In Which Vanir Relays The Origin Story Of Stupid Ranger To Provide Backdrop For His Tale

Way back in late 2003, my bachelor days were coming to a close, and I’d been dating my now-wife about 8 months. My longtime karate buddy Dante was back from college and job hunting, and we invited him and his wife (Stupid Ranger, who I’d only met a couple times before), and we invited them over for New Years at Efreak’s apartment along with a couple of her college friends. After thoroughly disturbing the other guests (I believe the phrase Dante used during Charades was “the Right Testicle of Our Lord?”), we decided it was so much fun we wanted to get together more often. I forget whose idea it was to play D&D, but I was thoroughly excited about the idea. I approached my lady-friend with the idea, and she was apprehensive about it. Eventually, I successfully pestered her enough to try it.

It was rough for her at first, especially the roleplaying, but she got the hang of it eventually. And so the four of us, along with our friend John, embarked on a year-long adventure that would come to be known as the Evensbrook campaign. Efreak played a little rogue gnome named Goudy Sans Sarah (she’s a graphic designer – if you don’t laugh, she will negatively readjust your kerning). I loved that campaign. I thought Efreak did too. I was wrong.

In Which Vanir Completely Chubs His Perception Check

Things went really well for a couple months. But slowly, the frustration she was feeling started to get the best of her. She was too scared to tell me she wanted to quit, and I, of course, was too blinded by the fact that I had a wife who played D&D with me to notice. However, I did start to take notice when she started referring to game night as “F#$*ING D&D”. It was, at the time, like a bomb went off in my face. That sucked. A lot.

In retrospect, I can’t say I’m really surprised there was a breakdown of communication. It was during our first year of marriage, and wow did we need to spend some skill points on that. And we eventually got through that and a lot of other stuff in the years to come, but gaming was one thing we never really saw eye to eye on since. We’d play a little Rock Band every now and then or the occasional game of Scrabble, but by and large we’d just hang out and watch TV. And, as previously stated, my heart’s desire is to game with my wife. So, it never really sat very well with me.

Consequently, every couple of months, I decide to try another game and see if she’ll play it with me. Usually, it’s a videogame. And unfortunately, it usually results in her getting frustrated and not wanting to play anymore. Which sucks, and is not the outcome I wanted at all.

In Which Vanir Discovers That Level 5 Married People Have More Skill Points

This very cycle was perpetuating in my living room yesterday night, this time with Carcassonne on the Xbox 360. I’d recently played the tabletop version with friends and enjoyed it, and thought perhaps it might do the trick since the console version did all the math for you. Well, she got frustrated again, and I got frustrated again, but something a little different happened this time. I’m not quite exactly sure what, but I think our communications circuitry might have finally adapted.

We started having a very enlightening conversation as to what it was we both want out of games. I’m certain we’d tried to have this conversation before, but this time it worked a lot better. The things I enjoy in a game are somewhat typical of a lot of “gamer” types. I like twitch games and shooters, but I have a special weakness for turn-based strategy (disclaimer: I suck at it, but I love it) . I like a lot of interactivity in my games, and I like to feel like I’ve accomplished something when I finish one. And, as you may have guessed, I loves me some roleplaying.

Efreak, on the other hand, loves games of chance. She likes Rock Band. She absolutely hates strategy games. When I asked her why, she said she gets so stressed out that she feels like she’s going to have a heart attack. That’s when it started to make a little more sense to me. When she comes home from work, and she’s frazzled out of her mind, one of the things I’ll frequently hear her say is “I don’t care, I just don’t want to decide anything“. She’s been making decisions and stressing out at work all day. She doesn’t want to do it at home on top of all that. Decisions aren’t relaxing for her, ergo strategy games aren’t relaxing for her. And here I was picking a lot of turn based stuff because I thought it would be slower paced (and I like it). My dear wife informs me a lot of women feel like this.

