Monster shirts

Man, I need about 10 of these. Wish I'd thought of this.

Interesting times for D und D

Last week, Goodman Games announced that they will start selling 3rd edition D&D stuff again. I am so far out of the loop these days I need binoculars to make out that there even is a loop anymore. But even from here I can see the sparks this thing is throwing off.

Goodman Games basically exists because of the Open Gaming License (OGL), which let outside publishers freely make D&D-compatible game products. It started with their weirdest product, Broncosaurus Rex, combining dinosaurs, science-fiction, the wild west, and the Civil War into one wonderful mashup that screamed, "Now I can publish my secret home campaign for reals!"

Things quickly got more commercial, and Mr. Goodman has made a nice little company out of the whole deal.

Goodman Games was maybe the first and definitely the loudest independent publisher to jump on the official 4e bandwagon. They proclaimed they were all in before the paperwork was done explaining exactly what "all in" meant.

But when the paperwork did come down, it said that official 4e publishers had to not produce any 3e stuff, and couldn't use the official "3e compatible" logo anymore (seen at right). Which meant that anything with the logo printed on it either had to get sold quick, junked, or covered with a sticker.

For most publishers, this meant, "sold quick, and junk the leftovers."

I don't know anybody's sales numbers for 4th edition-compatible products, although Mr. Goodman himself flashed around some comments earlier this year pronouncing the sales were good enough considering the market (my words, not his). However, I humbly submit that if 4e sales were all that great, Goodman Games wouldn't be reprinting old material.

If you thought sales of recent product were sufficient, if you thought they were going to be strong, you wouldn't go back to offering old product. You would invest in more new stuff. Yet one of the most successful independent publishers, who was ready to burn his boats a couple years ago, just refitted and relaunched the fleet. A fleet that potentially competes with his latest offerings.

From a symbolic standpoint, this is kind of a slap for 4e. From a reading-between-the-lines standpoint, this means that nobody except Wizards is making good money on it. And I wouldn't bet on Wizards, frankly. In fact, professionally speaking, I haven't.

The repopularization of RPGs pt 2

Fourth edition D&D has been correctly identified as inspired by MMOs. This is a good idea on paper, but that inspiration was a doomed choice by Wizards' game designers. It would be better to capitalize on what tabletop is good at (i.e., interaction), and minimize what it is bad at (fiddly mechanics). Instead, they chose to create a game that largely removes judgment calls, yet apes a complex game form, while reducing the complexity.

Thus you get neither the full human involvement of tabletop games, nor the full complexity of MMOs. The worst of both worlds.

The only way this makes sense is if 4th edition is preparation for a 5th edition, a game where people sit around face to face with computers doing the complex mechanical parts. This mythical 5th edition D&D would play to the strengths of both forms of games simultaneously, and could herald a resurgence of tabletop RPGs.

This is not a new idea, but the technology has never been so tantalizingly real. Before, it's just been imaginable as a good idea. Now, we can do it.

Laptops seemed to embody this promise, but in practice the form factor has been too clunky.

The Surface would be excellent for this, except:
1) It's not even available to the public.
2) It's wildly expensive.
3) The surface of a Surface is small. It's like trying to play D&D on one of those sit-down cocktail Ms. Pac Man machines.

Those are all surmountable in 10 years or so. Problem number 4 is not:

4) A single character sheet contains far too much information to display on the play surface itself.

For most tabletop RPGs, the character sheet is the most-used, and I'll go so far as to say, most important reference tool in the game. This concept has come over pretty much unchanged to computer RPGs, where the game takes you to a separate screen/tab/what-have-you to present your character's capabilities.

The amount and detail of information is so dense, there's no way to put that on the same computer interface everyone else is trying to use. You need a dedicated "screen" for every player.

This is what the Apple tablet is for, and what the iPhone can do right now. It's theoretically inexpensive enough that every player could have one. Someone will write an app that keeps track of fiddly things for you. (Character sheet apps are available now.) All the tablets/iPhones logged into the same session could talk to each other. And human interaction returns to its proper role as arbiter of information.

