I’ve made a significant decision. Our gaming has been nearly non-existent, and what time I’ve been able to devote to it has been spent tinkering with our custom Wizards & Warriors rules. Though I like the system we’re cooking up, it’s taking forever and I need to shelve it for now and get in some actual playing. So, in order to get at it, I’ve determined that we need to pick a system and go with it more or less by the book.
And I’ve chosen the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
This isn’t a slap at the products that have been churned out by the retro-clone and old school renaissance movements over the past couple years, and it isn’t even a statement of preference for 1e AD&D over Basic. For what it’s worth, I think that the 1981 B/X set is probably the best single version of the rules ever published, and that the retro-clone Labyrinth Lord with its Advanced Edition Companion is probably the closest-to-perfect that the game has ever been.
But for all of its warts and issues, 1e is the game I’ve played the most and the one that seems most likely to the vehicle to get our gaming back on track. I’ve referred to 1e as a “glorious train wreck,” and using the three core books to roll up some characters and prepare for a session makes me believe that more strongly than ever. In fact, I’ve spent a fair amount of time this evening groaning as I run into things that drive me a little nuts. Despite that, I think AD&D is where it’s going to be at for us. For every bit that makes me grind my teeth, there are two other bits that make me smile.
Next up is the task of NOT giving in to the temptation to tinker and fix and houserule. Though not intending to play completely by the book, we do intend to stick pretty close on almost everything. PCs will start at 3rd level. We’ll re-roll 1s on hit point rolls. Probably won’t use the weapon vs. armor matrix. But nothing all that significant. The point is to PLAY a game, not DESIGN one.
What this decision means for a couple of my ongoing projects, I’m not quite sure. We’ll see. But the key is to get a game going.
Wow: What happens when The Federation’s best teams up with superheroes of the 31st century?
STAR TREK/LEGION OF SUPERHEROES tells the tale of the original crew of the Starship Enterprise, who beam down to a planet only to discover that the planet isn’t their intended destination, or even in the right universe. At the same time, a group of “Great Darkness Saga” Legionnaires inside a time sphere find themselves cast into the 23rd century, but it’s not the 23rd century as they know it, either. STAR TREK/LEGION OF SUPERHEROES is a galaxy-spanning adventure that draws both teams together to face a menace that includes Khunds, Klingons, Borg, and other threats that aren’t quite as they should be.
The Original Series Star Trek. Great Darkness Saga Legion.
I guess if you’re going to do a crazy cross-over, you pick the classic incarnations.
It seems a bit silly at first glance, but I can see the possibilities. This could actually get me to buy a comic book. Maybe.
Over at Reddit, someone has posted
IAMA Dungeon Master of 15 years experience AMA
IAMA is “I AM A” and AMA is “Ask Me Anything” and is posting by a knowledgeable person who answers questions from the peanut gallery. There is some good stuff in there. And some not-so-good.
A friend came across this from his younger days and knew I’d be interested in checking it out:
UFO by Avalon Hill (1978)
It’s a simple game of earth versus flying saucer invaders. Very, very simple. Almost crude. Basic and Advanced rules take up only two sides of a sheet.
Board and Pieces for UFO by Avalon Hill (1978)
It’s apparently uplayed. Except for a couple of counters which fell out over the past three decades, it’s unpunched. (I put them back into place for the photo.)
The five dice in the bag DO NOT belong to this game, as I discovered after I snapped the photos. It uses two standard six-sided dice, which were also in the box. I’m not sure what these dice are for; there were a couple of other games in the lot he brought me to look at, so maybe they belong to one of those.
As I said, the game is a simpleton game where one player attempts to land his flying saucers on Earth while the other player tries to stop him. Given the date of release (1978) and the tagline (“A Game of Close Encouters”) I can only assume this was run out there to take advantage of the film CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) and the interest in unidentified flying objects it created.
We’ll have to give it a couple of plays. I plan to give it a write-up when we do.
Tags: board games, wargames
Watched the teaser for JOHN CARTER. Looks like it will probably be okay (or at least not too bad), but it really didn’t do much for me. Certainly didn’t get me to add it to the “must see this in the theater” list. Unless word is really solid, this is probably a wait-for-Netflix level film for me.
I know a lot of others feel differently. Just thought I’d chime in so it wasn’t unanimous.
So, though my gaming has been pretty sparse of late, I’ve been on a bit of a Traveller kick. (Books 1-3, no Third Imperium, thankyouverymuch) Traveller was, actually, the first RPG I every owned, played, or spent money on. And it was all kicked off by Understanding Traveller.
In fact, I’ve gone and pretty much completed a project I worked on back in 2004 and 2005: creating my own compiled Classic Traveller rules. My plan back then was to put together an nearly-exact duplicate of the Little Black Books, then modify them with various house rules and a few expansions such as Supplement 4, Mayday, and Snapshot. I got quite a ways through it before running out of time and steam, and the files have sat untouched for over half a decade. But a couple of months ago I “dusted them off” and have pretty much finished up.
My plan now is to go straight into “Kilgore’s version” of the game, but that version will be very close to Books 1-3 plus Supplement 4. No Snapshot. No Mayday. Virtually no house rules. (Though I do plan to use the range band starship combat from Starter Traveller instead of the Book 2 vector system.)
One thing I am going to add, though, is some sort of robot rule system. But after looking at Book 8, the rules in the Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society, and even those in Dragon Magazine #64. Heck, I even checked MegaTraveller. But none of those appear to be what I’m looking for. They’re all too complex and don’t really seem to “fit” well with Book 1-3 Classic Traveller where you can design whole starships with only a few pages of rules and tables.
I’m thinking that a few pages of rules which interact with the character rules sounds about right, making robots a special sort of NPC and not really an entire system unto themselves. But maybe I’m off base.
What do other Traveller players do for robots?
Tags: Traveller
Something I’ve starting writing about a few times over the past couple of years but never put together in a way I’m happy with has to do with the discussion of “heroic” or “non-heroic” player characters.
Yes, I do see how the “heroic” approach could easily become the default standard in a game with inflated ability scores, generous amounts of magic, and railroad-y world-in-the-balance plots, but it’s not a given. And, even more importantly, I don’t think that the older versions of the game are necessarily designed for play where the PCs are expressly “not heroes.”
Isn’t is up the players in both cases? I don’t want to overstate my opinion, but so often it sounds like critics of later versions of the game or certain styles of play take an extreme militant stance against heroic play. Fine, but don’t tell me how to play.
Tip of the helm to Lord Gwydion on this topic.
A discussion of infravision and how various players implement it is happening over at the Goblinoid Games forum. Some use it straight by the book (thermal-ish Predatorvision). Some use something similar to today’s night vision goggles, complete with greenish tint. Some just sort of handwave “seeing in the dark” and leave it at that.
I used to do the latter, but lately I don’t even use irfanvision. PCs cannot see in the dark. Many monsters can see in the dark, some of them well and some only a little.
My thinking is that none of the games attempt to define how a normal cat, for instance, sees in the dark. I more or less treat many monsters like that. The pseudo-scientificish thermal vision explanations don’t do anything for me.
Our homebrew Wizards & Warriors game, with only human PCs, doesn’t even mention it, though there are cat’s eyes and rat’s eyes magic spells.
On another note, a while back I noted that I was making writing some game projects priorities and would be devoting more time to writing and gaming. Didn’t happen. I’m struggling to get back on track, but it looks shaky for the near future. Hopefully I can get my kobolds in a row.
