Hiding back in the shadows of the cell, propped as comfortably as possible in a corner with my legs stretched out in front of me, I contemplated my toes and tried to imagine how the day could get worse. My best lock pick had been confiscated and was currently locked in the “illicit items” drawer. And I was trapped in this cell with no idea how long I would be here.

I heard the quiet jangle of his keys, and I knew the constable, settled at his desk, was snoozing in the calm of the afternoon. Great. I was locked away, and the only person who knew was taking a nap. If only that urchin hadn’t found my lock pick…

I must have dozed off too in the peace of the afternoon because the next thing I remember was being awoken by the deputy as he brought a basket to my cell. “Complements of the mayor. She didn’t want ya to be hungry.” The mayor? I couldn’t recall ever hearing of the mayor sending dinner to anyone in jail, but I wasn’t going to ask questions; the mayor’s cook made the best bread. Seated on the floor with the bounty of my basket dinner spread out on a blanket around me, it was almost possible to forget the miserable events of the day.

If I used my imagination, it was like a nighttime picnic. But my pleasant alternate reality lasted only as long as my meal, and then I was reminded of how bitterly lonely I was.

Around this time every evening, the town’s residents gathered in the main square to enjoy a concert. If I sat quietly and focused, I could hear strains of the music. Of course, with the mayor out of town, the music wasn’t quite as spectacular, but the other musically-inclined residents were still entertaining. Even without the mayor and her lute, the show went on. Without the mayor…..

A thought sparked in the back of my mind. How would the mayor have known I was in jail to send me a basket dinner… when she was supposedly out of town visiting her family. It had been a set-up!

This day just kept getting better and better.

Our good buddy Yax over at DungeonMastering posted up a whopping 83 free D&D Adventures. I don’t know whether it was the boldly advertised “adventures” in the title or the massive amounts of caffeine that I have ingested tonight, but it got me to thinking about the old school “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series.

I remember that one such book named “Space Vampire” (by Edward Packard) used to scare the crap out of me when I was a kid. It wasn’t the storyline, per se, but there were several “failure” illustrations that showed your gaunt dessicated corpse after the Space Vampire did his thing. Judith Mitchell certainly had the “creepy enough to seep into my dreams” illustration thing down.

Write your own adventure, or use a stock adventure?

This is one of the eternal questions, and it comes down to matter of preference. Personally, I find it generally easier for me to invest myself in a storyline or plot point if I create it from the ground up. I tend to either forget (I’m not much of a note-taker) or fail miserably at adapting the stock adventure elements to my own storyline, so I tend to prefer hand-rolling my own modular adventures.

There was a small part of me that was somewhat compelled to write my own “Choose Your Own Adventure” book when I was a kid, and I have to believe that was some of my proto-DM tendencies wanting to be released to the world.

Has anyone else been otherwise inspired by these books, or am I just particularly insane for keeping a special place in my heart for them?

Over the weekend, Dante & I participated in a trivia contest for charity. On teams of eight, we answered questions (or attempted to, anyway) from 8 different categories. In our post-game discussions, it occurred to me that preparing for a trivia contest is a lot like selecting your spells.

Prepare for the Unknown

For trivia or for spells, there’s usually two schools of thought that prevail. One, specialize. Two, jack of all trades. Specializing, you take as many spells of the same type; if you’re a cleric, you might take several offensive spells, or you might take several healing/restoration spells. Option two, play the jack of all trades: take a little bit of every kind of spell and hope that the ones you pick are ones that will be useful.

The Power of a Team

When you have multiple trivia players, or multiple spell casters, you may have better opportunities to cover the requirements. Pretty obvious, huh? The more people you have, the more chances that someone will know that obscure bit of knowledge or the spell that will make the difference in that battle.

Harness the Team Mentality

If you’re trying to conquer the trivia challenge or the Undead Lord, it helps to be coordinated with your other spell casters. Try to all follow the same preparation method; there is usually greater success if you are all specialists or all jacks of all trade. Try to coordinate your spells so they span the greatest range of possibilities. If you plan it right (and the other teams are not as smart as you), you might win that trophy!

