Top Ten TV Cartoons (plus Three Honorable Mentions)

-Swinebread

Tomb of Horrors!

Any old-school D&D player could tell you about Gary Gygax's infamous meat grinder adventure module "Tomb of Horrors." The module exemplified everything that was great about old school D&D: an emphasis on roleplaying, a sense of dread that your beloved character would meet it's maker and perhaps most importantly an emphasis on actual puzzle solving rather than rolling dice.

It's no surprise that gamers talk about that module in reverential terms. Surviving the module was a badge of honor among those that played early editions of D&D. It was almost certain you would most, if not all of your party, before you got halfway through the adventure.

So it was with no small bit of surprise that I read today that Wizards of the Coast is releasing an updated version of the module for 4th edition D&D. I'm pretty disappointed with this announcement.

Terabytes of data have been expended in debating the merits of the most recent version of D&D, so I have no interest of hashing that out here. I personally find the emphasis on character balance and dumbing-down of game mechanics to be off-putting. I can't shake the feeling when I play 4th edition games that I've played this game before online when it was called World of Warcraft.

Tank + Blaster + Wizard + Healer for the win = teh boring.

The prospect that you can take a module that contains only one monster but tons and tons of clever traps instead and translate it into the 4th edition rules with it's emphasis on fighting, player survival and rolling dice rather than roleplaying seems highly dubious to me. They're going to have to nerf the damned thing and if they do that they're entirely missing the point.

--Dean Wormer
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R.I.P. Dave Arneson.

I'm sure Swinebread would like to pay tribute to Dave Arneson, co-founder of Dungeons and Dragons. Anybody who has rolled a die that had fewer or more than six sides owes that guy a debt of gratitude.

I love that he, along with the late Gary Gygax, as adults had such pronounced imaginations that they still could come up with their wonderful worlds. It's an astounding thing when you think about it. The imagination seems to be the first thing to go as you get older.

Thank you and rest in peace, Dave.

- Dean Wormer

EDIT: I just want to add that it was very sad to hear that Dave is gone, he had been ill for a while but it still comes as a shock. I always considered Dave to be the Jack Kirby of roleplaying (with Gary Gygax as Stan Lee) but fortunately he received his due before he died. Thanks for sharing your wonderful imagination Mr. Arneson. You will be missed.

-Swinebread

Screw you John McCain and Michael Goldfarb

As a roleplayer and Veteran, I just have to say I'm thoroughly disgusted with Michael Goldfarb's comments:

"It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement..."

see Dean’s post here

Instead of making baseless attacks to distract the media and the public away from Senator McCain’s horrible record on actually helping Veterans when they need it (like the GI Bill), I suggest that Mr. Goldfarb do a little research before he debases a whole segment of the population that includes active duty service members, veterans and *surprise, surprise* even non-liberals. Using moral panic tactics of the early 1980s and supposed jock vs. geek paradigms shows that the McCain camp has wrong ideas, is drastically misinformed and is clearly out of touch.

Basically the McCain campaign is stating directly that people that play D&D are unpatriotic and in-fact not real americans. This is so stupid it sounds like something Dan Quayle would say. With the election so close, making disparaging comments about anybody seems like a really dumb idea and very petty.



Edit: I liked this point

Goldfarb apologized, displaying a tongue in cheek familiarity with the rules of the game.

If my comments caused any harm or hurt to the hard working Americans who play Dungeons & Dragons, I apologize. This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American.

That's the kind of deep, personal animosity that you associate with experience, which clearly Goldfarb has. It’s not hard to imagine that some basement somewhere holds the abandoned d20s, dusty rulebooks, and broken heart of a young Michael Goldfarb who never got to be Dungeon Master because he wouldn’t stop yelling. In fact, it’s hard not to wonder if, when Michael Goldfarb is berating the D&D players of the world, he’s really just berating Michael Goldfarb.

from here

-Swinebread

New Adventures in Roleplaying

Well, the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons is out and the majority of reviews have been very positive. Wired Magazine’s take is quite good, here’ s a section:

In D&D 4th Edition, dungeon masters, or DMs, are freed from a good deal of the bookkeeping associated with the hobby in previous editions of the game, as the designers have streamlined the process for preparing adventures. Boxes of statistical information and extensive charts were once the norm, but now DMs can almost throw together an adventure on the fly. This philosophy has also lead to some radical changes in monster design. Just as players now have a fun trick or two up their sleeves, monsters now wield fantastic abilities that are wholly unique.

