State of play? Good. How's yerself?

Wow, that last entry's a bummer, sounds like a gamer about to give up on gaming, which I never did. What I gave up in the interim was writing about playing -- and especially about not playing, as seemed to be happening in those days, because nobody needs more bellyaching. 

Quick update, then. Over the past dozen years, I've kept playing in not one but two long-standing groups of overscheduled parents and allegedly grown-up professionals. It's still fun. Play with people you actually like.   

One group's my hometown team, most of them friends from high school, which since 2008 has played mostly D&D, whatever edition, but also a full campaign of Shadow of the Demon Lord, among others. 

The other group's mostly friends from university in the 90s, now mostly in other cities/countries dropping in and out as life allows/demands. This made us early experimenters with online play, so the pandemic didn't wreck everything. (Both groups now frequently convene online, which will always be my second choice; and infrequently in person, my first.)

Group two's d6 home rules got good enough to publish, so we did. I take it to conventions and have a blast running it for strangers when I can. My first published adventure for Elemental, The Stone of Roc Rock, is coming out soon. In short, my state of play is good. How's yours?

 

Table for one, sir?

                                                                             Le sigh.

My old school D&D home game last week continued its phenomenal streak of non-occurrence. Of seven invited players, all of whom had expressed what sounded like interest, two begged off with parental duties, one was out of town, one jammed out at the last minute, and two didn't even respond to my email. Actual players in attendance: one.

He brought pizza (a nice touch, but one that rather rubbed in the, er, exclusive nature of the gathering), rolled up a character, which killed perhaps fifteen minutes, and was on his way by seven thirty. A truly gung-ho DM would have whipped up a quickie solo session and got the dice rolling, but my enthusiasm had wilted. Maybe next time.

It wasn't the sort of old school experience I'd been after, but I must admit it was historically accurate. Countless times did Young Ned make do with a single precious player and an unwieldy party of NPCs, or sit alone committing to graph paper yet another lonely dungeon that would never see play. The social stigma attached to the game was bad enough without having to face the fact that you didn't even have enough uncool friends to play it.

Musical Interlude: Red Fang

                                          "Hey Gandalf! Nice dress!"

I was going to try once again to get rolling on my long-postponed home game of ye olde schoole D&D this Thursday (scheduled to coincide with the wife's book club night, middle-agedly enough), but these guys are playing here that night for $10.

As an entertainment choice, I like to think I know when I'm licked. I will join a detachment of the Saturday Players as likely the oldest bastards at the venue, and try to convene the game next week, when my ears stop ringing.

That Old TPK Feeling...

                                          4E Medusa: Now With Stone-Be-Gone TM!

Long time no blog, I know, but that stretch of goose eggs in the comments reduces any guilty feelings that I've been neglecting my rabid fan base. I'll spare you any blogging about how I haven't been blogging, the most pointless subject there is. If I have nothing to say, I just won't say it.

My only regular game these days is a monthly 4th edition D&D game with the Saturday Players. It's been going for three years, so we're evidently having a good time. It ain't the D&D we grew up with, of course. It's no coincidence that Nerf is another of Hasbro's fine products. Encounters are balanced for PC safety and comfort and terrifying perils like poison and energy drain have been downgraded to mere annoyances, generally amounting to "Target is inconvenienced (save ends)."

We have had few bumps in our orderly progression through published modules, rising from 1st-level Badasses to 9th-level Junior Demigods, with regulation treasure packets to show for it. Oh, sure, my rogue got killed once, but a convenient, courteous and affordable Raise Dead was as close as the nearest NPC Cleric.

Last Saturday, though, that comfortable routine of level-appropriate challenge and presumed success vanished, and D&D ripped into us with its long-disused fangs. A few bad rolls was all it took for a typical run-in with a Medusa Archer to turn ugly, as one by one, our party turned to stone. Not until the end of the Medusa's next turn, not until save ends. Fin.

Ironically, the only member of the party not transformed into a lawn ornament was Biff the Bold, our gnome bard. Biff's player was absent and I was covering, badly. In a shocking string of single-digit attack rolls, I had managed to exhaust poor Biff’s entire arsenal of encounters, dailies, weapon dailies, buffs, bennies and bardic bimbammery. He sheltered behind petrified companions flinging his puny At-Wills at the Medusa.

It got tense. I threw some Vicious Mockery at her. "Yeah," prompted one of the other players, still gamely trying to inject a little roleplaying into WOTC's board game, "But what do you say to her?"

"Who gives a fuck?" I replied, perhaps a little more sharply than intended. That old AD&D fear and frustration was back, and it was glorious! Oh, and I bitched and whined round after round. Suffered, really suffered, and loved it. I’m an old-school pervert that way. Pain feels like pleasure, thanks to the cycle of abuse that passed for play in my formative years. 

And lo, on my last handful of hit points and an empty bag of tricks, verily did I whack that Medusa and save the party. Shame everyone was too stoned to applaud my hard-earned victory.*

4E being 4E, however, a solution was near at hand. The Medusa’s blood, smeared on the lips of her victims, now allows them to say goodbye to the heartbreak of petrification. That’s right: The monster now contains its own antidote, no doubt in a refreshing cherry flavour. Nerfed again.