This will require another revision of the rules, however, because 4th edition rules will be naively simple for all that processing power. And with the useful complexity shuffled behind the technological curtain, it will be more open for new and younger players.

Roleplaying games are coming back. It will never be a popular fad again like in Gygaxian times of yore, but only because it will never be a fad again.

The repopularization of RPGs pt 1

This video has been making the rounds of geekdom lately. It's a rough demo of D&D playable on the Microsoft Surface. It's popular with good reason, because it is the nascent future of tabletop RPGs.

D&D is nowhere near as cool as it was 20 years ago (much less 30 years ago), but it still has millions of players worldwide. World of Warcraft touts their 11 million subscribers. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many people also play D&D once a month.

Eleven million people is a decent customer base, and professional hobbyists have programmed extremely complex programs (Campaign Cartographer and Fantasy Grounds to name two) which cater to them.

People talk about the wonderful social aspects of MMOs, but building and maintaining a friendship in an MMO is like building a ship in a bottle -- a lot of delicate work done through a desperately small opening.

The very best social platform is F2F. In games, you can only do this with a LAN party, a LARP, or around a table. LAN parties and LARPs are very resource intensive. They go away after a certain stage in life. Tabletop games remain viable regardless of age, station, or income.

The part of games that MMOs do best is automating tedious, precise mechanics. Players have complained about the difficulty of running 3rd edition D&D, but even that is checkers compared to the multiple thousandths-of-a-percentage mechanics a single home computer adjudicates running WoW.

More on this tomorrow.

Two Gen Con stories

When Gen Con was still in Milwaukee, the local Christian evangelists took to the streets to save souls through signs and pointed questions and pestering. I never scorned them -- they're brothers in Christ, even if they're from a branch of the family I don't talk to much. But as a gamer, I could see their tactics were poor.

I felt bad just ignoring them, so I would acknowledge them when I passed, which was usually the opening they wanted.

Except I don't need re-saving. I was exactly the person they didn't want to talk to. Yet somehow, that never seemed acceptable to them. I got into some strange conversations with evangelicals looking for something to convert rather than someone to love.
Story 1
A guy with long, stringy hair a beard, a baseball cap. Pictures and scripture painted on his truck. A sign condemning sinners stands in the street, next to the sidewalk. It was the day before the con started; all of us were still getting warmed up. A friend and I were walking back from Kinko's to the convention center.

"Do you know what you have to do to be saved?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"What is it?"
"Don't you know?" I asked him, confused.
"I do, I want to know if you do."
"What do you say it is?" (Jesus judo ends theological arguments way faster.)
"Don't you know?"
"Yeah, but I want to know what you say."

We did that routine two more times before he revealed,

"Read the Bible every day!"
"That's not it," I said. "You have to believe in Jesus to be saved. That's what the Bible says."

He was indignant. My friend was already half a block ahead of me, so I left to catch up. I saw the dude later in the convention, but I crossed the street because I didn't want to talk to him again.

Story 2
As I walked by a man with a sign and a Christian t-shirt, I said hello.

He asked me if I knew what would happen to me if I died that night. A classic hard-sell evangelical opener, one I've never used myself, because it's such a theological crotch kick.

I actually had somewhere to be, and was with friends again, so I didn't stop to talk. We had this whole conversation while I was on the move.

"Yes," I said, walking by him. "I'll go to Heaven."

"Well let me ask you something else," he said as I walked on, looking back. "Will you go to Heaven if you commit suicide?"

This is the Catholic test. If you think Catholics aren't real, true Christians, you can sometimes lure the confused (I mean, open) ones into a conversation this way.

"Yes." I said louder, because I was farther down the block now.

That's right!" he shouted.

"I know!" I shouted back.

Jesus and D&D

Every once in a while someone in my extended circle puts together the idea that I'm a Christian and a professional D&D writer and asks my advice on how I resolve conflict in those two things. The true, but uninformative answer is that there is no conflict, and now would you like some pie?

