RPG a Day, Day 22: Man the bargain hunter

So tomorrow I am going to London, and one of the things I am most excited about doing, apart from all the great bookshops and museums and so on, is going to this tiny model shop in Ealing:

I'm going to buy something for the sake of being a good customer -- I can always get some modelling materials even if they don't have anything I specifically want -- but really what I like the most is the fun of bargain hunting. You never know what you're going to find! I've actually been much more successful in the miniatures field than in RPGS; my collection of Rogue Trader era rarities doesn't mean I was picking up weird Adeptus Mechanicus models when I was 9, it just means I am assiduous in my searching of flea markets, car boot sales and of course the internet. 

But that's not to say I haven't found a few cool things second-hand in the RPG world, mainly thanks to my old games shop having a good used shelf but also thanks to the various online communities I'm part of. 

                                    

Notes:

Now, as you might expect, most of the games I talk about in my second-hand post are out of print, but not all of them. 

You can't find this specific Glorantha book, but Design Mechanism has some other ones, including many for $1. Those are only a fraction of the many books out there, I'm just saying that they're from the same era as the one I mention in this post. 

And of course Reign is still available. And if you just want the leading-large-groups rules and not the setting, you can get the Enchiridion.

More info on the upcoming new version of King of Sartar.

Pieces of British gaming history, continued.

OK! Yesterday I talked about my recent yard sale acquisition of White Dwarf issue #4 and issue #6. There was good commentary in the, er, comments, placing these magazines in their historical context -- it's worth remembering that a lot of what seems like "oh, not this again," was actually pretty fresh and new in the late 70s, when D&D hadn't been out that long (and was even younger in the UK).

Without further ado, then, White Dwarf 6, for April/May 1978, six months before I was born.

What's interesting to me is that while I don't think this cover is as good as the last one, it is much more inspirational to me, gaming-wise. I like the weird, creature-like balloons, the caravan of weird animals, the ornate armour. It looks like a fun fight, set in a fun setting. 

As with the previous issue, we open with an editorial, this time announcing new refinements to the magazine -- justified text, new in this issue, and starting in #7, a colour cover. Oooh ... the big time!

Next up we have "Combat and Armour Class," by Roger Musson, another entry in the evergreen Armour Class Doesn't Make Any Goddamn Sense genre which attempts to create different types of armour class that apply to different types of attacks, not in a weapon vs armour type way but in a situational way. There are two really interesting things about this article to me: 

• AC continues to be a huge visualisation problem for players. They want to translate the rule into something that they can imagine happening, and similarly to express what they can imagine happening via the rules. Everyone understands that AC is an abstraction, but it's just too abstract for this dude -- and many other players, judging from the number of articles relating to this issue one runs into. I think Armour Class Doesn't Make Any Goddamn Sense is probably the second-most-common D&D rules fix/complaint, right after Spell Memorisation WTF. 
• The additional types of AC Musson proposes, "Target" and "Prone," are basically "Touch" and "Flatfooted."

"The Fiend Factory": Monsters! Many of them by Livingstone! The illustration for the Fiend is quite neat; the illustration for the Disenchanter is ... unconvincing. Ooh! Nilbogs!

"Archive Miniatures": A review of the imported American range, with particular attention to monsters suitable for D&D, including quite a nice umber hulk. I think it's interesting that the review refers to "Dragon Pass" figures suitable for "the world of White Bear and Red Moon," suggesting that the term "Glorantha" wasn't yet common currency. 

"A place in the wilderness" by Lewis Pulsipher is basically a chunk of wilderness setting that you can drop into your game, largely inspired by Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters. Let's Get Some Laser Guns Up Ins may be the third most common post-D&D article type, now that I think about it, and this definitely qualifies, with ultralethal future-tech weapons and some big-ass monsters to use them on. The art for this piece, by Polly Wilson, is choice.

It's got "murderer" in its name, for Pete's sake. 

Also, there is a monster in here called the Blue Horror. 

Reviews, reviews, reviews: Elric (the wargame) some miniatures, ooh! Wilderlands of High Fantasy. But the prize piece of the reviews is Don Turnbull's feature review of Traveller. And it is very interesting. 

Now, I've just mentioned the Let's Get Some Laser Guns Up Ins thread in writing about D&D, and I think it's indicative of the fact that many gamers wanted some SF in their games, and that, up to this point, there wasn't a whole lot of it about. Not none -- there was already Metamorphosis Alpha, obviously, as Turnbull points out, but I think this might be stretching the point. So Traveller is really the first big SF RPG, the first one to have a lot of traction. And this, to Turnbull's eye, is both a good thing and a problem. 

