B/X is the Template for a Reason

Let’s get this out of the way: I think there are objective rights and wrongs to design, and by that I mean there are universal ways to make RPGs easier to play and run. I also happen to think a lot of RPGs aren’t designed very well; they take too much work, and are way more troublesome than they’re worth. I’ll give you a hint: if it rhymes with trad it’s more than it’s worth. A good game is easy to run at the table, with minimal prep work. I also don't think that OSE is a perfect game, nor do I think B/X is perfect.

See, here's how a lot of modern games work, particularly trad: the players show up and rely up on the GM to make every single narrative decision worth a damn. Even in something like PBTA, where collaboration is a lot stronger, the actual table experience of a GM is vastly more complicated than a player's. A player has really one thing to worry about: what the GM is doing and what the GM tells him. Everything else flows off of that for a player. This then means that the GM, if he is to provide the operative environment, has to make quite a few more decisions than even one player in the same amount of time. Without a good way to shuffle some of that mental load onto something or someone else most games essentially consign a GM to mental exhaustion. This is supposed to be a game, not me doing taxes thank you. In this situation you don't want to prep, and who could blame you! You're worn out from the session and needing to take a break. Having to prep after that's torture, just flat out.

So is it any wonder that Moldvay’s Basic/Expert (BX) is arguably the basis of the OSR, because of its easy of running? It certainly isn't to me, not after perusing this book for five minutes.  Don’t believe me? Here’s what you do: draw a map and bookmark the random tables in the book. During the game every two character turns you roll 1d6: if you hit a 1(or higher if you think your players are being dumb) something happens. Roll on the random tables provided (or the ones you made up for fun) in the book after that, roll for the reaction of the mosnters, and go from there! You will be expending some energy, sure, but you will be using a hell of a lot less energy than you’d expect; you go from having to figure everything out to interpreting results. This is a huge difference in the mental and creative load. You can just go along with the procedures and not have to worry about where anything is going, because the game's job is to give you plot points to interpre. You go from playing the long game of a session to just focusing on the next task.

And OSE preserves these procedures exactly. Now, here's what I'm not saying: OSE ain't the only way to replicate such procedures. In fact, OSE's procedures are limited and narrow and if you don't want a dungeoncrawler turning to domain warfare and whatnot OSE won't work for you. That's okay. A game is a game because of its focus, not because it is so freaking large as to catch everyone and everything in its net.

Does that make 5e a game?

Do you really need me to answer that? Do you really me to bring up all the videos of people complaining about GM burnout and how hard it is to GM that mess of a game?

No?

Didn't think so.

Anyways, what I am saying is that, of all the things on the market, B/X is one of the ones with the most comprehensive support for both players and GM. It's not that I want everything to be B/X; I'm in the middle of designing several games, so obviously I think more can be added to the market. It's just that this is the space I think needs the most work: games that support and encourage, rather than demand and drain. There's a reason why Gygax could run games on an almost weekly basis, and it's because of the principles that are now encapsulated in OSE and a lot of the OSR. The fact that the OSR is arguably a commentary on B/X should say something about what this one game accomplished. 

And we all should be learning from it.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3

 

There are spoilers. If you've not seen it don't read it.

Please understand the following: from the moment I saw the first Guardians of the Galaxy I knew there was something special going on. There was a spark to the first movie that I could feel, all the way down in my soul, that came from Gunn's heart. The dude wanted to say something, and he had found the perfect way to say it: The Guardians of the Galaxy. There are certainly problems with the first movie, but I crave sincerity in art, and can forgive many a problem simply because the filmmaker meant whatever it is he's saying, from all the way down. Art is meant to convey person to whomever consumes it, artifice is a means to say something true. If the truth gets delivered the rest can be forgiven. I got that with Guardians 1. Guardians 2 hit me a whole hell of a lot harder, but I noticed it said volume two. They aren't separate stories, it's one story. You're meant to watch them as one thing, and to read as if they were a book, with future events impacting how you view past events and all that. So it's not that I'm looking at Guardians volume 3 as a standalone, but the end, with one thematic arc throughout. That seems to be what James Gunn wants us to do, so I'm gonna do that.

