Archive for February, 2012
Avoiding the Familiar Last week, I had been actively gaming again for a whole year. Almost forty, I have played more hours of roleplaying in the last 365 days than I have in almost half of my life. Not since university have I played this much, getting by in the meantime with online games, the occasional demo, some boardgaming, and two abortive attempts to get members of my family to play something d20 flavoured.
I can’t honestly account for the reason that I have been so long without gaming. I certainly having stopped thinking about games throughout that period. I took a moderately active role in the rebirth of the PARANOIA game and have more recently done something similar with Maelstrom. I have accumulated many more books and magazines over that period, despite not really playing much at all. I did actively play-by-mail for a good ten years after I finished roleplaying regularly. I admit I may have staved off any urge to play face-to-face by focussing heavily on the somewhat perverse entertainment of running a by-mail game for a dozen or more people. Ten years ago I spent a lot of time doing play-by-forum games, mostly Star Wars and a little fantasy. In the end, that dried up, too.
I wonder whether my own waning confidence in myself had something to do with it. While I have the occasional wit and eloquent thought that might suggest a comfortable approach to performing, I struggle quite a bit with a nagging lack of confidence. I have times when the thought of a fall in front of other people makes me overwhelming averse to any sort of performance. I can find something as simple as a short presentation a harrowing experience, best avoided at all costs. At other times, I don’t find it so hard, perhaps given confidence by my familiarity with a subject.
In that frame of mind, my lack of familiarity with many games might be the cause of my inactivity. I have owned many games for almost thirty years now, like MERP and PARANOIA. For some reason, I have sought solace elsewhere, dipping in and out of other systems as if something out there might overcome my own lack of confidence. I realise that the game system has very little to do with it. In fact, I suspect that opening myself up to other systems simply stokes the flames of my self-doubt with further fuel. I introduce complexity and confusion to my roleplaying life by reading more and find no clarity at the end because none lay there to begin with.
I have roleplayed for a whole year, dropping maybe half-a-dozen weeks along the way to illness or distraction. I have found my old hobby again and taken to the role of GM several times – for Dragon Age, The Laundry, Doctor Who and others. I realise now that I have not run anything from the beginning, anything really familiar. If I ran MERP, PARANOIA, Maelstrom or WEG Star Wars, wouldn’t it be easier? Wouldn’t I lift some of the burden of uncertainty by playing something I have known for more than half of my life and grown comfortable with?
Foul Dungeons Have I created this sense of dungeoneering somehow being wrong by aligning the act of entering a dungeon with the playing of certain games? I’m not sure I can take sole responsibility for it, but I think it bears consideration.
I find myself hankering for a dungeon crawl, but somehow in my mind this equates to having a dirty thought. On the other hand, how can that be true? When I go to sites like RPGNow, online purveyors of roleplaying materials always seem to have loads of maps and adventures that cater to those who favour subterranean environs. The indie gaming environment seems positively engorged with simple Old School games that support the sort of stereotypical view of gaming common in the 70s and 80s.
I admit I may simply have created a stereotypical activity aligned with a certain type of game – like people who play 4th Edition D&D or Pathfinder must spend all their time trailing around the musty depths of the Underdark. I’m 100% certain I have fabricated this vision. For every dungeon adventure published, in series like the Pathfinder Adventure Paths by Paizo, you can probably find another one (or a greater ratio) set somewhere above ground. You can, afterall, adventure in almost any environment and many genres don’t even have dungeons in the strictest sense. Yes, you might have a science fiction game set in an underworld, sewer, or claustrophobic hive complex, but I’m not sure that strictly equates to a dungeon.
Or does it? In the broader sense, is a dungeon actually a specific thing? If you have a series of encounters connected across an area doesn’t that basically amount to a dungeon? If I travel through the sewers, meeting mutants, rats, beggars and hideous slime beasts, how does that not count as a dungeon? If I throw in a necromancer at the end of the labyrinth, plotting from the stinking depths to raise an army of darkness from the corposes dumped in the fetid waters does that differ from another necromancer planning to do much the same thing from the midst of a crumbling underground den in the back of beyond. The guy in the sewer probably deserves some respect for having a better plan, as a swarm of undead rising from the sewers will likely meet less resistance than a shambling army heading towards the city walls.
I suppose that using the term ‘dungeon’ doesn’t help, because a gaming dungeon and an actual historical dungeon have very little in common. A gaming dungeon really represents a type of environment, a common type of adventure setting, populated with creatures, traps, treasures, and one or more megalomaniacal would-be overlord. A historical dungeon basically amounted to an underground jail, torture chamber or perhaps a vault for secure storage. I doubt it had anything else to offer.
In the mood for dungeoneering, I have mulled over the game to play with, and after juggling thoughts of Old School systems, I might use Maelstrom. The Tudor backdrop for Maelstrom amounts to quite a short background in the era over a few pages – otherwise, effectively, the game offers up a low magic quasi-historical setting not unlike many other Old School games. My familiarity with the system and desperate urge to tinker with it seems to fit my need.
So, now I just need to overcome the feeling that spending time in a dungeon somehow undermines my serious roleplayer credentials…
In a Dark, Dark Place In our regular games night, we played a game of Cthulhu Dark because we suffered a couple of withdrawals from the regular gang and needed something to fill the gap. While I find these intermissions frustrating when we’re in the midst of an adventure, sometimes the outcome can be just as entertaining and fulfilling. In this instance, both the adventure and the game system made the evening very much appreciated.
So, we had this one-shot, pick-up game set in an asylum. I suspect all good games of anything with Cthulhu in the title should include at least a reference or a flying visit to a mental institution, so using one as a setting took the experience to the extreme. Why wait to get made late in the game when you can start out that way! Two players – me included – chose to play patients, while two played staff. I played Edgar Grebe, one time doctor at the asylum, now confined as an inmate following some unorthodox self-administration of experimental drugs. Fellow patient, Johnathan, perhaps got a little too close to his artistic creations and visions for the theatre, slipping into a state where the world became his stage. Of the staff, we had Tony, an orderly, making a small profit out of selling the bodies of the dead – of which this sanatorium seemed to have an oddly high number. We also had Sebastian, the enthusiastic doctor who took over Grebe’s position, a man keen to experiment with practical (and impractical) approaching to curing the ills of the residents.
Cthulhu Dark offers a very clean, simple system – all about degrees of success, ensuring the story keeps moving along and doesn’t get bogged down in the dead-ends of failure. Yes, you can go insane, but you can’t end up hammering your forehead against a wall simply because you could roll lower than a target percentage. When you roll a die to check for a result, you can get anything from a vague and unsatisfactory success through an adequate one, all the way off toward something awe-inspiring and potentially mind-blowing. Getting a 6 can mean you achieve the level of success that opens your eyes to a whole new level of understanding, and in Cthulhu that kind of thing can drive you mad. You choose an occupation at the start of the game, and when an activity fits the chosen role you get a add an extra die to the mix. Fancy pushing yourself and your sanity, then add another – differently coloured – die into the set and increase your chances of rolling a high. However, roll the highest value on the sanity die and you’ll risk taxing your mental stability in the face of all that alien horror.
I used a variation of the Dark system to run a science fiction adventure a little while back, using differently coloured mental and physical stress dice. You could choose to not only rely on simply luck or actual skill, but on pushing yourself harder and harder. Alternatively, mental trauma or threat of physical damage could cause you to have to roll one or both dice and face long term disability.
Anyway – in the end, I suspect I died. The curtain fell on my tale before my demise, but sitting in the wreckage of a doctor’s office, surrounded with burning files, watched by baleful red eyes from amongst the shadows… it can’t end well.