Yesterday, I covered a topic that had been burning in my brain for quite some time: a discussion on Live Action Roleplaying and its place in our hobby. I feel somewhat vindicated in my stance on the matter after hearing the articulate commentary provided by you all out there in the blogosphere, however there is often another tangent to this discussion that always seems to come up when I talk about this with members of our group.

True Dungeon: The LARP Grey Market

I have had the good fortune to play most (if not all) of the incarnations of True Dungeon over the years. Often, when I discuss the topic of LARPing Vanir readily points out this fact to me and tries to make the argument that True Dungeon is essentially normalized LARPing for the masses.

I respectfully choose to disagree with my good friend on this point, and here’s why. LARPing, by its very definition requires some aspect of roleplaying. Hopefully those of you that have been through True Dungeon can back me up on this point; there is little to no actual roleplaying taking place within the Marriott Ballroom walls by the players.

The non-player staff does a pretty good job of roleplaying, but due to time constraints roleplaying is usually a luxury that dies the moment the sounding carillon chimes to usher you down to the Pits of Doom. Do you get to act out character roles? Yes, but there is a distinct difference between this and actual roleplaying. Actual roleplaying would dictate that you have given your assigned character a background, personality, and motivation… none of this exists in the incarnations of True Dungeon that I have played.

The closest you get to any real personality for the players is when the bard of the group is forced to sing in order to maintain their bardsong effects, and strains of off-key (sorry SR) “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” doesn’t qualify in the range of effective roleplay.

Why I classified this a Grey Market

When you buy your True Dungeon ticket, you are purchasing a dungeon crawling experience. The tavern that they make available and the in-character staff that serves drinks, provides orientation, and adds flavor is very adept at evoking the feeling of Greyhawk and in some cases are very good at playing the roles that they have been assigned (or created, I don’t know how that works).

This makes it a very realistic D&D style experience, and honestly its why I love True Dungeon. I love the look and feel of actually being within a game, as if I am a life sized miniature with stats (please, withhold jokes there guys). It’s like being on the edge of LARPing with a set of opera glasses watching the show, but with this show audience participation in the midst of the Dungeon isn’t possible.

To me, its an in-between experience for us pencil and paper roleplayers and the world of LARP.

Today I’d like to discuss one of the more interesting areas of the nerdly arts, the world of Live Action Roleplaying (or LARPing). I must admit, the strangeness of costumed folk at conventions that claim very fervently to be some character that only they and their friends know about is considerably unsettling to me. The level of passion that LARPers bring to their hobby isn’t the only thing that bothers me…

Disclaimer: I have never LARPed before. It frightens me, and I apologize in advance if you are offended by the following.

Those of you that know me or have been paying even the slightest bit of attention to some of my posts know that I enjoy high quality props (both relating to films and relating to my campaigns). Unfortunately, the examples of craftsmanship in costuming and propwork have run the range from hilarious to extremely unsettling (most seem to be executed using Wal-Mart bargain rack fabric in roughly 36 minutes). That, and the penchant for tights and ill-fitting bosom supporting devices is intolerable, and don’t lie to me and tell me you don’t wear them, I’ve seen them with my own eyes at GenCon!

Heavan help you if you actually stop to ask someone who LARPs what the giant sword that they are carrying is supposed to be, or what (incorrectly assumed movie) character they are dressed as… because you’re going to get a dissertation on the providence of said item that the person or someone they knew made up and nobody else knows about. This is usually followed by the Nerd Sound, usually a “nyahh” vocalization to indicate extreme satisfaction. I make it too (about other topics), so I’m not throwing stones… simply pointing out a fact. That sound is often used as punctuation when fulfilling ones nerdly genetic imperative.

