution of D&D: clearly so from 3.x, not so clearly so from the LBBs. It doesn't play like 2.x or later, but it plays well. All that said, I wouldn't run it without some major limits — it might be interesting to run a sword and sorcery game with only martial classes, a 10th level cap, humans only, and magic only in the form of rituals. But for now, I'll look elsewhere for games to DM.

I swear I'm not dead.

Most of my time has been spent on preparing a presentation for the Council of Education annual conference on Friday (I'm leaving for San Antonio tomorrow morning), reading more Bourdieu for my dissertation literature review, and spending time with my wife. Less of it has been spent on Athanor, but I have done some stuff. The blog has been left to gather moss and cobwebs. Sorry, regular readers.

One of the Athanor related bits of work was reorganizing my house rules and setting information into three little brown books. Ill post those eventually. The other was retooling skills again to use Akrasia's skill system for Swords and Wizardry. Though eloquent words have been spoken by people like Jeff Rients on the reasons some folks dislike skill systems, I have found skill systems useful since I first discovered Runequest back in 1983.

On the other hand, using skills in a system like D&D or a simulacrum of it is always an odd fit, since some of the elements of a skill system are already inherent in the game itself in the form of classes, saves, and to hit roll progressions. Heck, even the skill system for thieves in Supplement I and beyond has seemed out of place. That's why I am avoiding either inherent penalties for characters trying to do things their characters aren't skilled at doing on paper and why I'm trying short lists of very broad skills.

Oddly, Athanor has slowly morphed into something resembling a version of Tunnels and Trolls using D&D mechanics. I have rearranged the classes in a way that mimics T&T's three main classes, have rethought the saving throw mechanic in ways similar to T&T's, but not adopted a magic point system or the combat system. I'm happy with it so far. Some day I need to post the updated PDFs.

Finding time to run a game is a bigger challenge. School starts up again soon, and for me that means work ramps up as at the same time as I return to classes. It also means that I need to push hard to get through some more literature so I can start working on a new and largely rewritten-from-scratch-after-all-my-work-last-year version of my literature review. On top of that, I am actually playing in one continuing 4e game and am going to play in a game that will be another friend's first time DMing (and he has only been playing D&D for a few months, so this may be interesting....) So time. Yeah, that'll be a challenge.

Once I get a sense of the pace of this quarter, things may get better. If not, it will be clearer, so I can make more clear commitments of my time, and cut some jetsam loose to streamline the ship.

I'm all wrapped up in chaos, but procrastinating with crafts...

Well, I'm busy at work, behind on putting together a workshop that I need to present on the 11th, and behind on reading a stack of journal articles. That means the blog is paying the price....

On the gaming front, though, I have been experimenting with putting together small digest-sized booklets for running Athanor on a tabletop, which has gone well. I have figured out how to flip copies over in my laser printer so that I stop misaligning double-sided copies, and now this is going swimmingly. The only problem I'm having lately is finding an appropriate-sized box to feel like I have my own whitebox set.

But Chgowiz comes to the rescue, with his tale of a cheap craigslist find of the original little brown books and his box solution (based on the similar tale of box-finding by a OD&D forum reader). Voila, a quick look at the Joann web site and there it is... a paper mache book box, just like the one I saw at Micheal's that was too small, but sized just about the 6"x9" size I need for the task.

Now the next time my wife heads to Joann for fabric and craft goodies, I can pick up the box, some craft paints, and go to town.

I'll post some photos when I have it all put together.

Well, back to work on the stuff that pays the bills.

Access vs. Individuality

One of the things that has been interesting to me over the last year has been reviewing older versions of D&D to see them with fresh eyes. I’m currently playing in my best friend’s 4th edition campaign, and one of the players at my table is a RPG newbie. Teaching him the nuances of 4th edition have been easier, from what I have experienced, than teaching similar levels of experience in 3rd edition, but it seems to me that the whole idea of teaching the later versions of D&D to a player new to role-playing games is a much bigger leap than teaching new players the rules of the game when I first started.