He's super complimentary about the books in the boxed set, but at the same time he expresses doubts about whether anyone will actually play it -- Turnbull thinks the game might be a shelf queen, praised by critics but not actually played. And why is that? There are a couple of points worth exploring here: 

• Turnbull thinks that there are not actually a lot of RPGs being played. People buy games -- EPT, T&T, what have you -- but they don't actually play them as games in themselves. Instead, they mine them for ideas or roll them wholesale into their D&D games. He suspects that very few non-D&D games get a lot of play other than as part of a D&D game. I wonder if he was right -- there wasn't yet a game to take the "thinking man's D&D" mantle like RuneQuest would, and there wasn't yet a lot of game presence in other genres. Indeed, Playing at the World suggests that the distinction between "D&D" and "roleplaying games as a genre" was very, very fuzzy in the game's early history. 
• Turnbull thinks that the game may just be too complex and time-consuming to play -- not because the system is difficult but because the setting is so large that generating it will be a right royal pain in the ass. Let me find the money quote. Here we are: 

Like MA [Metamorphosis Alpha], its scope is so vast that to play it thoroughly must approach a lifetime's experience. The referee's task is crucial here, for in both games it is virtually limitless ... the referee must populate a universe! Granted, the referee does not need to complete the entire ... universe before play can begin, but if the players are to have anything like reasonable freedom of action and choice [emphasis mine] the Traveller referee must do a good deal more pre-preparation than the D&D dungeonmaster, who can get by initially by creating two or three 'levels.'

Fascinating! What are we to make of it? I think it's very interesting to note that, like Pulsipher in No 4, Turnbull thinks that there are a lot of D&D games going in that don't have much of a setting -- just some scoundrels in a maze. And secondly, I think there's that emphasis on sandbox play. Since the players could hypothetically go anywhere and do anything, the ref has to be ready with at least a reasonable simulacrum of anything, whereas in D&D he or she has a reasonably good guess as to what the players' range of options are.

It made me wonder if increasing mechanical and setting complexity didn't go hand in hand with the decline of sandbox play as a concept? I'm not sure; I haven't really played Traveller, but I do think that games from the 80s tended to have settings that were much harder to just improvise. I don't know.

Anyway, it's fascinating, and of course Turnbull's dire predictions (which he goes back to in the last paragraph) were proven completely wrong. I should mention that I think this is a really good review. For me, the contextual discussion, wrong though it turned out to be, elevates it to much more than just your usual "here's what's in the box" piece.

There's a comic strip. Generic fantasy stuff needs an arresting visual presentation or else who cares? But perhaps people may not have felt this way 35 years ago.

"Treasure Chest" is full of crunchy bits: some new, complicated, magic items. One of them has four lines of doggerel on it. Then there's a system for giving XP for successful spellcasting. I'm sure someone can tell me why this is desirable. Then there's another hit location subsystem. I wonder how many hit location subsystems there are for D&D? I bet it's more than spell point systems, but on the other hand hit location subsystems are way easier to write.

The Classifieds are characteristically adorable. There's an ad for membership in the British Science Fiction Association ("Chairman: Arthur C. Clarke." Blimey!). 

I missed it from last issue, so check out this ad for Games Day.

Not what you'd get from GW marketing in this day and age, I'm sure you'll agree. 

Anyway, there you have it! I was really struck by just how stuffy and formal the language can sometimes sound. I would say it was an earlier era, but Dragon magazine was like this in 1991; like eating a great big bowl of sawdust. I wonder if perhaps most of the people writing for the magazine weren't really experienced writers? It's definitely a stylistic quirk that you get when people aren't really comfortable writing for publication -- they tend to go a bit serious as a way to compensate.

Again, I'm not sure there's anything in here I would really incorporate into a game (except maybe that mad-eyed Termagant), but it's all pretty fascinating. 

A piece of gaming history. Well, two.

I live in an area that has lots of charity shops, car boot sales and so on. Every now and again I find some cool piece of retro-gaming stuff at a good price. If it's something I want, then it goes in my collection, but if it isn't, then I try to resell it (at a low price; I'm not gouging) and add the profit to the little tin that houses my go-apeshit-at-Salute-or-failing-that-Fiasco fund. 

Over the last couple of weeks, I've had some great finds: a complete Rogue Trooper game that I sold almost immediately, and a complete (except for the plastic stands) 1st edition Blood Bowl. 