Now, if I'm going to look at this movie on its own, I'm disappointed. It's not that I wanted things to have a syrupy-sweet happy ending, it's that the ending we got doesn't make much sense to me! Peter goes the whole movie trying to save Rocket and he doesn't take him to see his grandfather? Like, why? That doesn't make any sense. I get that Peter wants to finish grieving and see his grandpa, but there's not even a moment's hesitation on him deciding to go see his grandpa alone. There's multiple alien invasions of Earth and the Snap and all this other crazy stuff going on... nobody would be surprised to see Peter with Rocket. Sorry. They wouldn't. The fact that Rocket, the heart and soul of this movie, is relegated to a dance number at the end while being the captain of a now mostly defunct group is... that doesn't feel good. Or make sense. He'd go with Peter. He just would.  I get that he's helping all these animals and other victims and whatnot, but that doesn't seem like a thing of agency for Rocket; he goes through this huge arc where he actually comes back to life for Peter and the gang and then they split up and he just stays there.

Yup. Doesn't feel right to me. Sorry.

Mantis's ending also doesn't feel very well set-up. She clearly loves Drax... and decides to go and find herself? After years? This one makes even less sense to me. You don't find yourself by leaving people you love, that's literally why Peter is going back to see his grandpa. Especially now that Drax is back to being a foster-dad, that seems to be something an empath would want to stick around to see! Again, I don't see the sense in that. There's no moment where Mantis is going "Hey, maybe I should try things truly on my own". There's no real set up to this moment, and is flat out wrong. If Gunn wanted Mantis to start having "I need to do this on my own" vibes... please set them up? Pretty please?

That being said, there's some real brilliant moments in GOTGVOL3. Anything to do with Rocket works, and it hits every time and my God the tears I cried at the death's door scene. Gunn has always had Rocket Racoon as the heart of this epic three-part movie and this is the movie where he finally comes out the door swinging with Rocket and I loved every second of it. The scenes with the High Evolutionary are the closest thing to perfection in a villain that I've seen in the MCU (no, sorry, the dude whose name I can't even care to remember from Black Panther- oh wait it's Killmonger I still don't care he's not a good villain). The characters are always well-acted and their dialogue is about the clostest thing to perfect I can expect from an MCU movie. The music is gorgeously picked, although it could have had some quiet moments at certain emotional climaxes to make it punch harder.

So that's the movie on its own: brilliant parts that aren't put together well.

As a part of a larger story what do I think of it? Endings should clarify what the overarching story is about, and provide a good capstone to everything so that way you are okay with no longer journeying with the characters, while elevating the whole experience. Endings. Are. Hard. To do. Even if you get it right others may be upset that you didn't address what they thought the story was about (see the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy!), or any other of a million objective and subjective reasons. So I'm not here to rag on Gunn. While I feel like this final part clarified very competently what the whole story is about... it doesn't elevate the whole for me. I get that you need  to see Infinity War and Endgame, yadda yadda yadda, but honestly this is the closest we've gotten to a coherent single story in the MCU... and it was hamstrung because it was a part of the MCU. Gunn has gone on record as saying that he disagreed with Peter being the reason why everything went to Hell in Infinity War, and frankly I agree with him. So Gunn had to write a character that he had made his own that was more or less hijacked and make it make sense, years later. It's an impossible task, in all fairness. I don't think he pulls it off, but I don't think that's Gunn's fault, but the fault of Feige (who is increasingly looking less and less competent) and the Russo Brothers, who should have stopped and asked for input and respected what he would have told them.

This feels like the end of an era for me. I don't know if I can tell everyone in this blog post just how loud I screamed in the theatre at the end of Iron Man. I was a total madman, an unabashed fanboi practcially on the word go. This scene?

