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.

Zero Hit Points: Brandon Crisp (1993-2008)

A year ago today, hunters found the body of 15-year-old Brandon Crisp near Barrie. He’d been missing since Thanksgiving, when he’d fought with his parents about video games and left home. He was found at the base of a tree and had suffered injuries consistent with a fall.

I didn’t know this kid, but despite growing up 20 years and hundreds of clicks apart, and not, I felt a shock of comradeship when I read about him.

According to his parents, he was a game addict. His poison was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The media, notably the CBC's Fifth Estate, trotted out the usual parade of child psychologists to offer up the same scaremongering reefer madness bullshit about video games that they have through the ages about heavy metal, D&D and the fucking hula hoop, for all I know.

That's the version of the story we're left with. Brandon doesn't get to tell his side of the story. Was he really addicted to his game, or just passionate?

His parents say he was up all night playing, they could hear him talking to the other players, his friends. His father recalled ripping the plug out of the wall to make him stop playing. He had visions of going pro, playing tournaments for cash and prizes, and there are indications he was good enough. Did Brandon have no control over his gaming, or were the Crisps just freaked out that they had no control over him?

They also said he'd started skipping school to play. In later interviews, it turned out he'd skipped school just once, and that had precipitated the confrontation with his parents. They took away his Xbox, he found where they were hiding it and took it back. That's when they told him they were taking it away forever. No negotiation, just punishment. We say so.

I’m kind of afraid the Crisps will somwhow read this and be hurt. That is not my intent. I don’t blame them, but I think they fucked up, overreacted. Parents do it every day, and usually nothing even remotely this bad happens.

They told a competitive, strong-willed kid “my way or the highway,” and he headed for the highway. He overracted, too.

But I see no obvious self-examination on their part. In interviews, the Crisps say if anything they wish they’d deprived him of the game he loved sooner, more harshly.

In his memory, they have set up a fund, the Brandon Crisp Foundation of Hope, to help poor kids play…hockey, which he'd played when he was younger. As the ever-reliable Fifth Estate put it “a foundation to help kids who want to play sports. Real sports.”

Because some obsessions are more acceptable than others. Hockey's what normal, healthy kids obsess over, not those weird games or music parents don't understand.

Maybe Brandon would have wanted it this way, maybe not. Nobody can ask him.

Warcrack Diaries

Well, this blog’s off to a limping start and my excuse is a poor one: Virtual reality intrudes. NPCs are on my ass throughout Azeroth about various assassinations, harvests of body parts and other assorted errands. One does tire of the passivity of the NPC. Do these people ever do anything for themselves?

After perhaps two years clean, I’m back on the World of Warcraft, and it’s as devious a time trap as ever.

I don’t like to use the word addiction when it comes to games. I think it’s sloppy thinking, and often, it’s just a way for people to pathologize pleasure. Merely liking something a lot and spending copious time and money on it isn’t de facto addiction. The word gets thrown around by laypeople with pop-psych abandon. I’ll have a little more to say on the topic next month when a sad anniversary rolls around.

That said, there is more than a little of the lever and food pellet reward cycle built into the game, watching that experience meter creep across the screen.

This stuff is poison for a guy who works at home. The game is always lurking inside my computer, ready in a couple of clicks, though the load time can feel like an eternity, like twitchily heating the spoon.

The first night, I played until about 11:00 with Fazz, and then, when he begged off, I switched to one of my old characters (clever bastards at Blizzard keep them forever) and walked places, stabbed and looted until 1:00. The next morning, I got right back at it, intending to kill the rest of an hour. I stopped two hours later. I blew most of this morning playing. One afternoon, I noticed it was raining in the game, but not until later that it was raining outside.

Erkonlin joined the Saturday Players in part to kick the MMORPG hard stuff. We’ve got three fathers in the group, and so schedules typically permit a session only every four to six weeks. One of the great things about D&D is that it’s inconvenient.

Chasing the Dragon: Phantasm (September 26-27, Peterborough, Ontario)

Phantasm feels like my hometown convention. I went to university in Peterborough with the Gildorians, and Phantasm always draws a friendly, easy-going, enthusiastic crowd.

Masterminded by the indefatigable Dave Watson, this is a small con (maybe two hundred assorted elf fanciers packed into the basement of the public library) with a freakishly big heart. Example: This year, Dave added a promotion with a gamer twist: Drop off a non-perishable item for the local food bank, get 1d6 “gold coins.” The coins were redeemable at participating game tables for a re-roll or other benny, at the GM’s discretion. Cool.

