Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets

Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets
Bob Bledsaw and Bill Owen started Judges Guild in the late 1970's about the time I got my White Box and published some really useful and fun products at a time when I was trying to figure out this new game. I found many of those products very helpful and I'm guessing others did also. Tables are part of what makes the game fun for me as a player and as a referee. I like not knowing until the dice are rolled what is coming next. Random results can be very entertaining when approached with the right attitude. I actually think randomness verses choice is one of the ways the game has changed over the editions. If control is desired, then random is not good, unless it accidentally produces the desired result. On the other hand, if we are willing to go with whatever comes up, rolling on a random table is a great way to be surprised and that can be great fun. The Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets contains random tables and more tables.  Some are taken from the rules and some are taken from other Judges Guild products, some are probably new to this booklet. So I still don't know if Ref is short for reference, which I suspect, or short for referee.  It works either way. There is a lot of ambiguity in the Judges Guild products as well as in the White Box and I like to think this is intentional because it leads to different interpretations and individualizes the game. Now I know this can be an undesirable thing if it leads to argument, but with a referee system, the referee interprets the rules at the table and there really shouldn't be arguments during the game. What will happen and did often in those early days was that differences in interpretations often resulted in very different games being played at two different game tables. My understanding is that one of the goals of the Advanced game was to standardize rules so that people could easily expect to play a similar or identical game regardless who the referee was. One of my pleasures was to sit down with a new group and discover the ways they played the game differently than I had seen it played before. I still like to read the description of a new product and imagine what's in it, how it would work, the story that would flesh out the brief description...then buy it and read it. Often the stories I think of myself I like better than the ones I read, but certainly not always. Random tables are great for giving the referee's imagination someplace to start. A whole evening's play has frequently started with just a few random rolls on the tables...and a lot of referee improvisation. Judges Guild was my introduction to a style of play now referred to as hex crawl.  Many of the Judges Guild products paired random tables, brief descriptions keyed to a few locations with a map overlaid with hexagons.  It can be great fun to explore the world hex-by-hex, the referee having some prepared locations and access to random tables that can be used to prompt adventure for any hex not already detailed out. Over the years, Judges Guild has published some of my favorite gaming products, many of them using this technique. I look forward to writing about some of them in future posts.