I don't usually give that answer, because it's not really the question being asked. The real question is, "I'm intellectually stuck between my religion and my joy. Can you get me unstuck?"

I usually can't, because that's between you and God, friend. But sometimes I can offer some helpful ideas the person hasn't come up with on his own. (It's always a dude.) Here are anonymized excerpts from what I wrote the other night to a friend who asked me that question:

Whenever I've talked with people about this kind of stuff, one of the primary things I try to get across is that God is the main thing. There's nothing particularly satanic about D&D/fantasy/speculative thinking, but if it's getting in the way of God, then God gets to win. I've talked to people who have a lot personally invested in D&D, and who, in conversations with family members, try to "win" their point. That's a tenuous place to even start, much less finish. God must be the main thing you're trying to get to, or else you're going to spin out on some useless tangent.

I find this to be true for me, and I suspect for you as well: There is something true and deep that fantasy sparks in you. Like pretty much everything in a world bent with original sin, it isn't inherently evil. Football, sailing, welding, D&D -- anything can be twisted toward evil if you go that way with it. It can also be straightened to bring out love and truth.

But since fantasy has particular meaning to you, it's more likely to do you good or ill than say, welding. Especially if it's affected you deeply enough that you've ever struggled with it.

Therefore, removing it from your life might protect you from harm. But it also walls off the potential good that could come. Which is more important to you? To God?

These are not rhetorical questions, and you might find they have different answers at different times. God might want you to back off from something at some point to protect you, but that doesn't mean God always wants that. That's why we have a new covenant. Jesus lets us replace law with relationship.

As a result, categorically eliminating things that have potential to be spiritually destructive becomes problematic. It creates a religion that forces you into a tiny, contorted shape.

Instead, look to a living, interactive God for answers, rather than a set of principles designed to protect you from evil. From this perspective, the way forward becomes: Spend as much time as you can going toward God, and as little time as you can trying to get away from evil.

The essential problem I have with the sorts of ideas concerned Christians typically espouse here is that they focus on the evil. That's not an inherently bad goal, but evil is a vanishingly small blot in the infinite light of God. If you're spending much energy on evil -- sensing it, fighting it, escaping it, protecting others from it -- you've started in the wrong place. You start from God. Then you depend on God to tell you if evil is going to be a problem. You don't need to suss it out yourself. God is the one in charge. Your job is to love on God.

God makes all things good. God will pull truth and love out of whatever you're in. There is nothing too "evil" for God to redeem; even genuinely evil things (without the irony quotes) can be redeemed.

If what you're doing wanders into sin territory, the Spirit will convict you about that. In the meantime, ferreting out sin is not your job.Your job is to love on God. Wherever you are, whatever you're into, count on God to make it good. Because He will. He does. All the time.

I'll end with scripture, since that's one of the means we're supposed to use to make sure we're not kidding ourselves with trumped up ideas. Philippians 4:8 says, "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

If D&D points you toward true, noble, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy things, then think about D&D. If it does not, follow the thing that does point you toward those. Do not spend any more time on Satan than you must. God is sovereign, and knows what you need. Pay attention to God, and you will be steered well.

Interestingly, the real problem between Jesus and D&D -- which no one has ever asked me about -- is the idea that you solve problems and advance in the world by slaying your opposition. That methodology is wildly unChristlike. Killing your enemy is exactly the opposite of what Jesus said to do. It has no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. A major premise of the game is a lie.

But it's a fun lie, so I keep playing.

Google Wave: invited

Ok, thanks to Jon, I have a Google Wave account. So far, I'm a little baffled.

My friend, Dave, summed up the stutter-start with Wave (on Google Wave):

Hmmmm. There's a lot of interesting and useful tech here. Now all I need is an idea big enough for it to fit into. you know, a reason to use it.

I can see the business application easily, but the social media-esque applications are missing me, especially with limited choice of people to talk to.

