Roleplaying: The Backgroundening

I put the acronym “RPG” in the title of this blog. I did this because I still play roleplaying games. I don’t do so as often as I used, nor as often as I’d like. But it still happens. So I figured I’d write about that, too. But what, exactly, to write about? I could chronicle the events of each session, perhaps from the perspectives of one of more of the characters in the game. Or I could simply collect objective notes, lists of the events which occurred, plots foiled or come to fruition, and monsters slain.

I’m not sure that’s compelling reading.

So, inspired by recently discovering Lore Sjoberg’s The Book of Ratings amid the interwebs of the past, I think I’ll recount my roleplaying history and give a grade to each roleplaying game, a composite score based on my nostalgia and my much more critical current self. I won’t use letter grades; I teach composition at a Community College, so I’ll use the grade point system, where 4.0 is outstanding, 2.0 is middling, and 0.0 is Scrappy Doo failure.

Later blogs will focus on particular aspects of one or several roleplaying games, mainly so that I can be snarky about roleplaying games.

AD&D

I didn’t play a lot of AD&D. I was a bit young, though I did read all of my older brother’s books. I still have his copy of the now out-of-print and apparently litigious Deities & Demigods, which usefully includes statistics for using Chthulu as an antagonist for a game. Meh. In a world where every third dude is a sorcerer Big C isn’t all that gripping.

The game seemed alright, although some of the systems were sort of random. The psionic rules in particular seemed tossed into the back of the late-model Player’s Handbook willy-nilly. I can say that AD&D increased my vocabulary dramatically, as words like “enervate”, “contagion”, and “lucubration” entered my mind during elementary school. All of those are taken from magic-user spells. I always liked magic-users. My biggest gripe was the inclusion of a mechanic for even the most banal of tasks: the Open Doors roll from the Strength table. “Yes, I’d like my character to interact with the dungeon at an incredibly rudimentary level. Let’s see, can I open this door?” DM Response: “There’s a roll for that!” (checks Strength table) “Oh, and your chance of success is actually quite low.” 2.5

Favorite supplement: Unearthed Arcana.

AD&D 2nd Edition

I actually got a lot of mileage out of 2nd edition AD&D. I was the only one in my social circle of pre-adolescents who liked it enough to run the game, so I did. Often. It was pretty bad, narratively. But it was fun. The rules. . .were a lot like AD&D. There were some subtle differences, the Non Weapon Proficiency system being my favorite. Psionics was still fucked. The Open Doors roll was intact. Goddammit. 2.5

Favorite supplement: Tome of Magic.

Rifts

A buddy of mine picked up Rifts around my thirteenth Christmas. I think he gave it to me for Christmas, as a present to himself. Because he wanted to play the hell out of Rifts, but I was the guy who ran games. Poorly; but still, I ran them. I have this conundrum with Rifts. I absolutely love the “flavor” of the setting, the backstory, the varied mythologies, the various possibilities for gameplay, and the NPC Characters, which is amazing because of how referential it apparently is to other Palladium efforts. I came to Rifts cold and it resonates. Those other games didn’t even merit a look from me.

On the other hand, Rifts (and perhaps Palladium games in general) is so mired in awful rules and arcane, arbitrary systems I simply have to hate it. Two people can look at the core rulebook, make two different, interesting characters, and then find that their power levels are so wildly divergent at even the starting level one of them could vaporize the other with a thought. Perhaps I was too “power” focused when I was exploring Rifts. Perhaps it’s awesome if you give it the ol’ roleplaying chance. Or maybe the whole Mega-Damage system is fucked. Also, not so many great new words were learned from Rifts. Rifts makes up new shit, it doesn’t cater to etymology. 1.0

Favorite Supplement: Rifts World Book 2: Atlantis.

Vampire: The Masquerade

I was about sixteen when I played this game for the first time. My buddy’s brother Tom was home from college for the Christmas holidays and somehow got roped into Storytelling (GMing, every system has its own vocabulary) for a bunch of socially-awkward high-schoolers. We played for like ten hours straight. I think it was light when I went home. It was awesome.

I hate to say that I liked it so much, because the more we played the more I saw design flaws and weird rules bits, but those seemed so small compared to the good things about the game. Combat was a little silly: hours of die-rolling. God forbid someone have Celerity and get to take extra actions. Everyone else might as well go out to eat.

On top of that, scant months later Jyhad was released, and Tom actually gave us some cards for it. I have little negativity to bestow upon V:tM, and as positivity is generally not as funny, I’ll be brief. Vampire was also great for my vocabulary; I learned “obfuscate” years before someone used it to describe the Bush Administration’s closed-mouth White House Press policy. 4.0

Favorite Supplement: Clanbook: Tremere.

