This Stuff is GREAT !

 Other than keyboards and bathrobes (tm) my most popular posts seem to be reviews.  So, here is another one  some more.

So, there's this guy (I guess) who goes by"Lars Dangly" over on one of the big RPG forums. So what?  So he is kind of a random RPG encounter - out of the blue he has posted two free excellent RPGs.

One of them is "Balrogs and Bagginses"   a set of original (and early) edition rules for playing in middle earth -and clearly channeling the adventure ethos of "The Hobbit ".

It is really really good, and this is coming from a massive JRRT geek.   The rules are concise, freestanding (mostly spells are still a bit beta) and very nicely developed from bog standard OD&D.

So, it scores two hits in
1. Successfully pulling off a Middle earth RPG without being wildly concerned with microdetails, and

2. is another excellent example of what I think the OSR is doing (or should do) starting with the very basics of D&D and evolving it in a different direction.

Plus, the cover uses one of the best "adventure and get treasure" pix, evar.


Seriously, I love me some MERP, and tolerated me some whatever the second one was, and pretty much poked at the new middle earth RPGwith a stick,  - but, this is at least as good as MERP for feel, and given that MERP was tied to the mondotablequest engine has a much more elegant system.

No kidding: it's a take on old style D&D that gets around the three class model very elegantly and avoids race as class (which I despise, thank you very much) .  Very elegantly.  Seriously, check it out -I'd go into it in detail, but as it is free, you can download it and decide for yourself.  Plus, my beer is getting cold.


 Again:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B8azW7IbtcxzalBIRUl0VW5zY1k

I was old School before YOU were old school.......

 So, right.   Here is why I'm paraphrasing the wonderful words of the Tubes....Its not just that I started pretty much in 1975 with three little books that explicitly mentioned Balrogs (more on this later), Ents and Hobbits; it's not just that the only other guy I know personally that has played longer than me has a brown box that he bought from EGG on the basis of it being a chainmail expansion. Nor is it that I never needed an OSR clone* because I still own multiple copies of the original rules, and use them whenever I want to run D&D.  ...It's not even that basically, I've never liked 1E or 2E and firmly considered B/X to be kiddie sanitized marketing tools. 

Hell, it's not even relevant that I'm old enough to want to quote the Tubes on my Blog......

See, those things just mean that I'm an ancient opinionated grognard blowhard who is  ....well, opinionated, possibly undersocialized, certainly too damn sure of himself, and has been playing games since the internet really didn't exist unless you were a colossal technical geek, as well as a gaming geek -and being a gamer had nothing to do with the crude computer ported video games you played. 

Here is why I was OS before you were OS:  In the mid 1980's, back when ADD was all the rage, and the edition wars were about B?X vs ADD......

(and let me tell you, without the forums and blogs and websites, you had to work your ass off to be a divisive polarizing black-and-white-thinking shit-stirring partisan about editions.)

......my buddy and I decided that it would be really cool to run an old fashioned D&D game, using the three little books and some hunt and peck from the supplements.    And we did. For several years. We called it the Nostalgia game at first, but it was really really always the real D&D game to us.

We did this when D&D as a CONCEPT Was Barely Ten FrikkinYears Old ; Gary was still at TSR (abeit fighting with the Blumes and Lorraine Williams and on the way out).  TEN YEARS OLD

yes that's right.  Less than eight years after AD&D was on the Market, He and I were all nostalgic for the simpler retro days of D&D.  .......and that was more than 25 years ago. One quarter of a century ago we were consumed by the desire for a simpler ruleset that was less than a decade old.  We were loons. 

 He is currently posting his campaign stuff on his blog, including (so far) the campaign intro and guidelines, and the surprisingly effective set of house rules for playing my unselfconsciously gonzo OD&D rules approved BALROG. Named Nesbitt.  Read here.  I so command it.

That children, is why I Was a Punk before You Were a Punk.

*Note that I still buy them , run them and play them; and as we know, shill willingly for Swords and Wizardry. That is because I am A Hopeless Case. And they are Excellent rules.  And, well...hopeless case.  Me.  Y'know.

The Thief is not guilty, part 3

So, I wanted to post some reviews, and I noticed that a common theme was: "great, except for the idiosyncratic refusal to include the Thief class".  So, heres my final(ish) thoughts on that.

