Jack Daniel
Legend
"The secret that we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." –Gary Gygax
Did you ever have one of those days, where you had a sudden epiphany that just wound up raising more questions than it seemed to answer? That's where I am right about now.
I'm one of those weird DMs that spends entirely too much time thinking about games: game design, game theory, world building, campaign planning, the whole shebang. (I guess, by virtue of posting on EN World and other internet forums, that automatically marks me as more "invested in the hobby" than your average, causal gamer. At least, that's the common wisdom. But for my part, I've never really met a bona fide casual gamer. Just fellow nerds who obsess over gaming to more or less of a degree than their other passions.)
Anyway, it's been a long time coming, but I think I've finally gotten to the point where I've lost interest in D&D. Not fantasy RPGs: just D&D in particular. The complexities of the d20 System drove me into the arms of the OSR, and it was great to play the auld game again, but now I'm starting to see even the TSR editions as too crunchy to serve my needs. Problematically, of course, what usually seems to happen when one tires of the specific vagaries of D&D is that rules get added rather than subtracted, leading to alternatives like BRP or GURPS, or your run-of-the-mill fantasy heartbreaker. But I found myself wanting to go in the other direction, towards story-driven indie games and "micro-lite" RPGs.
Epic Six is a good patch that goes a long way towards solving the problems I have with D&D, especially high-level D&D, but it's still just a patch. Even applied to the simplest of editions (like B/X), there's still a lot of game there to keep track of. As I scoured the web for micro-lite games, though, I noticed something about these simpler alternatives: they were easily memorized. Especially if they boiled everything down to a really simple mechanic. You could have a single small document or booklet, the sort of booklet that might come in a Monopoly or Scrabble box, and if you knew the contents backwards and forwards, you'd never ever have to consult it during the game, and neither would any of the other players.
That, I realized, ought to have been my goal all along. Not coming up with endless pages of house-rules, trying to hammer and batter D&D into something it wasn't. Just play an easier game, something that comes in a booklet rather than a shelf full of books. At this point (since I'd crossed completely over to the dark side of indie RPGs), it didn't really seem to matter which one I picked, so I just looked until I found one that I liked. I settled on Altars & Archetypes, which is cool because it uses the polyhedral dice in a matter somewhat similar to Savage Worlds, but simpler by an entire order of magnitude.
A few quick tinkerings and twiddlings of my own, and I had my own version of the game written up. (See attachment.) Once this was printed, stapled together, and folded over, I had a little booklet that felt for all the world like a window into way gaming was back in the 1970s, long before I ever took up a d20. There's a lot about the Old-School Renaissance that I don't particularly care for, a lot of dogmatism and deification and fetishizing (especially of pulp authors and the low fantasy genre, neither of which I care for). But there's also that hobbyist, do-it-yourself ethic that says RPGs aren't in glossy books and corporations; they're in *us* when we *play*.
So now I find myself in a weird spot... loving D&D, but unwilling to actually play it; part of the OSR, but much more interested in narrativism and immersion and high fantasy than most OSR-type folks; still utterly uninterested in anything that White Wolf has ever offered, for pretty much the same reason that tasteful people spurn Twlight; and not really sure if there's a label for the kind of play-style I like. It's like living in a limbo on the periphery of the hobby.
And I'm still not sure how the frell it happened... weird, eh?
Did you ever have one of those days, where you had a sudden epiphany that just wound up raising more questions than it seemed to answer? That's where I am right about now.
I'm one of those weird DMs that spends entirely too much time thinking about games: game design, game theory, world building, campaign planning, the whole shebang. (I guess, by virtue of posting on EN World and other internet forums, that automatically marks me as more "invested in the hobby" than your average, causal gamer. At least, that's the common wisdom. But for my part, I've never really met a bona fide casual gamer. Just fellow nerds who obsess over gaming to more or less of a degree than their other passions.)
Anyway, it's been a long time coming, but I think I've finally gotten to the point where I've lost interest in D&D. Not fantasy RPGs: just D&D in particular. The complexities of the d20 System drove me into the arms of the OSR, and it was great to play the auld game again, but now I'm starting to see even the TSR editions as too crunchy to serve my needs. Problematically, of course, what usually seems to happen when one tires of the specific vagaries of D&D is that rules get added rather than subtracted, leading to alternatives like BRP or GURPS, or your run-of-the-mill fantasy heartbreaker. But I found myself wanting to go in the other direction, towards story-driven indie games and "micro-lite" RPGs.
Epic Six is a good patch that goes a long way towards solving the problems I have with D&D, especially high-level D&D, but it's still just a patch. Even applied to the simplest of editions (like B/X), there's still a lot of game there to keep track of. As I scoured the web for micro-lite games, though, I noticed something about these simpler alternatives: they were easily memorized. Especially if they boiled everything down to a really simple mechanic. You could have a single small document or booklet, the sort of booklet that might come in a Monopoly or Scrabble box, and if you knew the contents backwards and forwards, you'd never ever have to consult it during the game, and neither would any of the other players.
That, I realized, ought to have been my goal all along. Not coming up with endless pages of house-rules, trying to hammer and batter D&D into something it wasn't. Just play an easier game, something that comes in a booklet rather than a shelf full of books. At this point (since I'd crossed completely over to the dark side of indie RPGs), it didn't really seem to matter which one I picked, so I just looked until I found one that I liked. I settled on Altars & Archetypes, which is cool because it uses the polyhedral dice in a matter somewhat similar to Savage Worlds, but simpler by an entire order of magnitude.
A few quick tinkerings and twiddlings of my own, and I had my own version of the game written up. (See attachment.) Once this was printed, stapled together, and folded over, I had a little booklet that felt for all the world like a window into way gaming was back in the 1970s, long before I ever took up a d20. There's a lot about the Old-School Renaissance that I don't particularly care for, a lot of dogmatism and deification and fetishizing (especially of pulp authors and the low fantasy genre, neither of which I care for). But there's also that hobbyist, do-it-yourself ethic that says RPGs aren't in glossy books and corporations; they're in *us* when we *play*.
So now I find myself in a weird spot... loving D&D, but unwilling to actually play it; part of the OSR, but much more interested in narrativism and immersion and high fantasy than most OSR-type folks; still utterly uninterested in anything that White Wolf has ever offered, for pretty much the same reason that tasteful people spurn Twlight; and not really sure if there's a label for the kind of play-style I like. It's like living in a limbo on the periphery of the hobby.
And I'm still not sure how the frell it happened... weird, eh?
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