For a few minutes there, though, cursing the dice and mentally rolling up a new character in despair, I had played real D&D as I once knew it. 

*Our DM, a bit of a softy by my lights, later allowed that he had rolled a couple of 20s over the course of the fight and disregarded them because our asses couldn't absorb the additional kicking. As a player, I'm damned glad he was in the DM's chair; I would have let them stand.

Oh they say that it's over...and it just had to be

Gygax, Frazetta, Dio. Somebody check on Moorcock. I haven't the heart.

And you can't play D&D here? I call bullshit.

That's Wisconsin's Waupun Correctional Institute, where inmate Kevin T. Singer this week lost an appeal in his lawsuit against prison officials who had banned D&D and confiscated his rulebooks, magazines and home-brew campaign notes.

A letter to Singer informed him, “Inmates are not allowed to engage in or possess written material that details rules, codes, dogma of games/activities such as ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ because it promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling.”

Officials also claimed the game, in addition to all these ills, promotes gang activity. (They also warned of possible "escapism," because it's apparently penologically vital to imprison not only an offender's body, but also his mind).

The evidence on the gang thing? The bald say-so of the prison's resident gangbuster, "Disruptive Group Coordinator" Bruce Muraski. D&D, he had deduced, involves players taking directions from a "Dungeon Master," much as Bingo has a caller or muscial chairs has that guy who starts and stops the music. This, in Muraski's world, "mimics the organization of a gang."

He admitted there had never been a recorded instances of D&D players organizing into nerd-posse prison gangs, but hey, better safe than sorry. Singer, in contrast, presented 15 affidavits from fellow player/inmates and from experts on roleplaying games, and never stood a chance.

I'll refrain from further belabouring the ridiculousness of this power-tripping petty cruelty, backed up by the most specious of arguments and unchecked institutional power. Everyone's already had a good, sad, sick laugh over it. If you haven't had enough, the decision is  here.

If all of this DMG-burning goofery sounds woefully familiar, though, that's because it is.

Back in the 80s, Tipper Gore and the other culture warriors of note didn't have much time for gamers. They were too busy with Judas Priest and Ozzy. (As he surveyed the wreckage of the 2000 election, I wonder if Al Gore took a moment to calculate how many metalheads of voting age there might be in Florida).

We had to settle for third and fourth-raters, like loopy pamphleteer/mullah Jack Chick and Mad Mother without peer Patricia Pulling. Not to speak ill of the dead, Patty, but you were one obsessive, crazy, lying harpy. Rest in peace.

Still, we had our moments, a few murders and suicides dubiously blamed on the game, media mic-wringing over satanic cults springing up across North America, and the hilarious Mazes and Monsters, featuring Tom Hanks.

The moral panic over D&D soon collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, but when a certain sort of person finds himself in a tight spot, beating up on the weird smart kids just comes naturally. During the last presidential election, John McCain spokesass Michael Goldfarb made repeated derogatory comments about D&D players as some sort of bizarre attack on sissified, book-reading Obama supporters. Ah, the enduring popularity of losing tactics among losers.

So, are gamers a gang? Playing generates a lot of camaraderie in my experience, but the gamers I know are not followers. These cats don't herd. Their politics are all over the place and they like to have their own fun their own way. Hence the appeal of gaming.

But maybe we should be a gang, and maybe we should stand up for Kevin Singer. Yes, he's in for murder, but this rule applies to every sad bastard in that prison. Can we allow this kind of ignorant horseshit to go down an hour and a half's drive from Lake Geneva, home of Saint Gary?

A warning to anyone considering direct action: It seems you might be locked up for two years and liable to a fine of up to $500 if you smuggled a 20-sider into Waupun.

And that’s if they don’t consider it a controlled substance.

Dagger +2 (Not exactly as illustrated)

Any magic light thrown or heavy thrown weapon, from the lowly +1 shuriken to a +6 perfect hunter's spear, automatically returns to its wielder's hand after a ranged attack with the weapon is resolved.

Catching a returning  thrown weapon is a free action; if you do not wish (or are unable) to catch the weapon, it falls at your feet in your space.

-- Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook (4e)

This gem was pointed out in-game during my last session with the Saturday Players. As a bunch of old-timers, our reactions ranged from incredulous laughter to audible rolling of eyes.

Has it really come to this?

Don't get me wrong. I'm playing and enjoying 4E, but Wizards of the Coast seems to have redesigned the game with customer service in mind. Not only does the player/client expect to win, but he doesn't want any inconvenience en route to glory.

Hence we now heal wounds by taking the equivalent of a smoke break, or in the case of truly horrendous injuries, a longish nap. Was it tedious waiting for days to regain hit points in older editions? Of course, but it also anchored the adventure in something approaching reality. You overcame adversity and thus became a hero, rather than showing up pre-fab heroic and collecting your expected treasure from accommodating mooks who thank you for choosing to loot their dungeon today and use their dying action to give you a nice foot rub.

So now, thanks to new standard features on today's magic items (which are distributed like friggin' coupons) you don't even have to pick up your shit after you throw it. As ridiculous as the rule seems, it also happened to benefit my Rogue, so I shamelessly took advantage. I am, after all, a gamer.