Nothing Risked, Nothing Gained

So my friend Charles- fellow DM and player in multiple of my campaigns and past adventures- started his own D&D blog, Late to the Adventuring Party, and he recently touched upon something that got my fingers so wiggly to write that I'll have to yet again postpone the much-noted post about my Labyrinth Lord campaign (but, by God, at least this post will have more substance than a simple call to foul gods).

Charles was talking about a recent Labyrinth Lord session of mine, one that ended with a poorly-employed Random Monster on my part but which resulted in Fun for all involved. A net gain, really, even with the horrible abuse I put the poor players through. What happened was this: the party- only three strong for want of hirelings- was camping out near a kobold warren to try to catch a man they have been told has been preying upon the kobolds. (The party had earlier discovered many kobold babies in the warren, and were about to try to slaughter the Kobold King- as they call him- when he shocked them by offering a peace treaty in exchange for their help.) After a fruitless first night, the party figured they'd camp out once more to see if the fiend would appear to make more shoes out of that supple baby kobold leather.

Well, I rolled some dice to see if anything interesting happened during any of the watches during the night, and lo and behold, something interesting was indeed to happen. On a lark I rolled on a wilderness Wandering Monster table and came up with that good ol' chap, the TROLL. I knew this was overkill. I knew the table said "tailor the actual result to your party." I knew the party didn't stand a chance. I knew all this- and I shrugged, laughed, and decided to, eh, see what would happen.

Well, the predictable happened. One of the heroes was dead before she knew what exactly was charging out of the woods at her and one of the others was chased down as he ran, slammed to the ground and beaten to a pulp. The third, the Elf, made it back to town, sprinting blind and furious in his bulky plate mail. (What a sight that must have been!)

It was a slaughter, of course. And it worries Charles that his own Labyrinth Lord character- Rabbi Rosencrantz (Charles decided his people needed more representation in fantasy worlds)- is as fragile as the thief who was torn literally asunder by a troll, or the young magic-using girl who was also torn literally asunder by a troll. It bothers him that in older editions death is not only a threat, but a very likely outcome to the life of adventuring.

I understand where he is coming from, especially knowing why he games and what he wants out of gaming. Suffice to say, it is very different from what I want out of gaming, and specifically what I want out of fantasy role-playing. My Editionity Crisis is partly founded on the unshakable feeling that 4th Edition characters are just Too Damn Healthy, too damn reliable in the old HP department. The very real touch of death inherent to older systems is one of the main draws for me, both as a DM and as a prospective player.

The very word ADVENTURE reeks of death and risk to me. Adventuring is not a safe career. It is not something someone with money, comfort, or choice really does. It's a stinking, sickly, dangerous job and only psychopaths, outcasts, the overzealous, and miscreants would really consider it. If adventuring was safe enough that simple resource management would see one through, I doubt many tombs would still have treasure left for any johnny-come-lately 1st Levels to ever find.

It can be called "realism" that death is so easy in older D&D, but it's not really that. "Realism" is so arbitrary to the system, the setting, and the very ethos of the game to be almost beyond consideration. No, to me it's about a risk/reward equation that is far better tuned- through a lack of tuning- than the current edition. Adventuring needs to be literally risky, literally deadly, to merit such rewards as magical swords that cleave the enemy in twain, piles of gold that would make a king blush, and arcane secrets so powerful the gods themselves wish them to remain buried in some foul swampy crypt rife with vermin, horrors, and the undead victims of disease and malady.

In my humble but of course 100% Accurate opinon, character death is what it's all about. Of course it sucks. Of course it's aggravating. That's kind of the point. Not only is it a great tool for learning from your mistakes, but it lends itself very naturally to really prizing the times It Finally Went Right. Yeah, you're three characters deep before you're lucky and cunning enough to hit level four. It was all part of the learning process as a player. And really, it's about the player- not the character- in this equation. The PLAYER knows he or she has earned the treasures and powers commensurate with his or her level, because the risk was not only real, it was demonstrated time and again as prior characters and fellow adventurers died to seemingly trivial traps, sword slashes, and simple daily dumb bad luck.