Some of this is because so much of the rules mastery portion of older versions of D&D was distributed differently. In Ye Olden Days, the DM was the only one who had to master much of the rules structure—though there were always older players who had learned things as well, often because they were DMs, too (but sometimes because they were just rules lawyers.) This was also because there was less in the way of choice for players in developing characters in the rules. The limited customization options and rules-opaqueness were good for hopping right in.

However, the down side was often a period when new players for whom the restrictions and tropes of the game were not central conceits, became frustrated with the arbitrary limits of the game. (“Why can’t my wizard learn to fight with a sword? Can’t he just take some fencing lessons? Why can’t I increase my strength? Can’t I just start exercising?”) That’s where limited options become a challenge to overcome for new players.

So I understand why over time different RPGs began to include more options to customize characters. I’m all for players having choice, and I’m supportive of customizing characters to help players feel that their characters are different from the next player’s. But choice often leads to complexity, which leads to puzzled new players who start to look panicked as you tell them to start making choices about their characters when they don’t know the impact of them.

As I put together my house rules, I want to make sure the game stays in a shape that allows play with minimal rules mastery, focusing instead on smart play that involves players mastering their interaction with the game world. However, I want players to feel that their characters have some depth and are different from each other, which is harder to do in an environment of limited class options and limited rules elements to distinguish characters. Yes, it’s good to make your character’s personality his or her difference, but my experience is that players want their characters to have something in game play that distinguishes them, too. That’s a major reason for the proposed skill system I have been working on, though I also want to encourage the kind of specialization (personality, play style) that I find actually is more enduring in play.

Setting up a game is hard. Boo-hoo for me.

The problems are twofold: one is my desire to run a game with people I know and like and the limited schedules I and my friends face as thirty- and forty-somethings with, you know, lives. I work full time and am a doctoral student, my best friend is a nurse who also still does some work as a massage therapist and is focused on completing his first novel. I have other friends whose life is complicated by living some 30 minutes or more drive away. This all means that weekdays are hard to schedule, and weekends are very precious.

I could run things as PBEM or PBP, but I need to learn more about the formats, and I actually like running a face-to-face game. So if I want this to happen, I suppose I need to make the time on my schedule, and face the possibility that I might need to recruit players into my game including people I just don't know -- something I haven't done in ages. Most of the time, players started with friends, who helped me recruit friends of friends, making the job easier.

In short, I have gotten lazy. And, frankly, spoiled. I'm not enamored of going through screening people and since I game these days in my own home, I'm not enamored of bringing in total strangers. I realize that I am much more averse to risk than I was as a teenager or twenty-something year old. After all, gaming for strangers at a con or a game store is a different sort of thing than having a stranger drop by your house, especially given the fact that many of the gamers I have known (and even played with) over the years have been people I gladly saw once a week or month at a neutral place, but might not have invited over to my house.

Well, at some point I need to suck it up.

I can put that off for at least another day, though. I'm back to work after a three week vacation (and by vacation, I mean three weeks off work doing academic research), and I think that will keep me busy for at least a week catching up on things....

Back to thinking about skills and magic

The past week I have been immersed in my life as an student -- my three-week summer "vacation" for the last three weeks have involved a few days settling into a new apartment, a few days of down-time for the San Diego Comic-Con and the visitors who came to our house as a result, and the rest of my time has been filled by intensive reading in psychology, sociology, and educational theory. I'm about 80 pages into a journal of notes on the stuff after about 2 weeks, but this is what's going to keep me on track to finish what I need to finish by the end of next year so that I can advance to candidacy for my Ed.D. But enough of the personal griping. The point is, my academic life has put the gaming blog life on the back burner again, but as always, stuff is brewing back there.

As I was thinking about my problems with skills and magic, my mind seized upon the old Different Worlds reprint of the first edition of Empire of the Petal Throne that I had sold ten years ago before moving from Santa Cruz to San Diego. In EPT, Dr. Barker included, I remembered in a moment of procrastination, a set of skills and magic rules that, while inspired by D&D, had some key differences.