I tend to lump LARPing in the upper echelon of what society assumes when it thinks of roleplaying “nerds.” It is clearly within my personality to be mortally embarrassed if I was ever photographed LARPing and said photos were shown to my family/coworkers/dog. It is simply past my threshold of acceptable levels of nerding out.

That being said…

The rest of my disdainful perspective comes from ignorance. If there are any LARPers in our midst, I would love a few words about why you love your hobby and if it can be related to a classic roleplaying experience I would love to understand your point of view more.

Many stories exist on the Internet regarding LARPing and some of the unique characters (both real-world and created) that have existed in this genre, and I am curious what segment of our readership have experienced this type of roleplaying first hand.

Educate me! Share your stories!

If you agree with my general perspective, lets hear from you too!

(NOTE: I would prefer this not become an “is True Dungeon LARPing” thread. We will save *that* topic for later on this week.)

Dante’s recent post on the appropriate amount of damage a thrown mug could inflict reminded me of a time back in our college days of gaming.

During a break one night, some of the guys were flinging dice around the room out of some golf locks they had found at Walmart. Surprising to us all, the walls of the room were not immune to thrown weapons, and a diamond shape was imprinted on the wall from the corner of a d6, and a second d6 had left a small mark.

We all appreciate how much damage we can do in-game by rolling our dice, we should also raise awareness of how much damage dice can do to us. We’ve all all seen the warning-d4-can-damage-your-foot shirts. We need to take it a step further. Maybe we should consider a warning-thrown-d6-can-scar-your-drywall cross-stitch sampler. Or a warning-multitude-of-d20’s-on-the-floor-can-be-as-slippery-as-marbles poster.

If we don’t tell the world how much damage our polyhedrals can do, who will?

Well… it wasn’t exactly great… but even still this scenario did cause a bit of contention within our group and it illustrates an excellent example of how impromptu DMing can sometimes cause some issues.

What happened:

Well, to put it succinctly… one of our player characters (Bat Loaf, I believe) did something uncouth in a tavern and started a fracas. In the resulting fray, one of the patrons blindsided The Loaf with a thrown beer mug.

Since this was taking place outside of initiative, I simply arbitrarily selected an amount of damage (2d6) and applied it upside Bat Loaf’s head. Someone noticed the die roll, since I was excited and didn’t hide it all that well and it caused some discussion as to whether or not the damage was subdual and how I picked 2d6.

The Resulting Argument:

The argument that someone was trying to cause harm was easily enough won, but there was a lot of discussion about how much damage a thrown, broken beer mug would cause. If I remember correctly, there was a certain measure of punishment involved in selecting that much damage for such a mundane thing, however if you think about the breaking glass and resulting shards it might’ve been somewhat close to correct.

After a few iterations of hearing the tried and true “you’re the DM and you can do what you want but…” argument, I think we compromised by backing off the damage a bit. Has anyone else experienced momentary gaffes relating to situational damage when you’ve been made to create something on the fly?

Let’s hear some stories… it always pleases me to read others sharing in my pain!

With my crazy work schedule right now, the creativity has been sucked out of my brain. So, I’ve been going back through my archives to find stuff that I intended to post and never finished.

Sometime last year, Yax posted a list of things which are inevitable. Here’s my list of additional laws:

1. The DM will unveil a significant plot hook at the end of the night when everyone has had too much sugar/caffeine to have sufficient attention span to retain said important plot elements.
2. The DM will roll dice for no reason.
3. The wizard will either die early in the epic battle, or he will outlive everyone else and take down the Big Bad with a 1st Level spell.
4. When characters have money to spend, they won’t be in a town with a sufficient marketplace to find what they want to buy. When they are in a town with a good market, they won’t have money to spend.
5. When you really need to roll well, your dice will betray you.
6. When players choose to cooperate with the DM and follow what they assume is the expected path, it will never be the path the DM wanted them to take.
7. The one time the party doesn’t have a rogue is the one time they need one.
8. Ditto for a cleric.
9. When you finally find some awesome treasure, it will either be: a) useless to everyone in the party, like a cloak only usable by an outsider, or b) cursed, but no one in the party has a Remove Curse spell.
10. You will stumble across undead when no one has any undead-appropriate spells memorized. (This may be related to #8).
11. After you have finished equipping the party with mounts, you will suddenly be required to travel by sea on a boat that cannot accommodate your horses.
12. The one time it would be useful to have a bird scout ahead, the ranger will forget s/he has an owl for an animal companion.

