The Dungeon Master is Dead ...

For those of you that don't know, yesterday, March 4th, Gary Gygax died.


I've been a Role Playing Gamer for many years. I started off in 7th or 8th grade, some twenty two or so years ago. I've been a gamer for two thirds of my life. My first game, like most role players, was Dungeons & Dragons. My mom bought me the red D&D box for Xmas after I had begged for over a year. Funny, to this day when I think of the intrepid adventurer facing the imposing red dragon standing on top of a pile of gold coins, the image that adorned that boxed set - it still gives me a zing of excitement.


Gygax was not the only person responsible for D&D, but he is the one most associate with it. He worked very hard to see his vision continue in the right direction. Because of his work and his vision, I have had hours and hours, probably months of hours, of fun. Time spent thinking, conjuring up entire worlds out of pure imagination. Then, I got to share those worlds with my friends. Instead of going out and drinking or partying with my friends and then regretting my excesses the next day, I sat around a table with my friends and enjoyed their company and helped them help me tell a great story of adventure and action and excitement. I cannot think of a single night of gaming I regretting the next day. Gygax is in part responsible for that.

I slipped away from D&D to play other games. As did many gamers. Eventually I even came to criticize the game. Now, looking back, reading what happened at TSR and what happened to Gygax, I see some of the reasons that I criticized the game were valid. And, maybe, had TSR and, later, Wizards of the Coast, listened to Gygax, maybe the game would have been better. Now, we will never know.

No matter. We gamers have all lost something irreplaceable. I and many gamers like me owe a good portion of the fun we have had in our lives to men like Gygax, Steve Jackson and Kevin Siembieda.

Gary, we will miss you. Good Journey.

(This post will be cross posted on my other blog: IrateWeirdos.com)

WarZone 2100

As I have mentioned before, I am cheap. I don't like to spend money.

Don't get me wrong, I can spend money - I'm a Mac owner after-all! But, if I can get away with it, I like to keep my money in the bank.

Gaming, in all it's forms, is a great hobby. But, it can be a downright expensive one. Since role playing companies have gone back to the idea of hard bound books, a new gaming book can run $50 or more - it's silly.

Computer games are worse. A game you might play for a month or two can also run you $50 or $60 new. When I think about computer games, I think about two things a) how much play will I get for my money and b) do I need to buy it now? How soon will it be in the bargain bin for $15.

When I buy a game, I want to be able to play it for years. Games like The Sims and SimCity and Civilization are nearly infinitely replayable. Heck, I played Civ II on the Mac up until Civ IV for the Mac came out. I wish they would com out with a newer version of Tropico - if I play my current one anymore, the disc will melt!

On the PC side, I'm big on waiting a year to pick up "the latest games". I picked up Warhammer 40k Dawn of War and it's first expansion six months ago for $20. When those came out, they were $60 each.

Often, I prefer free or low cost online games. If you look at my Project Wonderful ads, you might spy a button for TinyWarz. Very cool, you can play for free, check it out! I consider my monthly payment to World of Warcraft to be pretty low cost. I think it's silly that they charge anything for their supplements - much less what they actually charge! But, they are making money on it. I think we will see a day when MORPGs will be entirely free to download and play, they will find other ways to support themselves. To a degree, we are already seeing this with Second Life and other games.

And, although I shouldn't admit it here, I have been a pirate from time to time. Being cheap means I will go to some extraordinary lengths. This doesn't mean I have a hard drive full of warez - quite the opposite. I have gone out and downloaded some abandonware here and there. Abandonware is such a funny thing. It's illegal to download the game, yet, if I was given the original disk by a friend, it would be legal. If I paid a quarter for the disk at a used shop - it would be legal. Silly. I want to play the old games, the copyright holders don't make them available, so I have to break the law to play them. Go figure.

However, I like that a few companies have gotten smart. Nearly 10 years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a game called WarZone 2100. Fun game. I didn't buy a copy at the time - I didn't own a PC so there was no reason. I did however do a review of the game for Epinions, I hope that made up in karma what I didn't pay in dollars.