The possibilities these mechanical changes unlock are exciting in and of themselves. Nerds love to debate game mechanics, but what all this ultimately means for the player and the DM is more time focusing on more important things.

Combat moves so fluidly now, and the DM has so much less prep time to worry about, that the art of role-playing itself finally moves into the foreground of Dungeons & Dragons. Telling a compelling story, and having a ton of fun doing it, is ultimately the reason players sit down to game in the first place. What D&D 4th Edition represents is the chance to have fun with your friends without a ton of hassle, to immerse yourself in a fantasy world without working at it.

In fact, many of the mechanics are so easy to use that they remind players of what it feels like to play a massively multiplayer game. Wizards' Slavicsek has absolutely no problem with those comparisons, as all good games build on what has come before.

It seems that D&D has finally, finally shed most of its clunky rules but for me, it comes too late. The lawyering, number crunching, and game preparation were way out of hand. I've always stressed that Roleplaying games should just be that, about roleplaying and sadly the D&D folks never quite understood this until now. Most people don’t enjoy nor have the time to endlessly scourer the rules just to do the most basic tasks. Versatility and ease of story creation is the way to go and so it sounds like 4th edition would now finally provid that. It might actually attract new, non-geeky types… well probably not, but Wizards of the Coast can dream can’t they? It seems like 4th edition would be right up my alley.

The problem is I’m way too invested in 3.5 to upgrade. I bought tons of D&D and D20 books, looking for ideas and hoping the next volume would be the one to unlock the secret of easy and fun gameplay. Now I’ve got no one to blame but myself, but why would I do this? Well, I was sublimating my desire for a universal roleplaying game into the D20 system. It was the most prevalent RPG and I thought that it would provide more opportunities to actually sit down with somebody and game. I was wrong about that.

What I really wanted was a universal gamming system from Chaosium. I've always loved how their mechanics work in a simple but appropriate manner for their various games like Call of Cthulhu, and Stormbringer. Their core mechanic has a name, it’s called Basic Roleplaying or BRP but Chaosium hadn’t really pushed it as a universal gamming platform before except for a halfhearted attempt with Worlds of Wonder. So in my desire to fill the void, that Chaosium seemed unwilling to satisfy, I self medicated with 3.5 and D20.

It’s ironic that D&D 4th edition is being released at about the same time as Chaosium’s new Basic Roleplaying game. Finally, I’m getting the game I really want, and it’s not from Wizards of the Coast. Of course, Chaosium should have done this years ago but at least it’s happening at a time when I’m feeling particularly left out of the next big jump in RPG industry.

Basic Roleplaying the Chaosium System is rolling out to a store near you as I type this. But if you’re more of a PDF type of person, downloads are now available for purchase on the website. Dungeons & Dragons and Chaosuim have changed with the times even if both were very late to do so.

See basicroleplaying.net and basicroleplaying.com for info on BRP outside of Chaosium’s website.

-Swinbread

The Chaosium d100 system is at the Printer

cover art

That's right folks, the BASIC ROLEPLAYING SYSTEM is finally going to be a reality. I've been waiting for real multi-genre game from Chaosium for years. They have finally wised up and are providing a game system that's user friendly, like Call of Cthulhu, and is easy to apply to any type of adventure you want to run from sci-fi to fantasy. I've got a ton of ideas that BRP would be perfect for and now I’ll get to make them a reality.