How in the hell did I miss this? So what does she find relaxing? “Traditional” games like Life,  in which you don’t have to decide very much. The excitement of winning a race just from random chance appeals to her. Card games (sadly, the only one I really know is poker, and that’s only because… well…). Games that you can use your brain on (but not strategy) like Trivial Pursuit. I don’t understand why she likes Scrabble. I’m usually thinking two moves ahead when I play that game, but whatever she does it makes her more than a match for my limited intellect.

There is also a certain amount to which, for some reason, she gets intimidated because “you’re so much better at these games than I am”. I don’t generally pwn the crap out of my wife every time we play games, but it’s a factor nonetheless. Playing a game of chance, in this case, makes her feel like she’s on equal ground.

In any case, it’s plain to see we’re different kinds of gamers. Now, the trick is going to be finding where that Venn diagram intersects so we can have some fun together.

In Which Vanir Ponders The Road Ahead

Well, the road ahead for damn sure contains Boom Blox, as that’s one game Efreak specifically said she’d love to play with me. And she’s a huge Beatles fan, so this is a no-brainer. We’re also going to head out to our FLGS and try to find some stuff we’d both enjoy playing.

In the meantime, I would wholeheartedly encourage anyone with similar experiences as ours to either tell your tale, or (better!) to share what you’ve done that helped you. We surely cannot be the only couple who have gone through this!

Ultimately, it comes down to one of our old standbys here at Stupid Ranger – the only thing that matters is that everyone at the table is having fun. Finding out how to do that in one’s marriage might take some time and effort, but I can’t really think of a better reason to get back on the horse and keep trying.

Until next time!

Peter Blood writes:

It has been 25 years since I played D&D in college and I still miss it. Now my 10 year old daughter loves fantasy, LOTR, and has read the whole Harry Potter series. I want to play D&D with her but do not know how to start. I am not at a level where I could set up my own dungeon and be a DM. I can’t remember all that stuff about how to attack and saving throw stuff.

How can I play D&D with just the two of us?

Is there an online game where the computer is the DM? Is there a video game without much killing?

I am all ears.

First, Peter, let me inform you that I am totally jealous of your awesome name. For a moment I thought a pirate or sorcerer was emailing us and, with a name like Peter Blood, the person sending the email could not have been under level 18.

Now, getting down to business. I have personal experience playing D&D one-on-one with someone else. I did so all through high school with a friend of mine, and that was the only way I knew how to play the game for years until I found a regular group to play in. I was 13 years old, and the adventures were ridiculous and terrible, and occasionally I get all misty wishing I could have that much fun again.

If you intend to run adventures for your daughter, I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to get around learning some game mechanics. However, I completely feel your pain on this one. When I run adventures, I feel as if I am going to choke to death on how many things there are to keep track of. Under normal circumstances, you have a couple of options.

Our group has relied on a two-DM system where one person primarily does story and the other handles the nuts and bolts of combat. This leaves the guy who doesn’t want to deal with the numbers free to roleplay his fool head off. However, this isn’t really a solution for you, because it’s just you and your daughter.

This means you need plan B, which is what I do to cope as DM in any size group: rules light, roleplay heavy. By this, I mean you need to learn the barebones of combat and a few other actions — but a lot of the time you will just make a judgement call or handwave a skill check. Make the game less about the rules, and more about the interactions between your NPCs and your daughter’s PC. What do I mean by this? For example: have some orcs capture her PC and make it clear that she’s going to get killed if she tries to fight her way out. Play an orc, and make her figure out how to get out of there (either by escaping somehow or talking her way out of the situation).

DMing is difficult, especially at first, but don’t get discouraged (and don’t forget nobody is expecting you to be perfect right out of the gate!) Everything gets a lot more comfortable after plenty of practice and mistakes. I know our group saw more than a few spectacular disasters when I was running last, but at the end of the night everybody was having fun so it was OK.

You don’t have to come up with the dungeon and everything in it on your own, either. Expeditious Retreat Press has a whole bunch of modules designed for one DM and one player titled, oddly enough, 1 on 1 Adventures. I would add that I think these are D&D 3.5e and not the new 4e, but it is somewhere to start (and you’ll probably want to avoid this one, for obvious reasons). If your daughter enjoys solving puzzles, you can sprinkle some into your adventures too. Cloud Kingdom games has some awesome books on this topic.

