Super Saturday: Thor Hates Communists

No, seriously -- Thor really, really hates Communists. He was fighting them semi-routinely back in the 60's, starting with his 2nd appearance.







(Pages from Journey Into Mystery #84, 87, 93, 117, 123, and Thor #168. Plot/writer Stan Lee, penciler Jack Kirby. Dates 1962-1969.)

Irreparable

In the back of the 3E DMG, Monte Cook included a table of formulas for pricing new magic items. (Yes, they were suggestions only, yes they were meant for use by the DM, yada yada yada.) This has been, like, an unstoppable bleeding sore ever since. As Monte once wrote, "Some days I look at Table 8-40 on page 242 of the DMG and wish it wasn't there at all." I bet the single-most common question to ring out repeatedly in 3E campaign play is: "Can I really make an item that will cast cure light wounds at will, activated by a command word, for only 900 gp?" (Again, per Monte himself, here.) * 

This is so constantly abrasive, that I actually got in trouble with the moderators at ENWorld once over it (having a signature line with a particular rules interpretation that got deleted by the mods). And here is the exact same question again last week on the Paizo forums, more than 10 years after the book's publication. (I ran into this while scouting for the Boats & Ships Map Pack from last Friday; and here's me writing on the topic back in 2004.) 

* Perhaps this question also highlights how overwhelmingly important the healing ability is to D&D mechanics -- beyond any other specific spell, nigh-requiring that a certain character class devote all or most of their spell slots to it, etc. And that's one of the reasons why I delete the cleric class and remove responsibility for it from any one player.

HelgaCon IV - Into the Forgotten Realms

On Sunday morning of HelgaCon I was a lot better rested, getting up for the final morning slot. I'd been looking forward to this game all weekend, because it was Paul (always an excellent DM) running the Ed Greenwood AD&D adventure "Into the Forgotten Realms" from Dragon #95 (from March 1985). A lot of people say that early Forgotten Realms is a prime example of old-school play (prior to later developments & merchandising), and since it's not a milieu that I ever touched, I was eager to experience it and learn more.

We had 8 players around the table, choosing from pregenerated characters included in the adventure: 5th-8th level, with fairly high ability scores (most with 2-3 bonuses by AD&D rules), but absolutely no magic items (or even missile weapons). The goal was to infiltrate an abandoned college of sorcery, head off an evil warlord to the site, and confiscate as much magic as possible (so as to keep out of the warlord's hands). Tournament scoring would be used as per use of the adventure at Gen Con XVII in 1984, on a per-player basis (with one player "winning" the event).

One funny thing that happened was this: I was one of the few players who had a physical copy of the classic AD&D PHB at the table (and wow, is it beat up at this point). To begin with, I was thinking that it might be useful for me to take a magic-user so I could reference the various spells easily, but other players were even more eager to do that, so I started looking at the pregens for a backup plan. And the funny thing is that one of the clerics' established personality/background descriptions almost exactly matched my longest running-character ever, a semi-whacked out priest of a war deity with a bit of a Napoleon complex. (From the adventure text: "He prides himself in, and enjoys, being a skillful fighter and an accomplished thinking-on-his-feet battlefield tactician, or 'general.'... compulsively honest, finding it difficult to be dishonest or even diplomatic. He is always blunt, open, and truthful, even when it hurts himself or his friends...") So with a big laugh, I figured I could play that, having done so for about 5 years in the 3E era (in fact, that old character's name -- at one point mangled by a hard-of-hearing NPC -- is actually where the "Helga" in "HelgaCon" originated from).

I did try to leverage both this PC and my knowledge of AD&D rules to give a lot of recommendations to the rest of the party and I hope (similar to BigFella's writeup of another game) that this was helpful in a tournament context and not too aggravating for other players. Maybe, maybe not.

Having now played and read the adventure, here is a critique that I can't avoid: This really did ring my "new school" bell in numerous ways. (And it didn't do much to dispel my impression of Ed Greenwood's design work.) Stuff like: (1) A big focus in the adventure text on "role-playing", with fairly detailed personality & background motivations given for the pregenerated PCs, and that used as the basis for points-award votes at the end. (Commendably, Paul downplayed this in practice.) (2) At the same time, a surprisingly small number of monsters to fight in the dungeon; we fought two, with another two avoided that could potentially have been released as traps. (3) A lot of time, emphasis, and detail on the NPCs, their motivations and background, room-by-room prior activity in the dungeon, etc. The primary goal of the adventure is ultimately: puzzling out the identity & negotiating with the master villain of the place (who is basically invulnerable to the PCs). I can't help but feel like the spotlight falling on this particular NPC resembles Greenwood's use of a character like Elminster.