Yesterday, I was informed that the Hollywood sludgebucket has struck again. This time, their mark is one of the more charming movies ever to take on the topic of artificial intelligence gone wrong… Short Circuit.

Filmstalker reports that they intend to remake this movie, with some of the original cast returning but they don’t say who… either way, I am not optimistic.

What’s this got to do with gaming, Dante?

Well… on the surface, not much. However, once I started exploring why I was upset about this news I started thinking about a few things relating to gaming. Several members of our group were present during one of our more successful campaigns, and many times since then I have been tempted to do an additional chapter… a new campaign with some of our old favorite characters.

Whenever I bring up this topic among those players, it usually meets with mixed results. Sometimes they are excited about the prospect of revisiting their old characters and taking them on new adventures. I think this same motivation forces movie execs to think that this type of film remake is a good idea… on the rare occasions where its not all about the money, I am sure that it is done out of a desire to take these (sometimes) classic characters out for another spin.

Vanir often plays the counterpoint that things are never as good the second time around. I have to believe that this sentiment is true in most of the cases… it can never be as good the second time around, film remakes involving good chemistry and great characters often fall flat, and things like this are never a good idea.

But the notion sure is fun. There’s a certain part of me that really hopes Hollywood comes to its senses before they go all Planet of the Apes on this thing, but I’m fairly certain they won’t. Oh well, chalk another up to economics. *sigh*

Over the weekend, SR and I hosted a houseguest in one of my old college buddies, Boyle. He brought with him this magnificent trio that you see (parts of) above, along with the rest of his collection of D&D Miniatures to show me.

Wow, you’re late to the party, Dante.

Why yes, yes I am. I had originally purchased a starter set of miniatures when they first came out because I wanted them to augment my D&D campaigns with. Unfortunately, money was tight and I didn’t end up getting too many that were directly applicable to my setting so I threw them quickly back into the starter box where they resided for many years.

Luckily, when Boyle produced his miniatures it was exactly two days after I had recognized that starter box in the top of my closet and made note of it, so down it came and before long we were creating our parties and having some fun.

It was better than I anticipated!

I’m not going to lie… when I first got the miniatures a few people tried to convince me to play the game that goes along with it and I rejected that idea on the premise that I knew the D&D combat rules and anything based on that was probably far too complicated for me to actually ENJOY. Could I play it? Probably, but rules lawyering is a pursuit best left for SR as she enjoys the ancient art of being right.

Boyle is one of my dearest friends, and I could never tell him that I wouldn’t at least try it… besides… there were adult beverages involved so it couldn’t be that bad, right?

Right! I have to say the simplified rules, coupled with some familiar D&D characteristics made the experience immediately recognizable and fun. It also helps that my starter set happened to include a Medusa, which I understand is somewhat sought after. I’m sure there are a few of you that are kind of sick reading that, sorry!

Regardless, we played several rounds but I stopped short of playing any scenario involving the dragons pictured above, since I was barely having any luck at all with my meager starter set.

From what I can tell, much of the stat blocks that I have seen related to the D&D 4th edition seems to approximate the simplicity of the miniature rules, so I have hopes that all combat will take place in similar fashion as the new edition hits. The only thing that bothered me a little was the rules for routing and running… it seems to me that shouldn’t be so much determined by a die roll but I understand that miniature games are based more solidly in concrete rules so I can tolerate that minor annoyance.

It was a really fun evening, special thanks go out to Boyle for bringing his stuff over so we could give miniatures a try!