But that's not what I want to talk about. Yesterday, at a yard sale, I found a couple of 70s White Dwarfs -- issues 4 (the reprint version) and 6. And I found some of the articles very interesting, so I thought I would talk about them!

Look at that pretty-ass John Blanche cover.

So let's take a look at what's in here! We'll start with issue 4. Before the thing even gets going, there are some interesting ads!

Check out that ad in the top left corner. It's for game distributors "S.D. and V.M. Steel." The logo reminds me of distributor Esdevium, which of course could be another way of saying "SDVM." I never knew that!

The intro is by one of GW's founders, Ian Livingstone, and laments the lack of original British gaming products. Although we think of GW as the dominant force in British gaming, during the late 70s it was primarily a retailer, and the majority of gaming products were American. Livingstone, of course, went on to make crazy money off Fighting Fantasy, filling the need he identified in this piece. Anyway, onward. 

First up, "Alice in Dungeonland" by Don Turnbull. This is your usual whimsical D&D stuff. Manticores covered in wool disguising themselves as sheep, etc., etc. It's pretty crap dungeon design, in that it is, no lie, a straight path through an impassable hedge. Once you finish an encounter, the hedge closes behind you, so you can't do anything but just charge forward. It is pretty goofy. 

Then we have an article on D&D campaigns by Lewis Pulsipher. I sort of get the impression that there were a lot of these "how to make D&D work" articles going on in the early days of the game's history (well, relatively early -- it'd been out for a few years). A lot of them seem to share this article's insistence on trying to use a combination of alert GMing and mechanical strictures to make sure the game is played "right." Some of the remarks seem really weird -- like the idea that your PCs shouldn't venture out of the dungeon for the first couple of levels, which is logical given the way the rules work in early D&D (I guess) but seems absolutely bizarre to the modern ear. 

Tony Bath is next up with an article on Hyboria, the long-running sword and sorcery wargame campaign that was such an important part in the development of British fantasy gaming. Not too many surprises here if you know much about the game, but it is interesting to see how much role-playing and wargaming are intermingled; in fact, throughout the magazine, D&D is regularly referred to as a wargame. 

"Open Box" is yer review column. Famous items in this one include Nomad Gods, Dungeon! and Melee, which the review clearly treats as a combat supplement for D&D. Of course, together with Wizard, it would go on to become The Fantasy Trip which in turn would be GURPS. 

"Monsters Mild and Malign" is a little set of monsters, again from Turnbull. He makes a case here for the whimsical puzzle-monster. He also says (I think it's in this one) that he doesn't like new character classes because remembering the existing ones is hard enough. This will be ironic in a moment. It contains some goofy new monsters, none of whom really have the thematic oomph that would make them memorable antagonists. Of note here is the "Monstermark," basically an early attempt to codify how badass a monster is by creating a single value that takes into account its hit points, attacks, damage, and so on and so on. 

I continue to love the ads in this thing. There's one for occult paraphernalia!

The funny thing about the next column, "Treasure Chest," is that it contains a new class for D&D: The Barbarian! Yup, that was the new hotness in 1978, although this barbarian does not really resemble the one we know and love. There is a catching-arrows-out-of-the-air ability, which is a pretty neat concept and definitely exists in Viking sagas and so on. 

And then there's something called "The Loremaster of Avallon." Now this is part 4 of a series, so maybe I needed to read the other three for context, but just on a superficial analysis, this is the work of a disordered mind. 

It's another common feature of D&D house rules, which is an attempt to make Armour Class make any goddamn sense, but it does it in the form of an absolute crapload of tables and math. It's very hard to believe that this would be playable, but different groups are different. Perhaps reading the first three installments would make this feel less like something they find when they search the murderer's house. 

"Competitive D&D" by Fred Hemmings is the last few rooms of some patchwork dungeon with some tips on how to run competitive tournament scenarios. Eh. 

And then there's a letters column, some classifieds, all that kind of thing. 

So, overall impressions: I think there's a definite sense of punkity-rawk, but as done by nerds. A lot of the content is pretty blah, although I think the reviews are mainly on point. You can definitely see people struggling with the nature of the game, not quite sure what to do. There are a lot of gameable tidbits, although I don't think there's any of it I would incorporate into my game. 

It's mainly interesting, to me, as a snapshot of the British gaming scene developing. You can see only the dimmest shadow of the juggernaut that GW would become. Next time I will go over Issue 6. 

If you have questions, ask me and I'll take a look at the thing and see if I can answer it.