What's in a Name?

The Past is a Foreign Land.

This is a phrase with deep meaning and the title of various books and movies that have appeared in various languages. Anyone who has tried to explain something to another that they recall from their youth, especially to a much younger person, will likely understand the basic import of how "foreign" the past can seem to anyone who did not directly experience it. This can be a problem of perception or of reality - and sometimes both. 

In my last post I talked about how things appear different today when I am focusing attention on The World's Most Talked About Role-Playing Game. In this post I wish to add a few additional thoughts on this subject partly to help clarify my own contradictory beliefs.

The FRP game I started with, specifically the 1974 Little Brown Books in their 5th printing, is/was probably not as I now recall it. After decades of experience with later editions of what is often referred to as The World's First Role-Playing Game, as well as several other "spin-off" RPGs (variations on a theme, I propose) some of which show genuine innovative design in mechanics and play style, my opinions on the old favorite are undoubtedly influenced by all that has transpired to date. Simply put, I am not the same person I was in 1977. 

It can be said that we are the sum total of all our experiences. If this is true, and I suspect that it is, I like most everyone else, will have a unique perspective, one that differs from everyone else and is wholly my own. Given that we all have a degree of common experiences as humans, but also that each individual will have many unique experiences, the combination is unlikely to repeat in any two people. Perhaps its a wonder we agree on anything?

Fortunately we are able to set aside our differences and consent to cooperate in an effort to "all get along". Sometimes this "compromising" is necessary among a gaming group. It is said that compromise means that precisely no one is happy with the outcome and in a hobby based around a shared effort to have fun, this seems an unfortunate situation.

Now in our culture, having choices is generally seen as good thing. Choices can lead to disagreements however when everyone in a group shall prefer something quite different. Groups often form around their shared interests, but over time, interests may and often do, change.

Our expectations, generally speaking, are connected to our background exposure and experience. We build new knowledge incorporating novel data with older known experiences. What we have been exposed to prior to our coming into the tabletop RPG hobby will impact our expectations of the experience and our preferences for certain types of experiences. 

The era of the 1970s included widespread popular reading of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth trilogy. It was a fair bet that most of the gamers at any given table playing The World's First Role-Playing Game were passingly familiar with Tolkien's fiction. At that time Harry Potter had not yet been written about by J.K. Rowling so gamers did not come to the table expecting to see a "magical school" full of broomstick riding children. Many introduced to the then new hobby in the 1970s had read Tolkien as well as many of the other authors listed in Gary Gygax's "Foreword" to The Original Role-Playing Game (and in his famous Appendix N once that became available for reference). There was at the time a certain common expectation based on shared familiarity with certain sources of fantastic fiction that formed the basis for general acceptance of certain tropes as found in those sources. Many (but not all) of those tropes and themes still appeal to me.

Exploration and survival were among the themes commonly found in those pre-1974 sources and therefore became shared expectations of the "White Box" game experience. There were many other commonalities between fiction, gaming and gamers as well as many diverse concepts scattered throughout the different source materials and I credit it a strength of the original game that its authors were able to connect with so much variety and produce a game acceptable to so many.

Today's game also draws upon certain shared sources of inspiration. Although the game's name is the same, much of the similarity ends there. The current edition has many recognizable features, but those are increasingly "in name only". A comparison of "old" and "new" will readily reveal many of these differences and I have written about a few on this blog. Although no one is dictating how we are to play the current game at our table, there is clear messaging regarding the "preferred style and manner" in which its publisher would like to see their product used.

The more I play and run 5e, the less satisfied I am with it. Reading anything beyond the starter books and free download "Basic" edition is off-putting as the current game makes many assumptions about play that I find un-appealing. It still says its the same game when I look at the title, but I am thinking this edition has come a long way from 1974. I suppose that is precisely the intended point!

Having only passing familiarity with the sources in popular culture from which the designers of the current material draw, and honestly, very little interest in the ones that I am familiar with, I am increasingly convinced that I am not their "target audience". And I am increasingly "okay" with that realization.

Now where did I put those Three Little Brown Books?

Hero verses Power Fantasy

What's in a Name?

I have been thinking a lot about the hobby and my place in it. As many of you reading this blog have gathered, I have been playing role-playing games since the late 1970s - and I am still in love with those three original little brown books which I find pretty well defines what I like best in the hobby. Well, as is the nature of things, the hobby has changed quite a bit since 1977.