A few days ago, I looked back at that review. I think someone had linked to my blog from that review and I caught it on the site monitoring software. I decided to Google WarZone to see if maybe someone had it on eBay or ... who knows?

Google gave me a gift in the first link: The WarZone 2100 Resurrection Project! Apparently, the copyright holder, Eidos-Interactive, made the game open source on the GNU license. So, a group of geeks are rebuilding the game - they even put out a release for the Mac!

I downloaded it and played it. The game is still awesome! Yes, the graphics are simple and look at least 10 years old - who cares? Most chessmen don't have a kung-fu grip, either! This is what all companies should do with their old games! Allow the gaming community to rebuild their games as we wish and allow me to download them for free!

Role-playing companies should take a cue here. Wizards has already come up with open source gaming with their d20 product. Why not release old games as a .PDF - this would promote the new games and bring more people into playing those games. I would love to be able to download old modules and source books instead of trying to scrounge them up in used book stores. My game shelf at home would be a lot cleaner if I could! Even charging a buck for an old supplement would be better than that material just fading away. Or, release it to the public domain and let the players do great things with those materials.

In this day, it's too easy to make an illegal copy. Instead of making interested players into criminals, make them into customers. Game-makers, what do you have to lose?

The End of the Industry?

The debate has waged for decades, maybe since the industry came to be.

Every few years, sales of Role Playing games dies off. Then, something comes along to reinvigorate the industry. When I was in college, it seemed like the industry was in its last days. Then along came a little company from the Pacific Northwest with a little card game. Magic the Gathering players moved from collecting cards to collecting RPG books and the industry was alive again.

When I was a kid, the industry revolved around D&D. The media and people on the Religious Right set D&D as the main target of their agendas. TSR suffered, it probably never recovered. Many thought role playing would die off. I remember having conversations with people older than I at that time. I was just getting into the hobby and I wondered how others felt about it. I ran into several young adults who claimed to have played D&D once or twice. They were almost embarrassed to admit it in the light of all the media hubbub. I meet young adults now who admit they played a game or two of Magic. They, too, seem almost embarrassed.

Up until just recently, I usually explained to people that I was a role player almost as if I was making my own apology. "Yeah, I'm one of those D&D playing freaks" I would say, even though it had been years since I picked up a d20. D&D was the only RPG the masses knew, thanks to the bad press in the 80s and 90s.

These days, things are a little different. Everyone I know, including family members who looked at me funny for playing D&D, plays World of Warcraft! Okay, not everyone, but huge numbers of people. In my day, WoW would have been dismissed as hack and slash and not worth a gamer's time. So many people own Xboxes and Play Stations - if they aren't playing WoW, they are home playing Halo. Let's face it, Halo is just more hack and slash - but with guns.

Today, it's almost as if I have come out of the closet. I admit in, well, mixed company, if you will, that I am a role player. I likes me some GURPS! People still look at me funny, so I have to explain that it's like WoW or Halo except with paper, pencils and dice. Sometimes I have to go so far as to explain it's like D&D - that usually gets them to nod their heads. But, I don't get the same reaction I got when I was 25. At that age, it almost seemed liked people were sniffing me to see if I had recently showered, or they looked at what I was wearing, expecting Doritos stained tee shirts or something. I didn't live in my parent's basement, playing D&D by candle light - that came later! But people really did have an image: cultist. That image has changed a bit.

Many still think the industry is on the out. I don't think so. Geekly hobbies have been a growing trend for the last decade or more. As video games become more like paper RPGs and as table top gaming becomes more like video games, I think we will see new players. Players who want to do more than shoot at their friends and run around looking for ore and troll ears.

Already, Wizards has announced new electronic features for D&D 4th edition. If you haven't yet, click on our link to Dungeons and Dragons there on the right. You will see links off their main page about the new features in 4th ed. It's an hour well spent for those of us concerned about the future of the hobby.