The truth is I love roleplaying, but I hate rules. Rules get in the way of having a good gamming experience, imo, mostly because they are too complicated and so I spend most of my time with my nose buried in the rulebooks rather than focused on the players. The weird need by most game designers to create RPGs with overly complicated rules sets which must be memorized has always astonished me. I think this is the main reason most folks aren’t interested in playing RPGs. If you like legalistic stuff that doesn’t represent any kind of reality then by all means keep playing that way but I certainly don’t have the time relearn an overly complicated rules set, like D&D, every time I want to add something to an adventure or a new addition comes out. Have you looked at the Stat blocks for creatures nowadays? I don't understand half of that crap. Plus, all the rules about levels, experience points and etc, etc just get in the way actually rolepaying, being the character and that’s what I find fun. Roleplaying, for me, is about being in the moment and BASIC ROLEPLAYING will allow that now that it’s not tied to a specific genre. Can you tell I’ve been waiting for this?

This book represents a first for BASIC ROLEPLAYING—a system complete in one book, without a defined setting. Previously, BASIC ROLEPLAYING has been an integral part of standalone games, usually with rich and deep world settings. Due to differences in these settings, BASIC ROLEPLAYING has had many different incarnations. Variant and sometimes contradictory rules have emerged between versions, to better support one particular setting over another.

Chaosium’s BASIC ROLEPLAYING system reconciles these different flavors of the system and brings many variant rules together into the covers of one book, something that has never been done before. Some of these rules are provided as optional extensions, some as alternate systems, and others have been integrated into the core system. By design this work is not a reinvention of Basic Roleplaying or a significant evolution of the system, but instead a collected and complete version, without setting, provided as a guide to players and gamemasters everywhere and compatible with most Basic Roleplaying games. It also allows the gamemaster the ability to create his or her own game world (or worlds), to adapt others from fiction, films, or even translate settings from other roleplaying games into Basic Roleplaying.

Take peak at the character sheet here.


-Swinebread

Wired Article on D&D and Gary Gygax

Wired published an excellent article on Gary Gygax. It was to be an investigation into the man himself and the game he created, Dungeons and Dragons. Sadly now it’s a memorial of sorts.

The Dungeon Master: The Life and Legacy of Gary Gygax
Editor's note: Wired contributing editor David Kushner visited Gary Gygax at the Lake Geneva Convention last July. We were preparing a package of articles about the father of Dungeons & Dragons and the upcoming revised edition of the game he created when we received the sad news of his death. We are running this story now in remembrance of Gygax and in celebration of his staggering achievements. Later this month, we will run the additional articles about D&D as well as excerpts from the extensive interviews used in reporting this story. We extend our deepest condolences to Gygax's family.

Dungeons & Dragons had a way of turning game players into game designers. The rule set was pure potentiality, and the greater the creativity of each dungeon master, the more the players could extract from it. Many young people found their calling while playing D&D.

See the full article here. Check it out.

-Swinebread

His Adventure Is Over: R.I.P. Gary Gygax

As some of you have heard by now, Gary Gygax, the D&D guru, has died. I wasn’t part of the first wave of roleplaying gamers and so I largely missed out on playing through most of Gary’s adventure modules, but I did encounter the large part of the game’s initial aftershock when the production values had increased. I love roleplaying games a lot but I kinda’ had a love hate relationship with them when I was a kid. Being able to inhabit another world and use you imagination was an incredibly powerful and fantastic experience, but the D&D rules were very encumbering and, for me, stymied that imagination. I never owned a copy of the main rulebooks until D&D 3.5 (well OK, except the Basic and Expert boxed sets) and I merely relied on others to run the game if we wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons.

It wasn’t until I encountered both the skills focused Basic Roleplaying System (via Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer) and the rules light Storyteller System (Vampire, Werewolf), that I really found gamming a truly immersive experience. It was also around this time that finally realized why I found D&D to have such a strange, clunky, mechanistic feel. It’s because Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were strategy game players first and then developed D&D roleplaying out of that. I was never a strategy game sorta’ guy and that’s why their approach to the gaming seemed backwards to me. Levels, experience points, tons of charts, character classes, and mutually excusive rules for every little aspect, was really just too much in my opinion. But for other folks, with a more mathematical or legalistic mind, probably found these rule mechanics pure heaven. For some, roleplaying was a numbers and accounting game but I never saw it like that. For me, gamming should be a character driven, story creation experience. On the other hand, I always greatly appreciated the world building that went into Dungeon and Dragons and the different types of dice as well. I believe those two aspects were some of D&D’s greatest strengths beyond just simply using your mind's eye.