This belief in the neccessoity for exclusion of the thief is puzzling, and it seems to be part of the OSR zeitgeist; the reasons range from the thief not being in the original three books, through them being a self referential class that creates the challeneges it is supposed to deal with, through being responsible for the glut of skills and feats of later editions.  Support or rejection of this idea seems foundational to the whole bubbling stew of the OSR.  So, since the thief excluders are wrong,  guess which side I'm on?


I've discussed (ranted about) these arguments before, expressing my opinion that they are, indeed, quantifiable as the merest hooie*. To sum up:

1. the number of people who started D&D with only the original 3 book set and not greyhawk either at the same time or immediately thereafter is vanishingly small and as such, it doesn;t represent a change of direction with regard to D&D as an RPG.
2. Gary wrote Greyhawk (well, yes with others) and obviously included the thief intentionally in his campaign, and thus the gygaxian vision of D&D; QED for the purists, I think . 
3. Fighters and the attempt to de-vanilla-ize them via weapon proficiencies and skill based subclasses is, in my obviously self inflated opinion, the real cause of the skillsystems and sorcery style of play, not thieves.  Note that GG resisted weapon proficiencies for quite a while as a bad idea that would lead to skill systems.
3. Its soooooooo swords and sorcery. Plus, Bilbo.

So, anything new ?  Well, yes, and here is my core argument.  
The thief is what made D&D more than just a skirmish miniatures game. 

We all know that it began as one -and that now it isn't just one.  A main difference between a skirmish wargame and the ur-RPG is this: Skirmish games  often are at the scale of the one figure = one man, but the player is still a disembodied commander moving pieces around, and all pieces are judged by their resource value in winning the game; an RPG changes the scale to one figure = you, and you alone. Playing a single fighter was still something that one could do in a skirmish game.  Fighters killed other units, Mages were artillery, and clerics were either recovery units or specialized anti -undead killers.
The thief was a big deal because as a class it had no useful place on the battlefield of a skirmish wargame, whatsover.

Really ?  Well, almost none of the thief skillset is useful in a skirmish -playing one is a waste of time.  Scouting is irrelevant on a real sand table, especially given the rules of that time period, and swiping was even less useful. Climbing and sneaking are options, but since one cannot do anything useful, so what ? Reading scrolls ?  Play an apprentice wizard. Possibly they could eliminate commanders and such, but that was really the role of assassins, a type specifically included in the original skirmish model of D&D.

Why then, amidst all the other detail of Greyhawk, most of which could simply be additions to a skirmish game is a useless unit specifically included ?

Because the thief had every utility in the dungeon game,  and the dungeon game created the role playing experience; and also, the thief in many ways defined the nature of the adventurer.  Remember, 1973.  Fantasy models are  not what they are today.  Heroes were sneaks as much as brawlers, often antiheroesm and in many ways, that is what made them a literary character, rather than the subject of a soldierly autobiography.  They solved puzzles, got into tight scrapes and conflicts by themselves; this I see as the real genesis of roleplaying.

So, given that, we see that the thief is the character of the dungeon crawl, and from there the Urban adventure or the indoor raid.  And those are the types of settings that set D&D apart from the skirmish game.  And thus...the father of the RPG, the causus bellum, the missing link -the neccessary part of the final result. 

No thieves =no role playing games. 

So, suck it up*, Grognardia and all you reactionary revisionists* ! Apologise to the thief right now ! Take him to lunch and make it your treat; you may as well, you'll be paying for it either way .





* I say this in the most loving caring  and compassionate manner possible..;)

Non-Ranting Adventurer Post.....

So, I've got a pdf available for the AAACS (Alternate Adventurer Abstract Combat System) available for perusal; and yes, I'd appreciate comments, and any actual playtest reports will get me to buy you a beer if we ever meet.

http://www.box.net/shared/tzgjs9vyrm

(UPDATE:  Links disabled.  check latest posts for current version)

The Thief Is NOT Guilty ! (part 2)

So, after a surprising amount of thought, and even more unsurprising amounts of dawdling (and working), I’ve decided to sum up my long hanging discussion on thieves.

In my imperial manner, I will ignore almost all of the arguments I previously said I’d discuss, and focus on two points: a discussion of one particular complaint, and one argument in favor not advanced before. Here goes the first part.