The pace is civilized, with one-hour meal breaks between four-hour game slots. The overall quality of the games is startlingly good. Local legend Ed Greenwood (Forgotten Realms) takes the podium every year to dance around his various non-disclosure agreements and give us a bit of industry dish.
I love it.

This year, though, reality intruded. I had to be back in Ottawa Sunday, and that meant a cruelly truncated convention, a mere two games on Saturday, or three if I didn’t mind leaving at midnight and then embarking on a three-hour drive before work in the morning. I wimped out and played only two games, and in the end drove longer than I played.

Prep was minimal. I threw a change of clothes, a toothbrush and deodorant into the rental, and the important stuff: a bag of game, much of its content left over from previous sessions.

The backpack’s sitting here. An inventory follows. Any of these items might form the basis for a future blog post, so if you want a closer look at any of this, pipe up in the comments section.

Equipment (in order of emergence from bag):

- Gildor Game System rulebook
The Gildorians’ all-purpose house rules. We’ve played the bejaysus out of these for ten years or so. More on these later.

- Zombies!!!
A handy intergame convention time-killer, and the zombies make dandy minion figures for D&D.

- Ziploc bag of Dungeon Tiles
Frankly, not my brightest purchase. They’re pretty, but impractical. They’re never exactly the right shape unless you design to the tiles, and it’s just so much faster to just draw on a battlemap.

- Keep on the Shadowfell, including a fattish swath of scribbled notes. I DMed this one for my semi-regular group, the Saturday Players, a couple of months ago. Hardly innovative, but it was a good introduction to the new rules.

- D&D 4E rulebooks (DMG, PHB, MM)
One tradition upheld since 1st edition: The core books still weigh a ton, further straining the average geek’s bookbag and ruining his already prawn-like posture, and now they don’t even contain the whole game. (Rules! Collect ‘em all!) Jammed in the Player’s Handbook is the character sheet for Ol’ Harry Shyteheel, my 4th level human rogue.

- The February 2008 issue of Polymancer magazine
Convention swag. I haven’t read it yet.

- Car Wars booklet (Division 10 Set 2).
More swag. Does anybody still care about this game? Even in the old days, it seemed to play awfully slow for the frantic Deathrace 2000 action it was supposed to simulate.

- Three RPGA Living Forgotten Realms Promo Cards
Still more “swag,” by which I think I may mean “useless crap.” Each gives an in-game bonus to a player. Interestingly, there wasn’t a single game of 4E on offer at Phantasm. What if Hasbro made a game and nobody played? Pathfinder has more of a following here.

- Phantasm 2009 Program
Includes ballots for the Loralie McCloud Award (Best Player) and the Gygax Hammer of Plot Award (Best Storyteller, which is what Phantasm calls GMs), a pretty impressive ad count and a plug for next year’s 20th anniversary of the convention.

- Big Ziploc bag of assorted el cheapo WOTC plastic miniatures.
There’s always a use for a bag of weird little dudes.

- Dice
In a leather drawstring bag that fair screams “I have no girlfriend, nor reasonable prospect thereof.”

- Single sheet of graph paper with a list of monsters
The beasties for a planned 4E game, which I would have run at Phantasm, had I not been so sore afflicted with laziness and time crunch. On the other side, reality intrudes once again, with scribbled invoice calculations related to my day job.

- Index card
This bears the name of Chard, the dragonborn paladin, with 1100 xps and an initiative roll of 14. The other cards I locate in the front pocket of the bag. More Saturday Players spoor.

- Set of six Staedtler Lumocolor non-permanent 1 mm markers, two Staedler Mars plastic erasers, one ballpoint pen, three traditional orange wooden pencils, one uber-nerd D&D mechanical pencil, courtesy of the RPGA. I’m technically a member, but find they have entirely too much collective enthusiasm for paperwork.

- Small plastic bag containing PC minis for Saturday Players.
Ol’ Harry and his homies Bahr Beihn Kew, Berend the Stern, Chard of K’raag, Dayreth the Flamesayer, Erkonlin, Maloch the Malcontent and Morthos the Unconventional.

- Dice cube (empty)
Still bearing $3.50 price tag, a perfectly functional gelatinous cube mini.

- Travel toothbrush
It's got my name on it, a gift from a friend’s wife who spoils me rotten when I stay over, and is perhaps trying to tell me something.

- An expired bus transfer, an empty plastic shopping bag, two paper clips and a clear marble.
Just in case.

1982

You open the box. Inside, you find a red book, a magenta book, six oddly-shaped dice and a white crayon. What do you do?

I read the red book.

Do you read it out loud?