Now it may seem like I’m bashing Mr. Gygax, but I don’t feel that I am, rest his soul, but rather I’m merely providing context and probing the memories his death has brought up. Gary Gygax was an entertainment innovator and brought a new way to experience, and harness imagination. I just needed it in a different form than he originally designed it. Regardless, thanks for starting the roleplaying game industry Mr. Gygax.

I think the New York Times has the best article about Gary Gygax, so I’ll post the whole of it here, as it will eventually disappear behind a registered user function.

Gary Gygax, Game Pioneer, Dies at 69

By SETH SCHIESEL
Published: March 5, 2008

Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Gail Gygax, who said he had been ailing and had recently suffered an abdominal aneurysm, The Associated Press reported.
As co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, the seminal role-playing game introduced in 1974, Mr. Gygax wielded a cultural influence far broader than his relatively narrow fame among hard-core game enthusiasts.

Before Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy world was something to be merely read about in the works of authors like J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert Howard. But with Dungeons & Dragons, Mr. Gygax and his collaborator, Dave Arneson, created the first fantasy universe that could actually be inhabited. In that sense, Dungeons & Dragons formed a bridge between the noninteractive world of books and films and the exploding interactive video game industry. It also became a commercial phenomenon, selling an estimated $1 billion in books and equipment. More than 20 million people are estimated to have played the game.

While Dungeons & Dragons became famous for its voluminous rules, Mr. Gygax was always adamant that the game’s most important rule was to have fun and to enjoy the social experience of creating collaborative entertainment. In Dungeons & Dragons, players create an alternate persona, like a dwarven thief or a noble paladin, and go off on imagined adventures under the adjudication of another player called the Dungeon Master.

“The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience,” Mr. Gygax said in a telephone interview in 2006. “There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.”

When Mr. Gygax (pronounced GUY-gax) first published Dungeons & Dragons under the banner of his company, Tactical Studies Rules, the game appealed mostly to college-age players. But many of those early adopters continued to play into middle age, even as the game also trickled down to a younger audience.

“It initially went to the college-age group, and then it worked its way backward into the high schools and junior high schools as the college-age siblings brought the game home and the younger ones picked it up,” Mr. Gygax said.

Mr. Gygax’s company, renamed TSR, was acquired in 1997 by Wizards of the Coast, which was later acquired by Hasbro, which now publishes the game.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Gygax is survived by six children: three sons, Ernest G. Jr., Lucion Paul and Alexander; and three daughters, Mary Elise, Heidi Jo and Cindy Lee.

These days, pen-and-paper role-playing games have largely been supplanted by online computer games. Dungeons & Dragons itself has been translated into electronic games, including Dungeons & Dragons Online. Mr. Gygax recognized the shift, but he never fully approved. To him, all of the graphics of a computer dulled what he considered one of the major human faculties: the imagination ’ ”

“There is no intimacy; it’s not live,” he said of online games. “It’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, ‘Because the pictures are so much better.’ ”

Nice article huh.

On another note, if you are a serious journalist (by serious I mean you get paid) and you use the words “geek,” “geeky” or “geeks” in your news article about Gary Gygax's death, you can FUCK OFF… …Just go fuck yourself. Those geek words are pejorative and not appreciated. Some folks in the gamming community use them, but that’s simply to take the word geek and disarm it while turning it’s original demeaning meaning on it’s head. “Geek” has no place in a eulogy or a serious piece of journalism and certainly shouldn’t be used by folks that don’t consider themselves a part of “geek culture…”

-Swinebread

What D&D Character Are You?

Apparently I’m totally lame... because I am a:

Chaotic Neutral Elf Bard

Alignment:
Chaotic Neutral characters are unstable, and frequently insane. They believe in disorder first and foremost, and will thus strive for that disorder in everything they do. This means that they will do whatever seems 'fun' or 'novel' at any given time.