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I was, nor can I tell you how red my sister and friend’s faces were when I was shouting horrible things like “GEEKASM!!! Oh the ECSTACY!!!” when The Incredible Hulk dropped its Captain America references. This was it, people, this was the dream!!! And I was that obnoxious fan about it all, so very openly and self-aware. Avengers came out and I about cried, because everyone was seeing it, they were finally seeing what this form of storytelling could accomplish.

Oh how much has changed in fifteen years! 

My disappointment with Phase 4, with the marked exception of WandaVision, hasn’t been subtle. But on some level I couldn’t help but hope in GOTGVOL3. I wanted to believe Gunn would beat the system once again. He didn’t; with the exception of No Way Home (I always watch Spidey movies with my wife) I’m done. The MCU has failed, far as I’m concerned. What was supposed to be an interconnected universe of stories and art is now merely, only, a means of getting ticket sales and merch whores. And it didn’t have to be that way.

But it is now.

Thank you for all you did, Mr. Gunn. You swung for the fences on all these movies and I couldn’t be more grateful. 

Here’s to Rocket Raccoon. What a run.

"Sky is forever"

The True Rot of the Culture War

 

As he (Jesus) was returning to the city at daybreak, he was hungry: and, seeing a fig-tree by the road-side, he went up to it, and found nothing but leaves on it. And he said to it, Let no fruit ever grow on thee hereafter; whereupon the tree withered away. Matthew 21: 18-19

I've told this story a few times on this blog, but it bears repeating. When I was a kid I learned that Benny Urqidez, one of the greatest fighters to ever live, had claimed that the spinning back kick was the most powerful move in martial arts, by the biomechanics. Me being the perennial smartass I was I asked my sifu Deano what the most powerful move was. He smiled at me, knowing I'd borrowed the book where Benny Urqidez had said that, and told me "Whatever knocks your opponent out. That's the strongest move". When I tried to argue about the biomechanics of particular moves Deano laughed at me: "If you knock a guy out with a spinning back kick and I knock out a guy with a bottle to the head we both used the strongest move, because the goal of all moves is to knock your opponent out." Deano taught me possibly the most important lesson of my life: what you are doing, right now, right in front of you, is the most important thing in the world. Not what you want to be doing five years from now, not whether or not it lives up to some weirdo abstract principle that sounds nice but you can't do anything with it. 

A few years ago one of those truly deep friendships you hardly ever find died. There were a lot of warning signs, of course, but the one that I knew at the time to be bad, possibly beyond repair, was when he called me a centrist. That may sound like a silly thing, but two seconds of this blog or actually talking to me will reveal it is impossible for me to be a centrist; it is constitutionally impossible for me to take a moderate position. He made this claim because I had loudly proclaimed that I couldn’t vote at all for any of the candidates in the 2016 US election, due to a lack of any suitable candidates. He claimed I was making a centrist position. And honestly at the time I didn’t make a good argument against him, beyond a wild gesticulation at my own temperament. If the accusation happened now I’d probably say that there was an underlying unity to left and right I sensed. I couldn’t pin it down, I didn’t understand why I felt that way, but I felt the entire game was rigged. And until I understood the game and how it worked I didn’t care to play into someone else’s hands; incomplete information always makes one a sucker.

But sure, that made me a centrist. 

Years went by, and I watched the world turn to madness around me. Labels were thrown around, people rioted and were either ignored or harshly treated, and propaganda (known as the news “being more politicized”) increased a hundredfold. I most definitely sympathize right more than left, and still do… but something held me back. Something seemed wrong and I kept trying to question the debate in the first place. This created some waves, so that the former friend said in a a fit of sheer cowardice: “You have to stop thinking sometime.” It was a statement that chilled me to my soul. I couldn’t say why it did, but the whole time there was a nagging feeling we were all asking the wrong questions, moving too quickly to be genuinely doing any good at all. Even when I started to get more comfortable with some political ideas, specifically the distant right (also known as neo-reactionaries) something still felt wrong. It frustrated me greatly, but I felt the questions that led me to The Distributist and Curtis Yarvin were wrong. As much as I appreciated the distant right I felt something was backwards… and the Distributist’s critiques of the distant right confirmed it. So I waited. I got sick of waiting, but honestly most of my former friends had made such complete jackasses of themselves that I held the course out of fear of cessation of thought. 

