As much as I enjoy writing for this blog, it is the easiest part of my life to reclaim time from, so I am going to need to be away a bit longer.

See you all in a few weeks.

Just like when I met Joe, I met Gail in-person for the first time thinking that she had a group, only to discover that, like me, she was searching for a game. The next few months were both a good time, and very frustrating. Gail and I both tried very hard to find some people and get something off the ground, but nothing seemed to work.

Most frustrating for me was that I discovered the events of earlier that year were no fluke. Even though in my mind I was still the guy who ran the Dread Pirate Roberts campaigns, the reality was that years of non-use had eroded my GMing skills and I was going to need to find a new style to fit my current abilities.

I remember one time when we tried to start a Star Wars campaign with this kid Curtis. We made up the characters and started to play, and then I just froze up; I knew I couldn’t do it, so I ended things right there.

Another time, after already having a couple of failures, we actually got a few people together to play D&D. The game ended up starting more than two hours later than planned. Then a very short time after we started two of the players left, supposedly for an hour or two. We put the game on hold and did other things while we waited, and waited. Two hours turned into four, then six, then eight. Somewhere along the way they had phoned to say it wouldn’t be much longer, but that would be the only contact we’d get. After eight hours we had given up and the other player had left, but Gail and I kept waiting to see how long it would be before we got a call saying they weren’t coming back. It was twenty hours after they left that they finally called back, wondering if we still wanted to game. We were so pissed off at that point, that all the frustration of not being able to find a group was forgotten – there was no way we were going to play with these guys again.

Finding a group and hanging with Gail had been the focus of my life for three months, but after I got a full time job, the search for a group got pushed to the side. A couple of months after that Gail moved back to her home town, ending that chapter in my gaming life.

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I am not going to give you any hot elf chicks, seeing as I only have one foot in the OSR. Instead I offer you five rules of writing good copy:

1. It must grab the readers attention with a compelling headline.
2. It must hold interest, by immediately delivering what was promised in the headline.
3. It must be absolutely clear what your message is.
4. It must have a strong guarantee.
5. It must produce the desired results.

Whether you are trying to get hits on your blog, sell your indy rpg, or just posting an ad to find gamers, writing good copy will go a long way to helping you. Why? Because our brains are wired to decide if something interests us or not in a split second.

I wonder how much the choice of the title “Dungeons and Dragons” played in the rise of our hobby. Though we are so used to it it seems like second nature, to someone who heard the title for the first time it must have evoked a sense of intrigue and made them wonder what the game was about.

I think I first head “Dungeons and Dragons” with regards to the Saturday morning cartoon, and while I don’t remember my initial reaction, I can tell you I was watching that show from day 1; the name just screams “This is going to be awesome!”

On the other hand I wonder if any would be challengers to D&D have been held back by their titles. I am not going to point any fingers, but there have been no shortage of games which have had unwieldy titles, confusing titles or just plain boring titles.

So keep in mind the next time you are trying to write a title for anything that before a would be reader will look any further, they need to be sold on the title. You should spend more time on the title than anything else.

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But in all the pain I suffered over Star Wars I learned some valuable lessons about how to not get caught up in the emotional turmoil of an edition war. I offer these to you in hopes they help you stay happy.

#1 Recognize Edition Wars

The earlier you spot an edition war coming, the earlier you can prepare yourself for it. Some times you can spot one coming a mile away, but other times what at first seems to be a little discontent can balloon into a situation where fans are flaming each other all day every day. The trick is ask yourself anytime you see a trend if the situation is one you want to be a part of? Is this just fans having a friendly disagreement or is this a disconnected series of arguments with the community firmly divided into two camps?

#2 Get Out

This may seem like a really simple solution, but it can be really hard to do. If you’ve been a part of an online community for years many people have a real desire to stay at any cost. You don’t have to be gone forever; start by disappearing for a week. After the week you will likely be in a better position to evaluate how things are.

Depending on the situation, and on you, the best long term situation may be to stay, or it may be to find a new site, or it may be that you need an extended period away from that community. I decided to take a little time away from the D&D community when 4E first came out; a little time turned into two years just because I got doing other things with my time, and never thought to check back, but that extra time away was probably a win for me.

#3 Shut Up

When an edition war, or any flame war, is going on some people on both sides will say absolutely absurd things. This small minority of people are like gasoline to the fire, and they bear the biggest responsibility in making an edition war painful to both sides (interestingly, most people only get offended by or even notice these people on the other side of the debate). Don’t reply to these people – ever.

You have nothing to win by engaging someone like this, and much to lose. Nothing you can possibly say will convince them that they were wrong. You will produce a list of ten facts to disprove their one lie, and they will respond with ten lies to counter your ten facts. By engaging them you are wasting your life, increasing your stress, and because this all bears a slight connection to something you love, you are damaging yourself.