No, it's not for every taste. For Charles, it's all frustration and defeat. It ruins his sense of escapism. This is in contrast to me, where 4E's mechanics and superheroics do the same thing. Action Points, Healing Surges, calculated bonuses at each level that determine the amount of magic items that the party should have- all of this ruins the escapism for me. Neither one of us is right; if we were, there'd only be a need for one edition. As a player, I love roleplaying when I forget there is even a set of mechanics behind the scenes. I have a feeling that Charles is most comfortable when he can approach the game from the mechanical side first. And that's great for someone who loves 4E, because even character creation is an exercise in mechanical balance and synergy optimization- things that, to me, should be anathema to a fantasy campaign.

And so it goes. I want to steer my campaigns away from mechanical mastery- or even much mechanical understanding- on the part of the players. Because I've seen these Labyrinth Lord sessions where truly unique, utterly genuine moments of true brilliance come out without single recourse to a character sheet, and I've never been scared to just roll with them. Do those moments happen in 4E? Of course, but not in my personal experience nearly as often, and when they happen in MY campaign I get real anxious that whatever I do will step on toes X, Y, and Z as dictated in the Character Builder and etc. and when I have to worry about removing mechanics to get to the game I want to run, I feel sort of- dizzy.

So, yeah, I realy like the risk of earlier editions. It's not because I think it's more "correct" that the heroes be necessarily mortal, or that I feel it's more important to have psuedorealistically fatal combat for any grand reason. I just see no reason at all why fantasy characters- even the "heroes of the story" (although I'm trying to steer my campaigns away from story and more towards world-discovery) should expect to live given a "balanced encounter" and proper management of the options if they also expect great rewards to mean something personally, to the player- not the character. A character can have any reaction or belief a player wants it to have, but a player knows when he or she has earned something through his character, or at least should know such. In a game as well-balanced as 4E, I don't see the risk/reward equation working out very well- rewards are guaranteed by the system if the DM wishes the mechanics to keep working, and to get those evenly-metered rewards the party must never face Too Much Risk.

In my preferred world, sometimes you take an axe to the spleen, and baby, that sucks, but at least you know where you stand. And yeah, sometimes it's not in your control- like when a nutso DM still learning his chops throws a nasty troll at a first-level party and lets the surprise roll play out as it landed, giving the troll time to savage the party good and proper-like. Sometimes fate is cruel, but as a DM I know that the crueler the world, the better the treasure, and my folks are earning themselves one hell of a haul... if they make it that far!

Still, I hope Charles will give my Labyrinth Lord campaign a go despite his fears and ill feelings. After all, despite my own misgivings I'll gladly play in his 4E campaign again should the stars ever allow it to be run. As I've said before (and then probably only echoing wisdom of Previous Generations), fun is independent of system- especially if you allow that there are more than one kind of fun. (After all, 4E does make a heck of a tactical skirmish miniatures battlegame with roleplaying elements- although I feel more and more that that's the long and short of it.)

Editions & Dragons

Well, howdy! Here begins a great saga, namely: my third attempt at blogging. First there was LiveJournal, which I still use on rare occasions; then there was my short-lived (though I suppose technically still-alive) fiction blog; now there is Editions & Dragons.

So what is Editions & Dragons? It's my foray into tight-focus blogging, for starters. Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal all keep my friends and acquaintances abreast of my day-to-daying. This, then, is something more by virtue of being about less. It is, then, my Dungeons & Dragons blog.

First, I must thank my wonderful girlfriend, Lisa, who has cajoled and ranted at me for months to start this damned thing. She saw how fanatically I was reading various D&D editions, various D&D-related fora, and various D&D blogs- especially of the "Old School Renaissance"- and wanted to see me write something of my own. I hemmed, I hawed, but like all great ideas, the woman won out in the end. So, thanks, Babe!

Ahem. First post and already rambling like a drunk conductor. Onwards!