And then I read The Book of the New Sun, and stumbled upon the following passage:

"When a client (torture victim, note by blogger) is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize." 

This passage stopped me dead. A lot of leftist complaints are about the poor and the marginalized, and the right's response is usually with ideas... but you know where it stays? A conversation. Symbols remain the center of the conversation. You wanna know why I say symbols stay the center? Because I'm not hearing about a sudden influx of charity work from everyone. No, I didn't say from organizations, I mean individuals. But something still hadn't clicked, and I've been trying to put the last pieces together. A lot of my friends from college had completely fallen into one of two extreme symbolic camps. Deano's words came back to me: the goal is to knock the opponent out, not do something that's technically correct. Thought follows life to improve it, life is not dictated by thought.

And Christianity, real Christianity, agrees with this sentiment.The Last Judgment (Matthew 25: 31-46) reads thusly:

31 When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit down upon the throne of his glory,

32 and all nations will be gathered in his presence, where he will divide men one from the other, as the shepherd divides the sheep from the goats;

33 he will set the sheep on his right, and the goats on his left.

34 Then the King will say to those who are on his right hand, Come, you that have received a blessing from my Father, take possession of the kingdom which has been prepared for you since the foundation of the world.

35 For I was hungry, and you gave me food, thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you brought me home,

36 naked, and you clothed me, sick, and you cared for me, a prisoner, and you came to me.

37 Whereupon the just will answer, Lord, when was it that we saw thee hungry, and fed thee, or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

38 When was it that we saw thee a stranger, and brought thee home, or naked, and clothed thee?

39 When was it that we saw thee sick or in prison and came to thee?

40 And the King will answer them, Believe me, when you did it to one of the least of my brethren here, you did it to me.

41 Then he will say to those who are on his left hand, in their turn, Go far from me, you that are accursed, into that eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.

42 For I was hungry, and you never gave me food, I was thirsty, and you never gave me drink;

43 I was a stranger, and you did not bring me home, I was naked, and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison, and you did not care for me.

44 Whereupon they, in their turn, will answer, Lord, when was it that we saw thee hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to thee?

45 And he will answer them, Believe me, when you refused it to one of the least of my brethren here, you refused it to me.

46 And these shall pass on to eternal punishment, and the just to eternal life.

Notice what Christ says! He does not ask what doctrine you profess, because doctrine follows your life, not the other way around. If you live according to this Final Judgment criteria you will meet Christ and know Him as the source of your goodness at the end. Notice that the criteria does not say "did you start a charity? An organization to get others to help the less fortunate? Did you write a blog about how people need to get off their asses to help the poor?" It is an individual thing: did you or did you not do this, personally, as often as you could (or even more than you could) during your life?" And notice that the answer is black or white: did you or did you not personally do this. These actions tell you what's in your heart, because what's in the heart will manifest itself.

I've been pondering the above for awhile, but have been unable to really make much of a break-through... until (surprise!) The Gulag Archipelago, when I came acrost the following passage:

The term political consciousness really got me. See, it's a verifiable fact that anyone with a "Western" consciousness changed post-WWI. We got the notes, the journals, the poems of poets mourning a sudden lack of moral fiber, all commenting on a lack of strength that seemingly vanished overnight. We live in the wake of a great public disaster and have seemingly forgotten it happened. There was once a time where there was a cultural consciousness where Christianity, where religion, was a thing that you did. And the true measure of religion? Well, James 1:27 sure puts it bluntly, don't it?