I became instantly excited about the then new idea of adventure gaming in a fantastic medieval setting. Despite struggling to understand all the unfamiliar and seemingly incomplete and contradictory rules as they appeared in those three LBB included in the small white box, the prospect of gaming in fictional worlds akin to Hyborea, Lankhmar, Barsoom and Middle-earth compelled me to carry forth. My friends and I were experienced wargamers and we soon filled in the gaps in our understanding of the ODD rules as written, and in the spirit of the early days, made the game just as we liked it.  

At some point well after we had discovered Gencon and nearly worn out the covers of our Advanced Game tomes through frequent use, we began to experience a desire for something new - especially in the form of the elusive "better game". I recall the occasion of our discovering the Call of Cthulhu RPG visiting the Chaosium booth while attending Gencon, and instantly falling in love with the idea of investigative gaming in a horror setting. We all purchased personal copies of the thin CoC box and began our journey in learning to role-play. If memory serves, until that point we had pretty much approached our RPG characters as playing pieces - not as "real" people, but rather more akin to our wargame miniature army men - in other words, a disposable collection of stats.

Call of Cthulhu was not the first new game I had added to my collection, but learning to play it represented a vast change in the way I would approach the hobby. Over the decades other new games would add additional (mostly minor) changes in my approach to playing role-playing games.

My apologies, dear reader, for the long preamble to this post. I now come to the thought of the day. Acting out our power fantasies at the gaming table is not exactly the same as role-playing a hero. Being powerful is not the same thing as being heroic. There are super-heroes and super-villains in comics and literature (maybe in real life too). In its currently popular form, the tabletop roleplaying hobby giant has seemingly moved away from any emphasis on playing the role of "hero" to one of enabling what I will call playing a power fantasy. Whether one sees this as a good thing or a bad thing will depend on personal taste. Good thing or bad thing aside, I think that it is a thing. 

For example, I think we may agree that Frodo is a very different character from the dark knight. Their internal struggles make them both compelling characters. The fact that one can easily defeat the other in a fist-fight hardly matters. Being a hero means trying to make a positive difference in the world. Power without purpose is just that - not really heroic. 

Returning for a moment to the topic of the game Call of Cthulhu I make the obvious comparison that CoC investigators are ordinary humans with vulnerabilities. The monsters are way more powerful than the characters. The game presumes that players will, through the actions of their characters, try to save the world by frustrating the various plots of evil cultists and alien entities.

Many people enjoy superhero comics and films. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that (it seems important to include this statement today). Superhero games have been a part of the RPG hobby for decades and lots of people enjoy playing them. It's just not my preferred form of entertainment. Under its current direction, the world's most heavily marketed role-playing game feels more like a power fantasy in which no one can agree on a definition of what making a positive difference might mean.

Did I mention things have changed since the late 1970s?

Revisiting an Old Favorite

Arduin is back!

I have the fondest memories of this "gonzo" FRP product line. It completely fascinated me when I first stumbled across the little brown booklets that were instantly identifiable as belonging to the hobby I loved. Compelling art and infectious enthusiasm for the role-playing game are my strongest associations with my personal Arduin experience - and that is a good word to use - it's an "experience" reading Arduin for the first time and really on each subsequent rereading. There is so much content packed into those little volumes that I expect one could spend a lifetime exploring what author David A. Hargrave has left us regarding his Arduin multiverse.

Mr. Hargrave freely "borrows" from more sources of inspiration than I can count and I am certain that I miss a few as my knowledge of popular culture is anything but exhaustive. Rather than making Arduin seem derivative as can be the case when an author lifts directly from a widely known and popular source, the fact that Arduin is mixing Mr. Hargrave's original content with "this, that, and another" inspiration, while making it all seem to fit nicely together in his fantastic multiverse, is a rather impressive achievement in itself. He does this while making me think of even more things I can add to the milieu, thus personalizing my own Arduin.

The first volume was self-published by Dave Hargrave in 1977, the same year I discovered the role-playing or adventure game hobby as we called it back then, but it was some years later before I saw a copy here in the Midwest abd by then the Arduin Grimoire had grown to a trilogy. (Trilogies were a popular format in the era immediately following publication of a famous one written by J.R.R. Tolkien!) In those days The Original White Box version of The World's Most Popular Role-Playing game was hard to find on the shelves of local stores, presumably due to its run-away popularity. My own copy of  "white box" D&D had been ordered through the mail - much like most of my game purchases today now that I think on it - and had become quite worn with use by the time I saw Arduin hiding on a store shelf. I can't recall if I recognized those Arduin books for one of the better game products, or just thought that the familiar little brown book format looked compatible with my beloved "white box", but some force guided my hand and I purchased the trilogy that day. Despite the existence of Dragon Magazine with its game system advertisements and reviews, most of my FRP game product knowledge came via word-of-mouth from fellow gamers. (College students like me didn't have money for magazines. I barely had money for a new game supplement and the Arduin Trilogy was almost certainly my only purchase that day.) 