I'd like to take this, my first post, to go in to my personal history with Dungeons & Dragons, and furthermore to explore what I hope to accomplish with this blog.

I discovered Dungeons & Dragons in 198x, some mythical year of my early childhood that will never be accurately nailed down in even my own mind. I was having one of my rare visits with my mother, and she handed down to me two books from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition: The Player's Handbook and the Monster Manual.

I'm not certain how long I had these books before I even began to realize it was meant to be some sort of elaborate game well beyond my ken. I was, again, very young- to mention nothing of the fact that I was lacking the Dungeon Master's Guide- but slowly bits and pieces began to fall into place. There was the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, which I remember watching with my father. At some point I must have realized the show had the same name as those funny books with the crazy pictures my mother had given me. I also distinctly remember having a bendable, rubber carrion crawler toy- no doubt a tie-in to the cartoon- that survived years of bathtimes.

Even as I grew aware that these two strange books I had were part of a game, I couldn't make heads nor tails of it. It's not hard to see why, even now; that special Gygaxian way of writing just wasn't going to fit into my fiction-filled young mind, which had no notion of roleplaying games. The Players Handbook was simply Greek to me, although I was fascinated by the Monster Manual and all the great illustrations inside. I probably even started to get familiar with some of the monsters' stats (especially that succubus!) without quite grasping the extent of what I was learning.

It was all for naught, though, when I was invited to actually play Dungeons & Dragons by some kids in middle school. The guy who was DMing it and I had worked on a psuedo-wargame the year before for a class project, and I guess he knew gaming was in my soul. And it was, despite the obvious dearth of any knowledge of roleplaying games; I was steeped in video gaming and board gaming until I was brown in the gills, and was already creating my own simple board games. Looking back now I know that the book this particular DM caught my interest with was the Rules Cyclopedia, and I fell in love with it those scant few minutes I was able to glance through it. I ran home, excited; I was finally going to play that crazy fantasy game I'd been reading about for years! Someone could finally teach me!

Imagine, then, my lack of joy when I found out my father Did Not Approve. I was not yet of an age where I would do things on the sly, so when he said I was Not to Play D&D, Just Because, that was that. I was heartbroken, to be honest, and a bit confused; hadn't he been there with me when I watched the cartoon every Saturday? Still, that was that, and I was left wanting, athirst! I suspect now that my father was mostly worried about me abandoning all other activity to play games he knew were right up my alley; he had already had to take measures to keep my video-gaming to a minimum if I was to even think about doing such things as homework and chores.

Fast forward to high school. I'm still not supposed to play D&D or any related roleplaying game (having been most recently forbidden from playing Paranoia at that point, having my uncle's copy taken from me). Still, I'm a little older now. I have a younger sister now, and I'm not nearly as scared as I once was to do things Not Allowed, as long as I was sure I wasn't going to get caught. So I counted up years' worth of nickles and dimes from under my bed and dresser, converted them into a check through my grandmother, and ordered the Second Edition of the Star Wars roleplaying game.

When that arrived, I had- finally!- my first taste of true roleplaying. It took awhile, but eventually I had all my friends make characters and, at my best friend's birthday party, I ran an adventure of my own design. I barely remember how it went now, but I know we had a lot of fun. Not a one of us really knew for certain what we were doing- least of all me, as GM- but it was a gas, and that was the important part.

Through high school I tried a few other games. There were a few short sessions of Vampire: The Masquerade, but I always felt the world was much cooler than the game could hope to be. There were a few over-the-phone AD&D 2E games run by my friend's younger brother, which usually devolved into robbery, murder, and extortion on the part of my friend and I, the only two players.

And then- silence. I basically stopped roleplaying. Sure, I picked up books now and then- notably D&D 3.0 when it first came out, and Nobilis (which I still wish I had run at some point, even though I'm still not sure how to do such a thing)- but I lacked other players who had the time and inclination to get involved with me.