If he is to offer service pure and unblemished in the sight of God, who is our Father, he must take care of orphans and widows in their need, and keep himself untainted by the world.

Political consciousness is a term putting the importance of the abstract above the concrete, the symbol over the thing that gives the symbol any meaning at all. Symbols, important as they are, will always be lower than the thing they represent. Christ does not ask in that Last Judgment if you believed in a Triune God, or whether or not you believe in gay marriage or whatever. Those things are important, but they're important because they fully unlock your potential as a human being, one that takes care of those less fortunate than you and who seeks out those less fortunate to help. Truth, real truth, makes you concretely better, in this world. 

And for those of you who are wondering what the "untainted" word means, the original Greek seems to be referenced frequently with "keeping the commandments". As in, the 10 Commandments and The Sermon on the Mount. So concrete actions in the world. You're asked to not hate on your parents, you're told that suffering for being kind isn't something to fear, etc. Notice it's not a freaking commandment to not play Pokemon or read Harry Potter. Con. Crete. Actions. People. What you do will change what's in your head.

The culture war distracts from this most important of things, the care of those less fortunate personally. Mindlessly quoting the Fathers to support your own sense of superiority is a distraction from caring for the less fortunate personally. True religion is caring for the less fortunate, personally, and doing it as often as you can. Only Christianity allows you to do this at max strength. You won't find it anywhere else. Not in the old pagan religions, where man was but a shade of a plaything for the gods, not in the "Enlightenment" where man is a rational animal that is responsible for all his suffering because he made a mistake, not in the new post-Soviet woke ideology where no one is responsible for any of their suffering. Christianity does not blame. It merely tells you to help, even if it makes you look like an idiot. Cause it will.

You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream,thought and love and act that matter. -Book of the New Sun

I'm not gonna lie, folks, writing this was hard. I lost a lot more friends in the 2016 election than I care to admit, and many more went away because of the madness that was COVID and 2020. I don't think I ever really moved on. A part of me wants to pick this phenomena apart beyond what's healthy, to perseverate and ask "What happened? What could I have done differently?" But ultimately that's a trap. I can't undo what happened then. I can't make my former friends what I thought they were, what I wanted them to be.

But is that what God wants for me?

No.

God wants to help me be there for other people, genuinely. He wants to make up the difference so I can actually live, here and now. The tragedy that is reality can be subverted, Christianity is the Great Subversion of reality. He doesn't want me to sit around and try to figure out what happened and get sucked into more and more of this "are you saying and doing the proper things so you can be put into a lovely little camp and get atta-boy pats on the back" box.

Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Comfort the grieving. Visit the imprisoned. Go where there is darkness and see what you can do.

And that, that right there, is true religion. If you do that God is with you.

The rest will follow from there.

Trophy Gold: The Book (Sans Megadungeon)

 

I already considered the zine version of Trophy Gold and Dark to be the tightest designed games in my library. Nothing felt out of place; Jesse Ross had codified a vision. Reading the zine version impacted me and my designs in a powerful but subtle way.

The book only increases my respect.

What do I think of it so far? I say so far, because I haven't tried the megadungeon, although I'm curious. The wording of the rules has been vastly improved, making the core loop the clearest storygame mechanic I've ever read or used at the table. But the book goes further, adding town and journey rules. They're not super involved, but add context to the characters and the world. You may not want to use them, sure, and the core gameplay would not suffer for it. But there's a lot added by these mechanics.

The gist of Trophy Gold is thus: when the GM tolds you to roll, gather as many d6s as you can (usually between 2-4) , and look at what the highest die is: 6 and you get what you want, 4 and 5 you get what you want with trouble, 1-3 you don't get what you want and it all goes wrong. There's three different kinds of rolls that interface with this base concept: Hunt, Combat, and Risk (the catch-all for doing something risky, including casting spells), and they all have different effects based off of what you're trying to do. You may take a Devil's Bargain (a bad thing that happens no matter what) for an additional die... and these are meant to be group activities; you're supposed to goad each other into greater and greater heights of stupidity. The amount of laughter this one mechanic has generated at my table is hard to overstate, folks.As dark as this game gets, as horrifying as it frequently is, it is hilarious. I've not laughed so hard at a game in years.