No, 'twas proficiency that killed the beast……

It is said that Thieves introduced D&D to the long painful slide into skill systems, and thus roll-playing rather than role playing, and , to those of us who care, this is a most damming accusation, for the heinousness of skillsystems in D&D  is true, to the extent that skills in almost all later editions are a train wreck, and promote the “roll to resolve” mindset for play. And when I say “train wreck", I mean it. Skills from 1E onwards just didn't work or were too clumsy for words.
Skills are and always were a bolt-on that really didn't add much. So, this, then, is what the thief stands accused of: nothing less than striking a  conceptual backstab to the rules of D&D at their  very birth birth in Greyhawk. A wound that has ulcerated and bled more each edition, until the entire structure of the game seems to be half intended to support it, as with some terrible parasite.  Were the thiefs abilities truly the wound that could not heal ?  A dolorous stroke to the system? No good readers, I say it is not. For while the skill systems of D&D are an abomination, they are not the thieves fault. No! Not the thief, I say. It was NOT the humble thief that struck the blow which we see now killing the colossus.  Then Who?  There ! He stands before you brazenly showing his known weapon proficiencies and specializations! The Fighter! THE FIGHTER !(Gasps from the crowd).

 How is this so ?  I will say, it was the lust for weapons and proficiency and clarification that birthed the blood-sucking tabeworm of dispair and confusion that is has grown, leviathan like, into the current skill systems.  But how you ask ?  Surely the thief brought skills into being, not the fighter ? No, lean close and I'll tell you the truth. (san loss =1/3-18)

Put aside the argument that the thieves “skills” are in fact class talents, and poorly explained at birth – and rather consider that the skill system as it exists, grew directly from the perceived need for weapons proficiency in D&D. See, back in the day, the argument was something like this;

• 1. We have limits of weapon use by class, but not within fighters
• 2. A fighter can thus use any imaginable weapon at all
• 3. The limits on non-fighters are assumed to be due to lack of training
• 4. If so, non-class weapons aren't impossible to use (do they burn us?) but rather usable poorly and at a penalty and
• 5. Fighters should have limits on weapons use, too, since knowledge of all weapons is clearly unbalancing or (your pick) unrealistic.

Now, I can't recall the exact source, but it might have been in the dragon, where EGG argued against weapon proficiencies for the exact reasons stated above: fighters should be able to grab anything, and class limits were no wonkier than armor limits or spell casting.

 “Weapon proficiency” was, however a constant source of variants everywhere, and at some point, EGG himself caved , insofar as it became official in the PH. Then came the cries for specialization –surely we need the ability to be insanely (here it is) SKILLED with less weapons if we are willing to limit the total number of slots. So, unfortunately, UA included weapons specialization that allowed trading slots for bonuses. At some point, I think it was the dragon in the AD&D era; we have “non-weapon proficiencies” which allow trading weapon slots for …other….skills! And by 2E it was a huge hodgepodge of variants and semi-official rulings accreted on the PH weapon proficiencies. So it was “improved” and regularized, and made completely core book official; and, it sucked, too. (Truth in advertising: I never liked 2E all that much)

Now, at some point, and I think it must have been just prior to 2E, or early on, at least, some clever Nelly came along and said some fateful words: “Hey, look, since thieves use skills and proficiencies, and now so does everyone, perhaps we should make them all work together  ? “; or at least that what it sounded like. And thus, when 3E came along with its rules heavy agenda we discovered that what the clever Nelly said was actually:

"I have an unresolved need for order and symmetry in my life, which is far more important than any consideration of rules intent or play, so I’m going to bollux up the thieves because they make me itch. And, I’m going to claim it’s more modern and advanced to have a defined skills system just to make it superficially acceptable , but mainly I want to do this to make DocGrognard's head explode in frustration ten years from now when he tries to play a 3.5 edition Thief" 

So, yes, Skills have been one of the banes of later edition D&D, but it isn't the thieves fault. It’s those damned “non-weapon Proficiencies.” And the bean counter fighter players who just HAD to know if they could use a three headed Battle parang, and if they used it in both hands, did it hit harder? Thanks dudes.

NEXT: Why the thief defined and created D&D as a role playing game. No, really.

Postscript, because I can.
I really don't know where the idea came from that if thieves could sneak, and then no-one else could. At least in the LBBGHBMEW games, we seemed to have assumed that sneak (for example) was ninja style sneaking, and hiding in shadows was batmanesque.

Actually, what we also assumed was that first level thieves suck and are unplayable as anything but muggers (backstab + loot); except for climb, every other “skill” was absurdly low. Which usually meant house rules to make them useful, which invariably included some notice of what they meant?