I was pleased to see that the Arduin trilogy pictured above is still available. Although the original format of three individual digest sized paperback books is long out-of-print, the trilogy collection is recently available thru a popular online digital and print-on-demand game resource or in a hardcover physical form from Emperor's Choice Games. 

The early era of role-play game publishing seemed to be characterized by amateur designers possessing an attitude of "share the fun". By the time I entered the hobby the attitudes were starting to be more focused on "how do we make money off this hobby". Litigation and intellectual property rights protected this ability to make money. Cease and desist letters went back and forth and from my perspective the fun suffered. David Hargrave was not immune from this changing attitude and you can read a little of his thoughts in the Foreword he wrote in later Arduin volumes. About 1980 he published The Arduin Adventure as a stand-alone introductory FRP game in which he recommends using his Arduin Trilogy if one is desirous of adding more detail to their game. The Arduin Adventure evokes a flavor distinctly its own which can be glimpsed in the cover illustration below.

Mechanically The Arduin Adventure uses a D20, but the game has its own magikal appeal distinct from any other D20 game I have encountered. (Mr. Hargrave spells magik with a "K")  The cover illustration by Brad Schenk is a busy mess and also full of imaginative action and flavor. The image hardly stands still, which is something that could also be said of Arduin in general - its a setting in perpetual motion even decades after its publication. The game's art alone can hold my interest and get me thinking about world's as yet undreamed of - to borrow a phrase. Yes, one can see similarities (of a sort) in The Arduin Adventure which at once feels familiar, yet not. In much the same way that he does with the Arduin Grimoire volumes, Mr. Hargrave blends and builds and makes something fun and exciting. Isn't escape to a fun and exciting place not the very essence of adventure gaming?

I will also remark that over the decades since I first discovered it, Arduin has frequently served as a sort of tonic for my lagging interest in the hobby. I have come to understand that when the RPG hobby starts to wear thin for me, when the corporate greed and the vast array of never ending new product starts to overwhelm me (and my pocketbook) and when it all just seems so boringly "more of the same", I can turn to Arduin, read the text David Hargrave penned and find his energy, his enthusiasm for the game that he dreamed of, played, and wrote about in these books, and for me it all becomes fresh and exciting again. That's some real Magik!

Over the decades I have heard many gamers talk about Arduin and they nearly all remark how reading it has "changed their game". Few products can be said to have had a larger or more pervasively positive impact on our hobby. And Arduin Grimoire (as it was once widely known) holds up pretty well, even by today's standards! Not in production quality, or presentation, but in shear imaginative no-holds-barred creativity and energy. If I re-discover Arduin a hundred times, I can't imagine ever not being inspired by its raw power to generate fresh ideas and excitement such that I can't wait to get to the gaming table and share the fun of tabletop fantasy role-playing in a fantastic milieu.

Thievery!

...an idea worth stealing.

"Your Uncle has a job for you, Noblett."

"What kind of job, Cousin?"

"Something a bit different. It seems a group of treasure seekers want the services of a thief."

"Since when do we in The Family use such a crude term as that, Cousin?" 

"It's what the adventurers asked for. A thief, they said."

"And our Uncle thinks this is a good idea?"

"It seems there is an opportunity to open up a new market that could be quite profitable for The Family.. Don't get yourself killed, Nob. These dungeon delvers often don't live long."

The presence of the thief as a player character class has a dramatic effect on The World's First Role-Playing game, from a mechanical perspective and otherwise. In addition to adding a new archetype, inclusion of the class of Thieves as they are presented in Supplement I Greyhawk introduces a number of irregularities (or innovations) to the game as it is described in the original three little brown books. How one views these changes may depend on the campaign goals.

The first new class to be added to the game seems to make a lot more sense for some campaigns than for others and like much of the additional material presented in Supplement I, it takes the game in a different direction. The fact that this direction quickly became more the norm should perhaps surprise no one given that just one person is the principle author of both the Greyhawk campaign and the soon to follow "advanced rules".