As far as videogames go, there are lots and lots of RPGs out there, but most are single-player. However, if you’ve got multiple computers, you could go with something from the Neverwinter Nights series or one of its predecessors. With videogame RPGs, though, you’re pretty much going to wind up chopping up lots of people and monsters into tiny little pieces to get XP. I’m having a great deal of difficulty thinking of one where that is not the case (unless you’re playing Myst or something). If you’re looking for nonviolence, my recommendation would be to stick to tabletop adventures where you can be assured of everyone’s peaceful demeanor via your omnipotence.

There is one other option that may terrify you, but it’s so crazy that it just might work: give your daughter the books, and let her run a game for you. She’s older than the age I was when I started getting into this stuff, and I guarantee you it’s a great way to spark her creativity. I would keep it super extra rules light though — perhaps eschewing the D&D rules for a much simpler set you two agree on (combat settled by rock-scissors-paper, for instance).

Hopefully, this was of some help to you, and you both will have a good experience like I did when I was starting out: ridiculous, terrible adventures — and lots of fun.

Cursed Consumerism!

This just threw a healthy splash of gasoline on the fire for me to plan my new gaming sanctuary at my new home. While I might not be able to afford the Sultan (unless their big reveal is more economical models!), I certainly would like some sort of a custom gaming area to inhabit with my motley band of adventurers.

The space itself needs some finishing, so once that is done I am looking ahead for some good multi-purpose ideas for using that space as a gaming/recreation area. I’m thinking a big, home-rolled whiteboard would be nice both for drawing encounters or keeping score for the ol’ dart board. A more high tech solution might come along depending on how my research into multitouch surface technology goes… that may take a back burner until warmer months when I can comfortably build things outdoors again.

Other necessary components, aside from a place to rest one’s butt:

• A food/drink/alcohol dispensary of some kind.
• One to many book containment units
• One to many miniature containment units
• Some sort of music system to provide some mad roleplaying tunes
• The all-important ambiance factor, meaning a place to display the ample Lord of the Rings prop/sword collection
• Some sort of glorified display for my autographed OD&D sourcebooks, perhaps with mini Gygaxian Shrine (seriously not a joke here people, I want this!)

I will provide updates as they develop… or when the guys at Geek Chic finally get the hint and drop ship me their newest model for… uh… review and testing purposes. Heck, I’ll even take their slightly loved used equipment off their hands!

As I return from dreamland, feel free to shout out whatever random stuff that comes to mind when you think about your ideal gaming space. Coolest ideas I haven’t thought of already will likely get you hugged if we ever meet IRL, and have a distinct possibility of being implemented in the final Roleplaying Dungeon!

Then I got the opportunity to run through an instance of Ragefire Chasm with some more experienced players. I understand that each person plays the game in their own way, and often the raids are about efficiency. My experience of actually engaging in the storyline was pretty well shattered by “talk to this guy, get this quest, then get back down there and more killing.”

So I ask you, loyal readers… has anyone had a satisfactory roleplay experience using a packaged video game (such as WoW, Neverwinter, etc) as a medium? Granted, we weren’t trying to replicate D&D style roleplay in our World of Warcraft efforts, but it was a bit amazing how quickly things devolved into hack and slash, efficiency gaming once a group came into the mix.

So let’s hear it from you… does video game facilitated roleplay actually exist? Can it be done?

Constantly heightening…

For no particular reason, I started thinking about weather effects in the D&D campaigns that I have ever been in. In the sessions that I have run, I tend to like to use weather to color a scene and not generally as the main focal point of a game, however I have often run into the problem of how to introduce weather as being significant when it hasn’t been to your characters up to this point.

This problem is compounded by the fact that as characters get higher and higher in level, they tend to be less and less concerned about environmental factors to their adventures. You could always cop out and make some sort of “killer storm” crop up that does 20d6 lightning bolts, but that just seems a little tired and obvious.