Supernatural Creature: the Gothic Noun

I wound up playing a lot of World of Darkness stuff, and buying a lot of supplements and games that we never even played. I have to say that I think that there was some interesting roleplaying elements going on in most of these games. We were still too young to realize it, so we didn’t get as much out of Wraith or Mage as possible. The downside, of course, is that ultimately those games weren’t compelling for the masses. There’s not a Mage: the Sorcelating video game out there. Vampire was as good as it got, I think, and every game they released actually seemed to cheapen the World of Darkness. I’ve got a copy of Mummy: the Resurrection around here that speaks volumes to the later point. Still, pretty good for the words. 2.0

Favorite Supplement: Changeling: The Dreaming (hardbound 2nd edition).

Werewolf: The Forsaken

I hadn’t roleplayed in several years when Robb, my local VTES Prince, asked if I’d like to participate in his own roleplaying resurgence. I of course agreed, as I don’t annoy him enough at the VTES table. He ran a WTF game for over a year, and I didn’t really enjoy it. It was around this time I realized that most roleplaying games take Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey a little too seriously. The characters start out as level/rank/whatever one and they’re chuds. It sucks. There’s some weird supernatural society that domineers the characters into certain patterns of behavior, and then the characters slowly accumulate power until they become, as my friend Joe puts it, studs. Chuds to studs, as it were.

Fuck that. At least, fuck that in a medium where the intent is to play a single character over that narrative arc for like two years. It takes a goddamn long time to hit the point where the character isn’t a chud.

With a year of Werewolf 2.0 I was really feeling that being a chud wasn’t fun. More to the point, nearly every week Robb would show up and say something like, “Hey, I was reading the rules, and I totally wasn’t rolling that Giant Ass Plundering Spirit’s toughness checks right. You guys actually had no hope of defeating it at all.” This did little to cheer up my lack of enthusiasm for the system. Said Giant Ass Plundering Spirit (apparently it was into big donkeys?) had nearly killed the entire party/pack/collective noun. I liked the rules less and less.

The rules discouraged min/maxing, and I’m not cool with that. I like specialists. I like playing a character that is great at something. Even if it isn’t something especially relevant all the time or even useful in a fight (let’s face it, there’s lots of fights in RPGs). In fact, most of the time that something is entirely useless in a fight.

Not so many new words to be learned here, and in fact I had to relearn all the made-up words for shit I already knew the made-up words for in Werewolf: The Catastrophe with other made-up words for the same shit. New word for near-wolf form instead of Hispo, new word for half moon instead of Philodox. I like learning new language that can be applied elsewhere. I don’t like learning new language that will only be useful if I’m playing the game. Pah. 1.5

Favorite Supplement: None, really. Core rulebook?

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

I’ll admit it. I gave in to the hype. I saw that a new edition of D&D was incumbent, and I liked the look of it. On top of everything else, I had a roleplaying group to play with. So I offered to run D&D 4E, reprising a GM role I hadn’t played in probably 8 or 9 years. I have to say, I wasn’t that disappointed. I quite enjoy 4th edition. But then, I don’t have to play it.

I did play a few sessions with some VTES guys at a local game store, and as a player I got remarkably bored by the actual rules crunch of the system. Mainly because when the dice start flying in combat, there are actually only a few choices each character has at low levels. I enjoyed the roleplaying bits, but most of those were self-directed, and the other players in the group weren’t all that engaged as characters. That’s okay: 4th edition sort of caters to a wide range of players, from people who just want to play board games to those of us who flesh out family histories for our alter ego. But in actual practice it sucked. My characters are nearly always more cerebral than diplomatic, but I found my wizard character doing all the talking to NPCs, despite my backstory of ambivalence.

As a system, I still like 4th edition. It’s standardized and fairly balanced, to the point that it’s quite the opposite of Rifts: two guys could create 4E characters, but their characters will almost certainly have to the same amount of class features and powers of the rest of the party. There’s an emphasis on team play, and it’s all around. It doesn’t appeal to the sociopathic misanthrope in me, but maybe we roleplayers need to be less sociopathically misanthropic. 3.0

Favorite Supplement: Player’s Handbook.

Dark Heresy

There was much talk about what Robb would run next. I was starting a second job and the crew was getting tired of the constant action of 4E. I was game for a lot of things, but I’m really down on the whole chuds-to-studs thing. We eventually decided on Dark Heresy, though we almost played Hunter: the Reckoning instead.

Dark Heresy is pretty cool. I feel like we, the players, are serious chuds most of the time in the early stages, but this is probably unavoidable. At least the game looks like the “stud” factor is actually not that high – most of the bad guys can get so incredibly arch that the odds are stacked against the inquisitors nearly all the time. I like being the underdog. The flavor of the game is pretty good, though there are a lot of unnecessary and ultimately useless new words, presumably to alienate the players from the world of their characters, making it all the more Other. I guess that’s alright.

I’m not sure I’m in love with the system. Some of the choices they’ve made for various game crunch annoy me, and it seems like as soon as the party has enough raw cash they can afford some ridiculous equipment-based advantages. I’ve never been a huge fan of games that allow players to throw money at the problem. Still, the setting is great, and I’m enjoying the game as a whole. 3.0

-Merlin out