Furthermore, and I think this is my central dromedary hump, I have a mindset that works well with unbroken streams of time. The regular Internet is a pretty hefty distraction as is, but talkative friends whose work styles differ from mine, or whose jobs don't require as much focus, can wreck an afternoon.

I'm still very interested in Google Wave. I particularly like the idea of using it for event planning with large groups of people. I can also envision a robust PBEM DnD game. I plan to make time to fiddle with it in the upcoming weeks.

Name your poison

Another quick story from D&D last week
When the first encounter started and everyone rolled initiative, I went around the table asking for characters' names so I could write them next to their initiative results. Since it was the first night, not everyone was totally ready. Jason hadn't named his character yet.

Flashback: About 10 years ago when we started playing our first 3e campaign in Seattle, we had that same moment. Stan! hadn't named his gnome character, and was futzing around for one at the last minute. Dave, former editor of Dungeon and Dragon magazines, said, "The punishment is that we call you something like Blobbo. If you don't come up with a name soon, that name will stick, and then we'll all call you that for the rest of the campaign."

Realizing this horrible truth, Stan! quickly devised Herumann, who went on to become a beloved curmudgeon and coward, hopelessly attempting to interject common sense into a rotating cast of D&D adventurers for the next several years.

Sadly, Blobbo stuck anyway. The name followed Herumann at a respectful distance for the rest of his career.

Jason's character was briefly named Blobbo last Thursday, because he wanted to take the time to come up with a campaign-appropriate elf name. (+50 experience points!) I didn't even try to make Blobbo stick. The name has enough stickiness all by itself.

Bonus Story: After the Blobbo incident, I moved onto Dave (a different Dave), who hadn't named his character yet either. Fearing the worst, Dave blurted out "Paul Oakenfold!"

Sure, technically, that name is already taken, but if you complain about D&D players stealing names, you have outed yourself as a solid n00b.

D&D: New campaign kickoff

Started my brand new D&D campaign tonight. If you've been following my blog spoor for the last year, you might have noticed I've been screwing around with a wiki for this thing. Now, open for business!

I've spent a hella lot of time laying groundwork and spelling out rules, and it's still not done.

Important Lesson: You're never really done.

But it was surprisingly thorough. I'm methodical as a tornado when I write. I blow through town and look back once I'm done. Sometimes I've hit everything, and other times I've left whole blocks mysteriously untouched. I don't have a system. I just make up stuff until some outside constraint makes me stop.

So going in, I didn't know whether I'd written enough to make tonight work. But then I said, "Well, in the wiki..." about a dozen times in answer to questions. So I think I got all the vital stuff in.

Important Lesson: Don't worry about getting it all right. It's a game you're playing with friends.

Important Lesson: Just because it's in the text doesn't mean anyone else knows it's there.

I made the experience point totals for level gain a little higher, using a conglomeration of different Pathfinder experience gain rates. Then I told them that I'd award extra XP for people who enable group enjoyment by doing out-of-game things to make things more fun. The player who takes notes or handles mapping or draws a group shot or takes pics of minis gets an XP bonus. I hoped to encourage players to be creative and contribute on their own terms instead of doing all the work solo. This idea was poo-pooed, so it might not last.

Instead, I might use a variation on Sean Reynolds's Alternative Level Advancement System. I like Sean's idea, but changing your character every single session is too much paperwork in an already paperwork-heavy game.

Important Lesson: Adults with kids don't necessarily have the giveadamn to write character journals. In the long run, a bennie meant to encourage participation could begin to feel like a penalty on people who don't want to participate.

I thought having the rules online would be a good way to get everything out to the players so I wouldn't have to be the sole source of information. Also I hoped it would require me to lug fewer books to the game.

But the concept is a little ahead of the group's hardware capacity. Nobody brought a laptop or usable wireless device to let them look up stuff. We wound up using books anyway, which don't quite mesh with the fifty-'leben ways I've tweaked the d20/Pathfinder rules sets.

Important Lesson: Oops.

After a lot of shuffling papers and answering questions, characters were done, except for the niggling details that no one ever firms up until the third game anyway. I thought that'd be it. Good work everybody, see you in two weeks.