When someone produces a blatant falsehood, just go somewhere else. (anyone who cares already knew it was a blatant falsehood, your services are not needed)

#4 Lighten Up

You may have noticed that from time to time I have produced posts that were edition war related, and yet did not really engage in any of the normal issues surrounding it, such as Edition Wars Bingo or 7 Awesome Things About 4E. I write these for a reason – to get all those bad vibes out of my system.

In both of those cases a blog I follow closely had just written a lengthy entry, engaging in Edition Wars. Rather than engage them, in their comments or here, I just got it all off my mind and out of my system by writing something tangential to the argument.

Conclusion

You can’t win an edition war, but you can lose one. Watch for them. If you see one coming, run. If you can’t or won’t run, then don’t feed the trolls and look for ways to get the stress the wars are causing you out of your system.

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On Losing the Faith

I learned to hate 3.5 D&D — a game I once enjoyed — because I spent too long on the D&D forums.

I don’t know Morrisonmp, personally or online, but I know that feeling. I know what its like to fight a thousand fights on the internet, then realize that all the fighting has killed my love for the thing I was defending.

I used to be one of the biggest Star Wars nerds on the planet; even among my friends who were themselves Star Wars nerds I was known as “The Star Wars Guy”.

When The Phantom Menace came out, I absolutely adored it; I saw it 23 times in theaters. I wanted more than anything to have a home online where I could talk to other fans about how much we loved it; but there was no safe place for fans of TPM. In every thread on every board on every site those who hated TPM would appear and bash it.

For me the real Phantom Menace was the internet.

For three years I argued every day with people who hated TPM. Then, just about the time Attack of the Clones was coming out, I realized something – reading their negative comments every day, and responding to them every day had killed my love of all things Star Wars.

I only went to AotC twice and RotS once. In the years since I have given away and sold the thousands of dollars of books and collectibles I once owned. I don’t own a single Star Wars thing anymore; not even the movies. Not because of anything George Lucas did, but because of the internet.

Anytime I hear or read someone repeat the old meme of “George Lucas raped my childhood.” I want to punch him and say “Why’d you have to bring me down with you SoB?!” (well, that and school him in how totally inappropriate it is to compare not liking a movie to rape)

The internet can do that to you. If you can feel it coming, then run, fast.

On the Self Consciousness of the Community

We all have this worry that we need to make gaming acceptable, or cool.

There are some people online, and I am definitely an example of one, who spend (some might say waste) an enormous number of words discussing how to make RPGs more popular. Is it a misplaced desire to be one of the cool kids? Is it an over developed nostalgia for a time when RPGs were on the up and up? Maybe, and maybe. But here are a few completely reasonable reasons to discuss the future of RPGs.

• A desire to give something to the future. It is a part of being human and getting older to want to see something you were a part of live beyond your years. The current course of RPGs indicates it will die with my generation.
• A desire to leave something for my kids. Not unlike the previous item, but more specific. I not only want to play games with my kids, but I would like it for them to have the opportunity to enjoy games for as many years as they choose.
• A desire to see continued innovation. Gaming has come a long way in the quarter century I have been playing, and I would like to see similar progress in the next quarter century. That won’t happen unless there is a strong, vibrant community.
• A desire to see something new. One of the problems with gaming for a very long time is that it takes more and more to impress. For me to maintain the same level of excitement I need games to actually be getting better.

Now make no mistake, if next year every game company on earth goes out of business, and every gamer I don’t know personally decides they will never again play an RPG, the impact on me and my game would be minimal (at least at first). But that doesn’t mean I can’t, nor shouldn’t want to see more people playing more games.

The Edition Wars

I think this is where Edition Wars come from — the idea that we have some way of ‘objectively’ stating that one game or another is really better.

I have to completely disagree with Morrisonmp on this one. As I have said before it is my belief that the root cause of all fan wars is passion. You have a group of people who are all very passionate about a game/movie/book/whatever, then a new iteration comes out which is controversial. The ones who dislike it are passionate in their attacks, and the ones who love it are passionate in their defense. The problem that all fractured fan bases face in modern times is that the internet brings the argument into our daily lives. No longer is this the fight you have with that one friend, now its a fight you feel compelled to fight every single day.

My suggestion is to avoid fan wars, for D&D or anything else. You can’t win, no matter what your view point is, but you most certainly can lose. Remind yourself why you love that thing you love, then run from fan wars at any cost.

Mind you, this is what Morrisonmp started off by saying he was going to do, so we can agree on that.

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He defines the three styles of design as

1. Classic Games – which the mass market does not like because they are a grind.
2. Strategic – which the mass market does not like because computers can do it better than a live GM.
3. Story Games – which the mass market does not like because it is too dependent on the players.

He then goes on to ask what can be done to overcome these weaknesses and build a fourth style.