The Hunt roll is one of the smoothest  systems I've ever run into, provided your players know that to ask a question is to roll dice. The GM then tells them if they get an extra die to throw in or not, usually basd off a skill or some story advantage.  Everything, and I do mean everything, funnels through the Hunt roll. The GM need do nothing except go off of the results of that one roll. If you are an OSR player you know this as someone taking a turn and the GM making a roll for a random encounter. In Trophy Gold it's just the one roll. It's elegant. The Hunt roll will kick back tons of wrinkles, all the time, and will keep everything moving on a constant basis, either because the player knows where to go or because something will interrupt them. The players are just rolling dice and you're jumping in to tell them what dice to roll and how many, and everyone's throwing in ideas of how badly it can go and the GM is just sitting in the back, laughing, taking notes. It's fantastic. The Hunt roll is the type of mechanic that every single game should aspire to imitate in spirit, if not outright.

The Combat roll is fantastic because of the ecosystem that it's hooked into more than the actual roll itself. Which isn't to say the roll isn't bad!  Combat is dangerous, with lots of chances to get hurt, especially if your teammates chicken out; the more people that drop out of a combat due to wounds the worse it is for everyone else. When you do the kill the monsters you can get Gold off them in the form of body parts that can be sold, as well as examine the creature for creatures, name it, and enter it into the shared journal bestiary the group is supposed to maintain. As time goes on combat will turn from "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING" to "Oh yeah, take its knees out!" It's a fun little advancement technique that cuts out one of the most problematic parts of RPGs, numbers. Whenever a game finds ways to do advancement that qualitatively change the experience, rather than just up numbers, you should pay attention: it's a sign someone has a clear vision of their piece.

The Risk Roll is the most "normal" part of this game, with the least implications on it. And that's fine; not everything can be this huge groundbreak innovation in a game, you've gotta have something to just do the hard work. The Risk Roll does this.. .although its expansion into spells is extremely cool. Spells are just a name with a short description, and you and the GM figure out if it applies best to the situation or not. Given the consequences for casting a spell can be extremely nasty.. be wary if the GM just keeps saying "yes". The balancing factor of spells in this game are that you may succeed and not like what you get. And that is going to be a lot more common than you think.

There are Journey and Town mechanics in the book version of Trophy Gold. They're not meant to be anything more than a small narrative beat between dungeons, something to contextualize why your (possibly not so) lovable losers are out doing what they're doing. It's simple, to the point, and poignant stuff. These are a great upgrade from the zine.

My favorite addition, however, is the versus and helping rules. The original zine didn't have anything for those situtations, and if there was ever a game I have run into where you will want to help or hinder your fellow players Trophy proper is that game. You could kinda hack something in, but Ross has clearly done a lot more testing and thinking on the subject and has crafted rules that are hilariously awful to deal with, cementing the mood of dark humor and despair that is a Trophy game.

I've run a few of the sample dungeons in the book and have found myself really impressed by what happens with these barebones outlines when you throw the Hunt roll at them. If there's anything that I resent about these sample dungeons, it's that you technically don't need them; you could just draw up a general structure and use the Hunt rolls to figure out the rest. Hell, probably could grab a bunch of OSR tables and throw them at the GM to answer questions. If anything, the game and how it's written at this point obfuscates the reality of what a GM would actually need to prep for the game and why. 

Ultimately, Trophy Gold in book form is an absolutely fantastic time. I've not heard people laugh this hard in a very long time at just some of the absolute worst situations one can orchestrate. The mechanics are simple but extremely deep when people decide to play with them. The book is a marvellous and dark beauty. The guidance could be clearer, sure, but that's usually a problem in most RPG systems. This is an amazing time. It's worth figuring out.