No! They demanded we play tonight! Begin tonight! Begin fighting! Tonight!

Since one of our regulars was absent, I didn't want to get too deep into the first adventure. So I used the time-tested, beloved pacing device DMs and comic book writers have used for decades. I threw in a combat. It wasn't meaningless, but it was off the cuff.

Important Lesson: Come more prepared than you think you'll need. And come prepared to improvise.

Red Hand of Done

This past week, my players finished the Red Hand of Doom, slaying High Wyrmlord Azzar Kul, vanquishing his summoned Aspect of Tiamat, and saving the human lands of Elsir Vale from diabolical infestation. Only two characters died in the process!

The amazing thing is how well their plans worked.

How a normal D&D plan works
At the beginning of any major set piece, the players develop a loose plan of action.
Round 1: Deploy plan.
Round 2: Something unforeseen manifests, and the plan is left swinging on one hinge.
Rounds 3-10: Everyone runs around relying on their best tricks until somebody's out of hit points.

That is how pretty much every D&D fight goes that I've ever run or played in. The interesting parts are coming up with the plan, and then coping during the plan's lumbering demise.

How this one was different
The plan more or less worked like they meant for it to. The hitters flew up a 100 foot shaft invisibly, wailed on the bad guy in a surprise round, and finished him before he ever got a chance to respond. The rest of the group clambered up just in time to see Tiamat manifest. Judicious application of resources made the fight hard, but winnable.

Several times in their adventuring careers, the party has been in worse shape, and far less certain of outcome. At first, I wondered if I did them a disservice by making it too easy. But today I decided I didn't. I mean, it was no half-speed move action among cakes. They took their lumps. Two PCs died (conveniently, the two whose players had dropped out of the game), and everyone else took serious damage (except for the monk whom Tiamat quickly surmised as a minor threat).

The feeling of mastery and completion though, made it seem like, for once, the players leveled up. They put together a plan, hit their marks, and used gumption to solve the problem. Yay players! Yay D&D!

Some weeks, the game is totally 20 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours. But it never seems like it's not worth it.

Good company

A game project I worked on has just had the full author list revealed. Check it out at Paizo.com: Guide to the River Kingdoms.

Here's the author list:

Eric Bailey, Kevin Carter, Elaine Cunningham, Adam Daigle, Mike Ferguson, Joshua J. Frost, James Jacobs, Steve Kenson, Rob Manning, Colin McComb, Alison McKenzie, China Miéville, Brock Mitchel-Slentz, Jason Nelson, Richard Pett, Chris Pramas, Jeff Quick, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Neil Spicer, Lisa Stevens, Matthew Stinson, and John Wick.

A plurality of writers is usually a bad sign, but it makes sense for the fractious River Kingdoms, land of the politically improbable. Once again, I'm fairly happy with my work on this book.

Also, please note that I've now worked on a project with China Mieville. That's one for the weaselly self-promotional bio!

The French Capital

I was reading up on how Napoleon rebuilt Paris today, and I found a fantastic original source: The New York Times.

They've scanned and made available their entire archive, and this story, dated "December 13, 1867, Wednesday" was a treat. In addition to the useful information, I read the top journalistic stylings of 150 years ago. It's quite a bit chattier than I'd expected.

You'll need to log in, and then download a pdf, but it's worth the hassle. Here's bugmenot if you're a privacy goon like me.

Check that out.

D&D TV?

Hasbro teams up with the Discovery Channel to have its own TV network.

The consumer protector in me cringes at the thought of having a toy and game company broadcasting from its own media outlet. (I'm less bothered about separation of church and state than I am separation of editorial and advertisement in modern life.)

But everything else in me thinks this is such. a great. idea.

I hope it works!

Players, they grow up so fast

Last week at D&D, I noticed nearly all my players brought their own dice. When we started playing 3 years ago, I provided dice for everyone. I was so proud of how far they've come.

So proud, I almost killed them all with a blue dragon and a behir.