On top of this, I started looking at Gygax's AD&D 1st edition "secondary skills" list. There may be some sort of solution in that, I thought to myself.

Normally, this is where I would post some draft rules I had cobbled together, but frankly, I'm not there yet. But maybe after I finish the chapter of Sociology of Education I'm reading, I'll start on something.

In Which I Whine a Bit, and Then Get Over It

Right now, Athanor is a design exercise. Life has lately dealt me a hand which is not full of lots of extra time. For instance, next week begins my three-week "vacation" -- which is just a vacation from my job. I plan to use most of that time reading, writing, and working on my literature review for my dissertation. By the end of next year I need to have a full lit review, research proposal, and IRB proposal approved, so my free time tends to end up filled with research.

Working full-time while getting your doctorate takes up a lot of time.

At some point, and some point in the fairly near future, I just need to start making time to run this thing. Back when I was an undergraduate (in the mists of the mid-to-late 1980s), finding time for such things was easy. Of course, I had a part-time job, none of my friends worked full-time, I was pretty good at procrastination and just-in-time course completion, I wasn't married, and didn't even have a dog to take care of. I could just have a few friends walk to my door and we'd run a game once a week. Easy.

These days, my gaming friends are scattered across the county and the country, their schedules are hard to coordinate, and everyone has an opinion about what games they will and absolutely will not play. It's a much bigger pain in the butt. And my wife isn't particularly interested in playing either. Sigh.

As a result, I sense that my work Athanor is missing a sense of mission, place and urgency. Designing and organizing a game, while fun and worthwile to watch, is always a bit less satisfying than running the game. Largely, I think, because the real game isn't in what the DM does, but in what the players do, and how they give life and favor to the campaign.

Some thoughts on my gaming past

I realize as the gaming blogs blaze by the light of the ongoing skirmishes between system warriors that such fights seem silly to me. I'm a games omnivore, with piles of card and board games at home, and having sold more games that I collected than I ever could have played. It's my nature, I guess, always collecting, reading, cannibalizing, and occasionally selling off collections to clear out room or get ready for a move (my most epic sell-off was in 2000 when I moved from Santa Cruz to San Diego. I sold half of my RPG collection for $500 cash and #250 credit to a local used bookstore. Considering the pittance of value I got and the fact that I tripled their used RPG section, this seems rather epic to me.)

So, thinking on this, I began to consider all the games I have run or GMed. This gives me the following list. Asterisks mark games I have DMed. I have collected, read and stole from many times this list, too, but this is my play history:

AD&D (often mixed with BD&D and Arduin)*
AD&D 2nd Edition
Champions/Hero System*
D&D 3.x Edition(s)*
D&D 4th Edition
Fading Suns
Feng Shui*
Gamma World*
GURPS
Kult
Legend of the Five Rings
Mage*
Mutants and Masterminds*
Star Frontiers
Top Secret
Traveller
Twilight 2000
Werewolf

What do I make of this? Not much, really. But I think the best part of gaming is playing with people you like, so the idea of system fealty leading to ongoing vitriol -- against games, gamers, or publishers -- just seems alien to me.

Work, moving, and some light at the end of the tunnel.

I'm trying to get back into a publishing schedule again, but I'm really just keeping my head above water right now. I have a backlog of notes that will be published over the next few days and a long list of notes that list ideas for most posts.

However, even though I have just finished 12 days of Freshman Orientation work, I am also moving this weekend, so stuff will be crazy for a few more days. So, there will be some automated posts over the next few days, and I'll be back to cranking out some ideas...

Slow posting ahead...

Spring quarter is my worst time of the year. Work and school converge into a horrible morass which impinges on things like writing and gaming. And my time with my wife. So Athanor may be on the back burner for the next month or so as I write lesson plans for orientation, rewrite publications, work on a literature review, and try to keep up on my reading.

If only writing a game up counted for my school work...

However, if I get through this week's school frenzy, I have promised myself that I would get some gaming material written.