For those of you looking for a way to make a mint off the Internet and gaming in general - there has to be a way to take the 3D gaming environment being proposed and use it more generically. As in, what if I want to play in a sci-fi or supers game? Setting up an SF street scene or the lair of an mad scientist would be great! If someone can come up with that and not restrict it to one game system - they will make the big dollars!

I think a lot of this can be done already. There are plenty of ways to chat on the Internet and there are ways to make electronic copies of character sheets and there are ways to share documents. A devoted enough group could set up an online game and I think they could have a great time. It would take some work, but I think it could be done. Give it a try and let us know what happened.

An Unholy Union

Sometimes I think people are running out of ideas.

I, like many gamers in my generation, started off playing D&D. I watched it evolve, albeit slowly. I was shocked by d20 - open source role playing. Intriguing. But, in all honesty, a long time player can look at d20 and see the layers. You see where D&D began and you can see where they added elements on top of the out-dated system. It may be true that d20 is the most popular system out there, but that's like saying Intel is the most popular computer chip. Both are the best sellers - but they are not the best on the market, merely the most used.

I've played plenty of other games, used plenty of other systems. I have my favorites. When I started playing White Wolf's Story Teller system, I didn't get it. It was too lite. I got that they wanted the players to worry more about role playing and less about rules - but I felt that the rules were just, well, not there. Now I get it - the rules were "not there" on purpose. If you were not acting as a rules lawyer, you had more time to think about the actions and motivations of your character. After playing for a while, I usually just stashed my character sheet and role played - really role played. It was quite liberating.

I see now that White Wolf has produced a version of the World of Darkness (WoD) for the d20 system: Monte Cook's World of Darkness.

This I do not get at all! White Wolf already has a working system. d20 already has plenty of books that you could use to run a WoD-like game. Do they really think the average person is going to shell out $50 for this book?

Okay, I want it understood that I haven't actually seen a copy of this book. I only found out about it a few days ago and I only have the advertising copy to go by - but I already have lots of doubt. Let's start with said copy:

"Dead souls returned to claim living bodies, creating blood-drinking undead fiends: vampires. Bestial spirits came as well, to create werewolves, and demons formed bodies from worldly matter. Magic crashed back into the world, and mages wield its power for whatever purpose suits them. Humans called the Awakened unknowingly keep the darkness at bay. These supernatural creatures struggle against each other and clash in the shadows ..."

Shadows ... you mean like Shadowrun? It's vampires and demons instead of trolls and dragons! Am I the only one seeing that? Instead of porting over the immensely rich World of Darkness to d20 - it sounds to me like they are reinventing the wheel and failing in the process.

For $50 bucks, I think you could do a lot more with your money. For example, if you must have d20 - and there's nothing wrong with that - hit eBay or Amazon or Half Price Books and buy a used copy of d20 Modern. I see it for about $20, which leaves room for a d20 Monster book - at less than $10 bucks used. There, I just saved you $10 to $15 even after shipping. Heck, grab d20 Call of Cthulhu and drive your characters insane! It's $50 and it, too, is written by Monte Cook!

I personally think you would do better with new or used copies of the WoD books. Amazon has the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem hardcovers, new, for $40, you will qualify for free shipping, too. Your local used shop will have them even cheaper.

If you want my favorite, or if you just have to have lots of rules to lawyer over, you'll need to look a little harder. Start with the GURPS Basic Set, 3rd Edition or 4th Edition - whichever you prefer. Then, go looking for GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade. It's out of print, but you can find plenty of used copies out there. There are a few other GURPS/White Wolf books, but I leave it as an exercise for the reader to go find them. I bet you could put together quite the collection of used GURPS books for $50!

I guess you could also just wait a year for this $50 book to hit the shelves of your local used book store. It might almost be worth $25 bucks at Half Price books.

To sum up, I think the RPG industry, if it's going to survive, will need to do more than take a well known brand, affix it to a questionable premise, bolt that to a kludgey rule set and then over charge for the package.