WotC pres speaks on PDFs

Greg Leeds, president of WotC, started doing some PR work, giving an interview at EnWorld.org over the the PDF brouhaha. According to bios I found on the Web, he's worked at Hasbro since 2001 in a couple of capacities -- as General Manager of the boys toys group, and some time later head of Hasbro's international marketing -- and was general manager at Samsonite before that. Look it up if you care.

Leeds took over at Wizards a smidge over a year ago, and started by killing WotC's vaunted, but woefully-implemented social networking site, Gleemax. Then he laid a bunch of people off. As I understand, some of them had it coming, and some were simply expensive expendables. Cleaning house is not the worst way for a new, corporate-appointed CEO to start, especially when the house was in such disarray. But it tends not to endear one.

His background is in neither publishing, nor games. True, Hasbro and Wizards both produce "games", but think of that in the same sense that humans and lamprey eels are both in the same Phylum. It doesn't mean we have anything to say to each other at parties.

So Mr. Leeds appears to be an experienced, not-incompetent marketing manger, cast into an entirely new industry. He's been on the job for a year, which, in my experience, is enough time to understand what it is that you don't know about what you're doing now. So that's who we're dealing with.

The interview is a by-the-numbers kind of thing. "Piracy is a substantial concern... We need to have a strong retail base...." Very little here that you couldn't have said if you knew who you needed to protect and who you needed to placate.

Couple of points of interest:

We do not have any plans to resume the sale of PDFs, but are actively exploring other options for the digital distribution of our content....
Along with the rest of the publishing industry, Wizards is also looking into new means of digital distribution. For our novels, we have recently introduced titles to Kindle and to Sony’s E-Reader and will continue to add titles to those offerings over the coming months.

PDFs are effed, but Kindle is in. If I'm reading him right, Leeds seems to think that other peoples' bandwagons will prevent piracy the iTunes way. By locking books into certain partner hardware, maybe they can slow piracy. Of course, they're already offering their books through their own system.

Its EULA says:

You understand that Wizards or its representatives may monitor all communications made by or received by you while using the Feature. You consent to the extraction of hardware system profile data and any data related to operation of the Feature.

Which means they will try to trace piracy of users through their Feature. I dunno... I call snoopware a Bug.

Exerting control like this seems likely to reduce piracy. Somewhat. It will definitely reduce sales. The installed base of people who can read is much larger than the base of people who own Kindles. Is the market not niche enough for WotC yet? Did they need a way to cut it finer?

If this does work, Wizards is in for an ugly 3 to 5 years while their hoped-for customer base follows them through the necessary hoops to make piracy somewhat more difficult. Seems like that's asking a lot, though.

Another quote:

...we conservatively estimate the ratio of illicit downloads to legally purchased copies was 10:1.

Listen, I can unconservatively estimate that by halting PDF sales, you have moved that ratio to 10:0. Great work, fellas. It's Miller time.

This doesn't sound like anything that will kill D&D, which has way more hit points than anyone would have estimated in 1980. But it does sound like a hindrance to WotC's customers -- not a deal-breaker, just one more discouragement that Wizards can ill afford right now. I suppose they could make the argument that not doing this could kill the company just as fast. I doubt it, but since we're all making it up as we go, no one's got the data to prove it. It's just a matter of who's most convincing at the top of the organization.

I have wanted to avoid comparing the current ownership to TSR in the mid '90s. I still believe they're more professional and more competent. They might have their heads in the same sand though.

WotC probably doesn't care what you think about PDF sales

I got an email the other night that basically every card-carrying D&D geek got, that said "Wizards of the Coast is out of the PDF-selling business in t-minus 12 hours." There has been predictable and understandable Internet furor over that.

A WotC rep showed up at enworld.org and left a post of which I will quote the relevant bits for you so you don't have to follow the link:

...due to recent findings of illegal copying and online distribution (piracy) of our products, Wizards of the Coast has decided to cease the sales of online PDFs. We are exploring other options for digitial distribution of our content and as soon as we have any more information I'll get it to you.