Race:
Elves are the eldest of all races, although they are generally a bit smaller than humans. They are generally well-cultured, artistic, easy-going, and because of their long lives, unconcerned with day-to-day activities that other races frequently concern themselves with. Elves are, effectively, immortal, although they can be killed. After a thousand years or so, they simply pass on to the next plane of existance.

Primary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.

try the quiz Here

Oh well, at least I'm the life of the party...

...so to speak.

-Swinebread

Some Gaming News

I was in Powell’s Books the other day and happened across a copy of the new Hawkmoon RPG by Mongoose. I didn’t have a lot of time to look through it but the art looked very amateurish, and the overall book design uninspiring. While I was happy to see familiar Basic Role-playing Stats I wasn’t impressed with the mutation rules. I filed that away. When I read a review at RPG.net my doubts were confirmed.

the book is too short, the space between paragraphs is really huge and the page borders are enormous. This means that we have around 120 pages of real text, not enough for a traditional core book, and the consequences are huge. The rules are explained lightly, not improving the short descriptions from the SRD and lacking many examples, and the background is sparse.
The writing style is functional but never managed to catch my imagination, and the few interior illustrations are not good nor bad. At least the Tragic Europe map is adequate and well done…

…The game should be cool, but it's not, and I don't know what has happened. Maybe the Tragic Millennium is not suited for an RPG, or the book needed another focus and writing style.

For 30 bucks a pop it ought to be much better. Also, considering Mongoose is usually very good with design this is somewhat of a surprise. More books are coming so the world of Hawkmoon will be much more fleshed out and it’s compatible with all the other Runequest games published by Mongoose so that’s something. I guess I’ll wait for another edition down the road if I buy it at all.


Speaking of Mongoose, I’ve noticed that Conan 2nd Edition is a little late. It’s now coming out early September. I hope I still get the copy I ordered. Another Book, the Conan Bestiary has completely disappeared from their site. I was look forward to that one.

The big news that’s fired up the gamming community it the announcement of D&D 4th edition for 2008. From here:

Wizards of the Coast announced at Gen Con Indy Aug. 16 that the much-rumored fourth edition of the seminal role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons will be released in May 2008. However, several D&D support products…

D&D 4th Edition will continue to use the d20 game system — according to Wizards of the Coasts designers, the 4th Edition rules will be an “evolution of the system, not a revolution.” 4th Edition play is designed to be faster and easier for the Dungeon Master to adjudicate. Each character class will have a specific, defined role within an adventuring party, and the designers’ goal was to give each class interesting options for gameplay at every level. Character races have undergone a similar overhaul, with at least two new player races included in the Player's Handbook, and the core rules now go up to level 30 for characters; with the levels divided into three tiers: heroic for levels 1-10, paragon for 11-20, and epic for 21-30. One goal was to avoid having a single “sweet spot” — a specific range in levels where everyone wants to play. In D&D 3.5, this tends to be levels 7-13. For Dungeon Masters, the new edition includes new ways to build encounters by giving every monster in an encounter a role to play, and addresses or removes “game-stopping” rules like grappling in combat.

In addition to the physical rulebooks and supplements, a major component of 4th Edition will be digital. Wizards has launched a free beta version of Dungeons & Dragons Insider, the online component for 4th Edition, shortly after the Gen Con announcement. D&D Insider will change over to a subscription model around the time the new Player’s Handbook is released. For a monthly fee, D&D fans will have access to the online versions of Dragon and Dungeon magazines; online tools for players and DMs, including a character creator and map, encounter, and adventure building tools; D&D Anytime, a round-the-clock virtual game table which will allow gaming groups to get together and play D&D online; and forums and other community features.

I’m not mad I knew this was coming. I was thinking more like 2009. I’m not using the tons of 3.5 books I bought because I rarely role-play anyway. Oh well. It’s a good time to quit Dungeons and Dragons, although haven’t purchased anything new since 2006.



The future digital component of D&D explains why both Dragon and Dungeon magazines were cancelled. The final publication of these magazines was this month in fact. I thought about picking up that last Dragon, issue #359, because it’s supposed to have a retrospective, but most of it is info I wouldn’t use. So Long Dragon, I will miss the art.