I love a design challenge and I love discussing how to broaden the appeal of rpgs, so this should be right up my alley. But the more I think about this, the more I realize he has perfectly encapsulated all the different types of games.

Sure, as James points out in the comments section of Greg’s article, not every GM is limited by these three styles. But you can’t ship a good GM along with your game book. If a designer is trying to appeal to non-players, then the new player’s first experience is going to be with a crappy GM, who at best is going to do what the book says to do.

I have tried in my head to mash the three styles up, or strip them away, but in the end the limitations are the same. If randomness is present enough that it impacts players choices, the game will become a grind. If a game is based on meticulous strategy, then a table top just isn’t the best place to play. If the game is story driven, it needs players who want to drive a story.

I’m sure there is a 4th style of game that I just can’t think of, but stuck with these three what gaming needs is to better equip new GMs to run a game that meets the needs of their players.

In the old Red Box set, in the DM’s book there was an adventure which started out as a choose your own adventure, run by a DM, then became a standard adventure, then a map which he needed to stock, and finally a level which the DM needed to create himself. We need materials like that sold with games marketed to new players.

A choose your own adventure style adventure would give new players who don’t know what choices they have a chance to learn what all the possibilities are in rpgs. Equally important, it would give new DMs a very strong support and safety net.

A game marketed at new players (and despite the new red box, I don’t think any major current game is well aimed at new players) needs to have two or three adventures like this packed in, and there needs to be a huge library of other adventures like this (at a reasonable price) so if it takes years for a GM to become comfortable, that’s OK.

If we can’t make a better game, then we need to make a better GM, and that starts by making the first book they pick up much more friendly, and giving them more material to follow up with; new GMs don’t need supplemental rulebooks, they need modules with stories they can easily run.

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The image is thumbed to avoid spoiling those who might not want to be. Click on it to enlarge

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The laws which the general public probably has the greatest awareness are Newton's Laws of motion.

Compared to sciences that man has been unable to condense to a few laws, the sciences that we have a small number of laws for are far more accessible, and far more enjoyable to practice. I think its fair to say that these truths translate well into gaming; games whose rules are easy to remember once learned are more accessible and more fun (because game time isn’t wasted looking rules up). So, why isn’t elegance always a goal for game designers, who have absolute control over the lay of the rules?

Its true that sometimes it can be more difficult to write an elegant system, but frequently it is not. It is much harder to make pages and pages of “to hit” table than to make a mathematical rule which governs attacks. It is much more effort to decide which attributes scores will give a plus than to make a rule which governs all attributes and all scores. It is far more work to give every class their own number of hit points than to make up a rule which governs all classes.

So why do game designers seem to like making more work for themselves and us?

A big part of it is mindset. As I said in my article 9 Stage to Creating You Own RPG, a game creator needs to understand at the outset what his goals are. For the creators of many games elegance was never a goal; but it should be.

I have been wondering, as I write this, if one could make a game with all the breadth of the major rules heavy systems out there, but with all the rules expressed in a tiny number of laws. Could one make a game as complex as say D&D where all the rules that govern play could be expressed in ten laws? If this could be done, could one write a rule book with two pages dedicated to each law, then the whole rest of the book dedicated to the developing the feel of the game?

If 4E had been written up in this manner, would the edition wars we have seen the past three years have been nearly so bad? If 4E had been written up in this manner, might Wizards have had an easier time programing apps for it?

Let me know what you think.

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Back in the later years of the HARPGC we started frequently getting together to play board games on the weekend. We played many weird games that few people have ever heard of – Cosmic Encounters, Civilization, Chaos Marauders, Wabbit’s Wevenge, and so on. But one more mainstream game that we played at times was Axis and Allies.

During university, it was quite common for us to play some board games after an rpg session was over, and Axis and Allies was quite high on the list of games we played. (almost always with the World at War expansion) I fancied myself to be a pretty good player during those days, and would have ranked myself ahead of everyone we normally played with except Rob.

Then I met Joe.

When I called the number from the ad at Warp, I was expecting that I was getting in touch with a group that played A&A. No, it was just this one guy who really, really loved the game. Joe was obsessed with the game, and I had nearly endless free time back then, so in some ways it was a good match. We played a lot of marathon sessions over the course of a year.

One thing I learnt very quickly was that I was not as good as I thought. Joe was incredibly awesome at the game. He kicked my butt, and he would kick the butt of anyone else we got to play with us. Time and time again.

But I did learn. While the early games we played were painfully quick, the latter ones went on and on. The last game I remember us playing we spent over thirty hours playing, and eventually just agreed to call it a draw.

I had a pretty good time playing with Joe, but I had to stop when I started being a contributing member of society; I didn’t have the energy, or the interest to play eight or ten hours of A&A after a day’s work.
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