The only sessions that I have been truly impressed by the use of weather as a plot point happened to be a seafaring adventure that we did. The DM essentially made a terrible storm that just hung around and kept getting progressively worse, until it spawned elementals for the group to do battle with. The combination of setting, urgency (if we didn’t get off the ship, it was going to sink into the middle of the ocean), and appropriate use of weather-based creatures made this scene a real winner in my mind.

I would love to hear some other success stories where DMs (or players) have used weather to augment a story in a organic, meaningful way. I tend to struggle with this as a DM, hopefully the comments will generate some great new ideas!

Problems, and Massively-Multiplayer Solutions

Here at Stupid Ranger, we’ve always had a much easier time writing about D&D when we’re playing frequently. It’s a kind of feast-or-famine thing — and right now, it’s famine. During certain times of year, it’s difficult to get everyone together to play. On top of that, Dante and SR are moving far, far away for a couple years to a place called Colorado (or, as I like to refer to it, “Thunder Bluff”). We’ve been considering several options as to how to both A. keep in touch and B. keep playing D&D together.

I was talking to the lovely Efreak about this situation, and she suggested that perhaps we play World of Warcraft together. Now, you have to understand — I have long been a person who swore that they would never touch an MMO as long as they lived because I was afraid that it would suck up my whole life, and now here is my wife suggesting that I install the beast on my PC. However, she also assured me that my life would be forfeit the moment that getting epic PvP raid gear became more important than my son, and so I decided to bring it up to the rest of the crew. To make a long story short, I now have a level 21 Shaman and I’m very disappointed that Ghost Wolf form makes you neither invisible nor intangible. My cohorts also have characters on the same server, and we like killing things together.

Broadening Our Horizons

All of us here at Stupid Ranger are very broad-spectrum geeks, and D&D is not our only form of fun. Recently, I’ve had the urge to write, but it’s rarely been about D&D (as you can see by my prolific posting here as of late). What I have had the urge to write about for some time now, is videogames and movies and other general geekery. As it turned out, my compatriots have been having similar urges.

Thusly, we are considering broadening the scope of what we do here at Stupid Ranger. Please do not panic if you see a post about how amazing and frustrating Mega Man 9 is, a scathing review of “The Happening“, or epic tales about being a complete newb in WoW. You may also expect to see the same good stuff you usually see here, and we will (of course) tag everything in a way that we can still be RPGBloggers.com compatible (and so those of you who don’t care what my thoughts on Rock Band 2 are can continue reading RPG-related stuff only).

And yes, I absolutely realize the end result is that we’re trying to be Critical Hits. (I mean, who wouldn’t?)

Have Wacom, Will Travel?

In addition, I have been itching to tell more of the Evensbrook story. I have also come to the conclusion that I really don’t have time in my life right now to draw the comic as it was (at least with my sanity intact). Therefore, I am going to ask the Internets for help. If you are an artist, or know of one who would be willing to do this, I am looking for someone to draw the Evensbrook strip. My ideal plan is to have a Penny Arcade kind of setup, where I write stories and funny stuff, and the artist draws the pictures and makes everything look wonderful. Me Tycho, you Gabe. And the position would pay exactly as much as I get paid for this! (And I wouldn’t even make you chip in a few bucks a month on the web hosting, like I do!)

I realize the chances of this actually taking place are slim to none, but on the off chance somebody is interested it might be a lot of fun. A far more likely outcome is that I start simply telling the story as an episodic novel here on the site. Stupid Ranger has several ideas that she wants to start writing about in much the same vein. In any case, we’re going to be firing up the Writers’ Turbines here shortly, so please take your seats and don your protective helmets.

Thoughts?

Admittedly, it does feel a little weird broadening our scope since we have traditionally been a pretty narrow-focused site — but we’re doing this for fun, and this will be fun (hopefully for everybody). We’d love to hear your thoughts on the direction we’re thinking of taking.