Other on-the-ball PDF retailers have taken clever advantage of the free publicity to point out that they're still happy to sell you their PDFs, and now offering special ha-ha-WotC sale prices good for the next few days. (They don't call them that. I called them that.)

This all reminds me of a post I tried to write about six months ago, which got long and recursive, and I never finished thinking through. Now, it seems inevitable that Wizards would give me another opportunity to unlimber these ideas.

The applicable one here being that someone at Wizards of the Coast -- not the whole company by any means, but someone -- is working furiously to rebottle the Internet genie. Furiously. This person has no idea how to behave when the business of selling electrons turns out to have different, and largely uncharted difficulties compared to selling atoms. And no idea what to do when the customer becomes a participant in the product.

No one does. No corporation has a clear idea of how to make money shifting electrons if they are not fortunate enough to have a near-monopoly. Individuals can do it, but large companies, even large companies full of Internet-savvy employees like Amazon and Google, don't know how to do this.

Clever people like Cory Doctorow and Kevin Kelly have come up with some interesting ideas about it. But they're making best guesses. (Although I highly recommend Kelly's list of Eight Generatives Better Than Free, especially if you are a publisher considering ceasing PDF sales.)

I would like to be indignant, and come to a trenchant conclusion, but I don't have one. (At least not a good one.) I'm guessing that what Wizards is doing makes sense from a certain legally-defensible standpoint. It's hard to know which of the many, many threats a business faces will strike a crippling blow. You try to make your list, and prepare for the biggest ones, and get to as many as you can while you can.

And so, seemingly, lower on the list than they've gotten to is the threat of falling out of touch with customers.

Here's maybe the one original idea I've got on this topic: They believe they're in touch with the customers they want to be in touch with. And they believe those customers are not that into PDFs. And they might be right.

Hasbro, owner of Wizards of the Coast, is a toymaker. They are used to thinking that their entire customer base turns over every few years. Maintaining an audience is never on their radar, because by the time you are 5 years old, you do not care about Mr. Potato Head any more. They have to sell Mr. Potato Head to a brand new crop of 2-year-olds.

Therefore, I might need to conclude that the people in charge are not interested in selling games to me any more. They want to sell Dungeons & Dragons to 12-year-olds. This does not mean that D&D is not suitable for 37-year-olds. It is just that the company is more interested in 12-year-old dollars.

Even if I'm right, since I don't have a look at their numbers, I can't tell whether that's a good business strategy. I think selling D&D is a different beast than selling Mr. Potato Head, and therefore, the process and goals must be different. But I can't tell. I can tell that lately, they're not creating game products I'm very interested in, which anecdotally at least, supports my theory.

If I'm right though, the card-carrying D&D geeks on Slashdot and enworld complaining about WotC's behavior is the equivalent of the dog complaining that the cat food tastes bad.

You can eat it if you want, but it's not for you, silly dog.

Kids these days: any other quests?

Ran an intro game of D&D for a couple of boys tonight, ages 12 and 10. I enjoy presenting D&D to brand new players, because they haven't been trained in roleplaying game-think yet.

When you've played enough of these demanding, complex games, you learn to see the game system first, and think in its framework. It's like learning art on a computer. Fantastically versatile programs exist to help you, but you wind up imagining inside the program's technical limitations.

So the D&D naif brings a jarringly unexpected set of assumptions to the table. (One woman I played with, who had a perfectly competent character, spent an entire session hiding in a cabinet. Because holy crap, people are shooting guns and fire blasts outside! Better to just stay safe.)

This has been my standard thinking for a long time about new players. But tonight, these kids tricked me by bringing a different jarringly unexpected set of assumptions to the table. Having already played the crap out of Final Fantasy and half a dozen other console RPGs, these kids were not D&D naifs. They were tabletop naifs. Drawing on unmediated experience to inform their behavior was strange territory.

Excerpts:

Me: If you run out of hit points you fall unconscious.
Kid: What's that?
Me: You fall unconscious every day. What's it like then?