The new class of Greyhawk Thieves is open to all LBB player races and unlike the race class level limits in the original volumes, demi-human thieves have no level limits. The unlimited Thief class may be combined with other classes (which all have level limits for non-humans) to form a multi-class non-human character who can now continue to progress as a thief. 

The Thief class introduces the concept of "skills" into the original role-playing game - at least in terms of its thieves' abilities. The thieves abilities are primarily described as a percentile system including abilities that previously had been things any character or members of any class could have attempted, namely move silently, hide in shadows, listen for noise behind closed doors, and climb walls. 

As is often the case with many of the problematic aspects of the original game, the fault may rest mainly with its overly brief rule descriptions, especially when combined with (dare I say it aloud) inferior referee practices. I propose that a careful reading of the exact text and application of some "common sense" can solve some of the problems that seem to present in the case of Thieves (and other ambiguities) when one reads with a less careful eye - and a generous attitude of "I think it means this..." (The job of the referee is often to place hard limits on interpretation of rules so as to not be overly generous to would-be rile manipulators!)

Quoting from the text, Supplement I describes the thief's abilities in a more precise manner than is generally assumed:

Basic abilities are:

– open locks by picking or foiling magical closures

– remove small trap devices (such as poisoned needles)

– listen for noise behind closed doors

– move with great stealth

– filch items and pick pockets

– hide in shadows

– strike silently from behind

– climb nearly sheer surfaces, upwards or downwards

Reading between the lines has been the bane of many a well intentioned  gamer. A close reading of the thieves' abilities reveals several extraordinary feats of legerdemain that seem to have become lost to time. Take for example the ability of "foiling magical closures". A successful roll of the percentile dice can presumably result in our thief opening a magically held door as easily as said thief might open a more mundane mechanical lock. The climb ability states "nearly sheer surfaces" implying this is not an ability to climb your average steep sloped cliff or dangling rope. By extension, a referee could be justified I think in ruling all of the thieves abilities represent something beyond the normal abilities of adventurers of other classes. 

Yes, anyone can attempt to move with stealth, taking care to avoid being too obvious and making too much noise. The thieves ability to sneak about moving silently and hiding in shadows amounts to much more than a fighting man or magic user being really cautious when moving or hiding. To continue this line of argument, the "strike silently from behind" ability of thieves represents something more than stabbing a foe while positioned to their rear. I think this "backstabbing" may involve the victim being unaware of the assailant and the thief having knowledge of just where to place the blade so as to gain maximum effect.

The ability to listen for noise behind closed doors is where my argument for "special abilities beyond the normal" rather breaks down. Thieves of levels 1 and 2 are given the ability to hear noise on a roll of 1-2 on a d6 per Greyhawk. Volume I, Men & Magic states:

When characters come to a door they may “listen” to detect any sound within. Note “Undead” never make any sound. A roll of 1 for humans, and 1 or 2 for Elves, Dwarves, or Halflings will detect sound within if there is any to be heard.

A human thief character effectively has the same ability processed by Elves, Dwarves and Halflings to detect sound beyond a closed door. Perhaps this "special ability" of human thieves is that of being able to listen like an Elf, Dwarf or Halfling? (So I wonder, what about those Halfling thieves and their ability to listen at doors?)

Treating the thieves' abilities as almost supernatural sets the class abilities apart from those abilities that other adventuring classes may employ. Doing so seems to be a more satisfactory referee practice than to rule that sneaking and hiding, and listening at doors are exclusive class abilities only available to thieves. I am left to wonder why interpretation of the nature of thieves abilities seems to be altered in subsequent versions of The World's Most Popular Role-Playing Game? Was it merely a case of changing the text to reflect how the class was being played at the table?

"So, be careful and don't let the delvers send you into danger, Nob. You ain't paid to fight monsters. You're a specialist with a quality of skill which they don't possess. That is why the adventurers want you along. They probably heard rumor of a magically sealed tomb up in the Cairn Hills, or some kind of fancy trap that only a member of The Family can get them past. No, you do your job, Nob, and leave off killing any monsters. Yes, and come back to us alive and with your share of the treasure!"

"I got a question, Cousin. If I get a chance to pocket a few extra valuables - I mean without our employers knowing it - should I keep them?"

"That's a good question, Noblett." (Smiles and pats him on the back)  "I knew you were a clever lad!"