Observations and Advice In Action

As previously mentioned, I had the distinct pleasure of an invitation to Drunken D&D which was run masterfully by our good buddy Phil, The Chatty DM. This was a great way to get to know a new group of people and bond over a common pursuit: a mixture of getting sauced and playing a fun adventure.

After the second successful session of this type of game, thoughts started prickling around in my head (or maybe that was just all the Bud Light)… but either way what Phil did made excellent sense. He engineered an ice-breaker right into a D&D game, which allowed us all to get to know one another in a not-too-serious game setting while enjoying some non-nerd style bonding (i.e. booze) as well.

What I Do…

On the rare circumstance that we welcome new players into our group in Stupid Ranger Central, we tend to have a social “getting to know you” session that sometimes consists of character creation, pizza, or a roleplaying heavy first gaming session where characters and players are encouraged to interact over a session which is intended as a prelude to the campaign proper. This allows new players to feel comfortable in the game setting while getting some light roleplaying involved as well.

Phil did a great job of engineering a game that really accellerated the bonding process, we were all laughing and having fun within minutes of getting together for the first time in person. It was brilliant!

What do you do to introduce new players into your mix? Do you adjust anything in your campaign to allow for a “feeling out” process? Let’s hear those ideas!

About half-way through the movie, Jane comes to realize that she must discard the baggage in her past (in the form of 27 dresses) in order to move on. And I got to thinking that as you move on to a new character, it becomes very important to dump the baggage of your old characters.

You have to let your old characters retire gracefully. If you let the memories of your previous character dictate your new character, you may attempt the Mark 2, a re-creation of the character concept, because you are sure you can do it better this time. Or, in the event things didn’t turn out the way you planned, you may create the antithesis, trying to create your new character as different as possible.

I’m not always good about letting past character retire, but I do try to keep my characters separate, at least in my own mind. For me, it helps to have a developed back story; it’s easier to keep everyone separate if they all had different stories.

What techniques do you use to move on from your old character(s)?

Organization and Scheduling, the bane of my existence!

The article recommends several good tips for keeping the same sane and moving forward, including organizing of one’s gaming pile and using Google Calendar or another calendaring tool to get your gaming herd together.

I completely agree with the use of Google Calendar to manage game nights and coordinate the group, but its only a good as the group using it. We’ve had problems in the past with people not checking the calendar. Using notification features of the calendaring software could help this problem, but the easily forgettable nature of email can still lead to failures. This is still generally better than having to call my entire group, plus I hate talking on the phone anyway.

As far as organizing the gaming pile, I have the most trouble with this task. My books are generally strewn everywhere, a few book bags contain my entire collection and they regularly get separated. I have a battle mat, however it often gets left in the trunk of my car or at other people’s houses and tends to be AWOL when I need it.

Be prepared!

What I really need is the equivalent of a “emergency preparedness kit” for gaming nights away from home. The only problem is that you can’t fit large items like a battle mat into a quick-carry kit like that… I imagine things like a set of dice, maybe some miniatures if your group prefers to play with those, a notepad, and if you’re really ambitious a few quickie game session ideas to get the ball rolling.

So what else would you have in your “gaming preparedness kit”?

You see, in addition to featuring everyone’s favorite non-sequitor generator Vanir we also feature a few members of our group that delight in horrifyingly severe puns. And they’re almost always funny once.

So rampant and severe the rate of punning, we had to institute an “out of character” demarcation to determine when a joke was being cracked and when the player was acting in character. (This should clue you in as to the level of seriousness that most of our campaigns attain.) In our group, holding up a piece of paper is the way to tell the GM that whatever it is to come spewing out of your word-hole next is not to be considered in-character. It is usually quite effective, until someone in your group realizes that by holding up a piece of paper they can speak freely and frequently for the whole session We all have our crosses to bear!

So that leads me to the question of the day: Does your group fall back on any humor/movie quote/funny stuff when nothing else presents itself? How do you manage things when the line blurs between character acting and player venting?

I know some groups continually fall back on Princess Bride quotes, Monty Python sketches, or Slayer lyrics. So what does it for your group? Whatever it is, I guarantee you I will fall for it at least once!