Kid: How much does a backpack hold?
Me: You've got a backpack at home, right? It holds that much.

The standout of the evening came after presenting entirely unsubtle clues that the Mad Alchemist's cave awaited exploration, and that there might be treasure. The boys then decided to ask around town to see if there were "any other quests." Thanks to computer games, they (quite reasonably) assumed there would be a handful of townsfolk loitering, with various problems to be solved. They would get to pick the most appealing one.

Also in a paean to overcaution:

• Long minutes were spent on Hide skill practice, followed by confirming Spot checks to see how well hidden they were.
• Rabbinical attention was paid to the number of arrows carried, and recovered, after combat.
• The sorcerer brought 20 torches, and the dwarf purchased flint and tinder for firestarting, despite the fact that he can see in the dark.
• They purchased a 10-foot pole and a mirror, and used them frequently, in ways that would make Gary Gygax proud.
  

I enjoy attempting this sort of thing, but every time, I am humbled. Improvisation is a hard skill, and understanding your own expectations is at least half the experience.

2008: A fantastic year

Most years of this decade, I've come to a grim December and thought, "Man, that was a hard year. Hope the next one's got something better."

2008 broke my streak. 2008 has been a fantastic year. A lot of it is thanks to Meredith, who helps ground me by listening and taking me seriously. Highlights:

• Worked at the same place all year, at a job I basically like, without a long under-employed break -- an extra bump considering how lousy the year was for everyone's business.
• Started a hobby from scratch, and made some walking around money in the process.
• Restarted writing RPG material, and it was fun instead of nerve-wracking.
• Depression came, but did not stay this year.
• I'm energized rather than intimidated by the need to learn and stretch.

It is a fine time to be Jeff Quick. Thanks for reading, y'all.

Grognardia: Implicit Christianity in D&D

James Maliszewski writes Grognardia, a blog of ruminations on old school D&D in our new school times. The audience for this blog is focused like a laser, and those who find it interesting find it riveting.

I don't have that much love for original D&D. I never played it. I don't even like AD&D much. It's sprawling and occasionally contradictory, and the famed Gygaxian prose is nothing I've ever found quaintly endearing. There is something exhilarating about the spirit of the thing though, in the game's pulp origins and its seminal pastiche. Modern RPGs echo that spirit, but have meandered far from it.

This is what James attempts to articulate, in a smarter, more engaging, and kinder attempt than anyone else I've seen. Even if you disagree, it's clear that James is trying to communicate something, rather than rant.

Here's a fantastic recent entry on the implicit Christianity of early D&D, demonstrating yet again that anyone who thinks D&D interferes with Jesus is just not paying attention:

...I am now more firmly convinced than ever that early gaming, far from being "pagan," was in fact shot through with Christian belief, practice, and lore. It was always a kind of "fairytale Christianity" broadly consonant with American generic Protestantism rather than anything more muscular,...

As James alludes, early D&D -- really, any version of D&D -- has no interest in presenting Christ accurately. But the basic Christian-esque assumptions of early D&D are embarrassingly plain. How could anyone with a genuine interest in Jesus dwell on the lurid demon pictures and miss the Christian imagery? This is not a rhetorical question.

Note, that the Christ himself is not represented. He's too hi-res to appear accurately in the 9-bit morality of D&D. But he is there, as every other good and true idea the game addresses. And of course he's present among the players, where the real action is.

Bulette in plush, in process

Here's a bulette I started on a couple of nights ago. I copied the body pattern from a triceratops plush toy -- disassembled it and started reverse engineering a bulette from there.


I'm impressed by my copying! Like tracing comics when you're a kid, this is the beginning of how you learn to put these things together for yourself.

Next time, I'll try to figure out a way to get the tail up a little more. However, the triceratops provides no guidance on a bulette head, so piecing that together is much more trial and error.


Art Shop is next weekend, so I'll probably spend more time on monsters that use less experimental methods until then. Besides, this works like most of my projects do, I'm due to put it down and not touch it again until late December.