Then I moved to Columbus, Ohio to start an (ulitmately futile) eight-year University Odyssey. With my new-found college friends I eventually ran a few Call of Cthulhu sessions and an anime-themed, homebrew campaign that sputtered out after a few months. The roleplaying spark was reignited, but nothing took hold.

Then, last summer, into my life came Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. I wasn't sure what to make of it at first; I had read- if never played- 3.0, and it was definitely different. I even tried to sell off the books before I ever had a chance to even make characters. But then a few of my friends started getting excited about it, somehow, and then I did- and now we've been playing since January. We're supposed to have a weekly session, but it's turned out to be much more like twice a month.

Our campaign has been going well, considering a lot of factors. The most significant factor has been learning to DM/GM from the ground up. I've only played RPGs a few times, and only once with what I would now call something like a competent GM. I've had to learn almost everything from scratch, pieced together from game books, magazine articles, internet sites, and sheer dumb luck. I'm still nowhere near where I'd like to be as a DM, but my players are apparently having a ball for all that they wish we'd play more often (as do I!).

Our 4e campaign world is Aquea, a world of my own design that I have been making up more or less as we go along. The past few months have seen the party amassing levels and treasure in a dungeon crawl, and we're all excited for the next leg of the campaign. I've been sussing out 4e all along, and- for instance- I'm not happy with how the dungeon crawl has gone. Because of the hour-long (or more) combats of 4e, it can take more than a single session just to explore a few rooms. This has necessitated pausing the game almost every time we play either just before or just after a battle, and plots and clues are long forgotten by the time we get somewhere good again. Still, we're making do and as the campaign evolves, so do the players and, of course, my DMing skills. I'm learning- slowly- what works in 4e and what doesn't.

My ambiguous, love-it-today, hate-it-tomorrow relationship with 4e led me to what has been called the Old School Renaissance. It started when I downloaded OSRIC and read it over a few weeks at work. I was intrigued to say the least; I knew that those books I had so long ago pawed through on the sleepless nights of my youth were what OSRIC was trying to emulate, only in plain language- something I would have nearly killed for as a ten-year-old wishing to go toe-to-toe with some nasty dragons or trolls- or to pit such fiends against my friends.

My flirtations with the older games have led to a few one-off sessions with my friends, first with Swords & Wizardry and more recently with Labyrinth Lord. These sessions have ranged from mostly-futile mapping expeditions in randomly-generated dungeons to laugh-out-loud roleplaying gems (such as my friend Drew trying to replicate his young female magic-user's voice at the expense of his own poor vocal cords while trying to hire mercenaries to join the group in the dungeon).

In the end, I've found that I'm of two minds. Part of me loves Fourth Edition most of the time. I like the tactical combat for what it is, and my players love how the campaign is going, which is hard for any DM to ignore. And yet another part of me is eager for our 4e campaign to either reach its logical end or fizzle out from player disinterest so I can start an older-edition campaign (I'm thinking 1e so that I can feel nostalgic for that old Monster Manual, although I see the appeal of Moldvay via Labyrinth Lord, as well).

I find myself, then, as a DM in two worlds. I'm certainly not unique in this, just as I don't believe I'm the only person interested in the Old School of D&D without actually having a single root in it. Plenty of people seem to enjoy multiple editions of D&D; certainly my players have let me know that they trust me to run any D&D system well.

This blog, then, is for all my D&D musings, game recaps, and other miscellany related to what is quickly becoming my favorite hobby. And despite some serious love for Call of Cthulhu (and an interest in some of the newer, narrative-based RPGs), I've found that I really, really love D&D. I love its tropes, I love its flaws, I love damn near everything about it. Is it because I was so specifically denied it as a child? Maybe. Or maybe it's just a solid game of fantasy, perfect fare for people like me (and so many of us) who love to chuck dice, make dirty jokes, and slaughter monsters with abandon.

So! That was a whole lot of introduction. I won't always be so long-winded, I promise. I'm not really sure how to end this, now. Is it proper form to invite y'all back? Did anyone even read this far? Can I fit one more rhetorical question into this paragraph? (Yes, yes I can.)

Well, then, until next time, folks!