The other thing that's super puzzling to me (and this was known going in: Paul & I had discussed it previously) is the use of per-person individual tournament scoring. The small amount of tournament play I've known has been team-based, with points awarded to the whole party, and the higher-scoring teams advancing to later rounds (such as writeups of G1-3 in Dragon circa 1978; tournament A/C modules published around 1980; or even the 3E D&D tournament at Gen Con 2004). But apparently there was some point in the "silver age" period circa 1984 when individual scoring was used instead -- and this also seems characteristically "new school" to me, that instead of pulling together as a team for an in-game goal, players are in some sense expected to compete with each other as to which individual character gets the most success or attention during play. I really wish I had more detail on the exact evolution of that tournament scoring over time.

So that's my critique of Greenwood and the design style of the mid-1980's (post-Dragonlance; within the year that Gygax would leave TSR) -- and I think it was really super educational for me to get to experience it firsthand, from the POV of a player interacting with an unknown adventure, and I value that greatly.

That said, Paul ran excellent game and it was a lot fun. He made good choices about parts to downplay (like not requiring deep in-character-acting; asking for vote assessments based on overall contributions to the game). His sense of pacing, responsiveness to player intent, fair-handedness at running the AD&D rules, and, ultimately, role-playing the insane undead boss at the end were without flaw and really compelling. He's independently come to the same philosophy I have about miniatures, not using them or battlemaps for combat at all (although minis were on the table for marching order), and again I like the flow of the game that way as a player. The other players in the game were exemplary as well, really working well together as a team and exploring basically the entire complex within the allotted time limit. At the end, voting took place under the rules provided (basically), with our very brave front-line thief player winning the overall award -- applause all around, a mint copy of Dragon #95 passed out as a prize, and then we wrapped up another year of HelgaCon (packing up, goodbyes, and travel to diverse parts).

Really great play and experiences all around that weekend, can't wait to do it again!

For more on this game:

• Paul's initial writeup here.
• Paul's response to my comments here.
• BigFella's thoughts here.
  

HelgaCon IV - The Fallen Obelisk

This week I'll wrap up summaries of the action at HelgaCon a few weeks back. Having run games in each of the first three slots, by Saturday night I was ready to kick back and turn DM'ing duties over to other people and get to act player for a while. Also I interface with the event, I'd only slept a couple hours the prior night, so I was pretty tired.

So that evening I got to play once again in BigFella's "Thousand Year Sandglass" milieu, an Arabian-themed campaign run with Labyrinth Lord rules and some lightweight use of miniatures and room tiles.

So the primary things here are that (a) BigFella runs a very nice, fun old-school sandbox (literally) game, (b) I get to play brothers with Paul again, the two of us running Hakim and Jiri Jarib (4th-level fighters with nearly identical statistics) which is really awesome, and (c) several of us being sleep-deprived, almost everything anyone said seemed painfully, ludicrously funny. So I was sitting there giggling and guffawing and gleefully mock-arguing in a slight Persian accent all night long. Sometimes I almost couldn't play rationally everything seemed so funny.

It's interesting action for a convention game, very open-ended, starting in a long canyon area with several different underground openings to potentially explore (the base of the great "fallen obelisk" tower, caves high up the canyon walls, giant temple statuary on one cliff-face, etc.), when you only have time for a single feature. Last year's action was a terrific bloodbath, with the Jarib brothers really lucky or smart to get out alive (everyone else went through 2 or 3 PCs that night, as I recall). This year had nowhere near as high a body-count (again, maybe the whole party being luckier or smarter or both). Jarib brothers are usually in the front of the marching order, ready to defend the rest of the party. Equipment is limited in this setting, with chain being the best available armor, as I recall, so at best you always feel pretty exposed/fragile. And at least last year there was a crapload of scorpions and other poison-y stuff crawling around.

The area we were exploring this time turned out to have mostly non-living stuff, like: a multi-armed skeletal swordsman; a trap that sucked the magic out of our wizards; a dust/vortex/elemental creature; a giant replica of the world's cosmology (a huge sandglass with upper & lower worlds); a spell-casting mummy (I think); and finally, a secretly bound efreet with centuries of experience playing chess for very high stakes. Some of the stuff I'm particularly fond of was luring the dust creature into a giant crushing room trap via an illusion; and having our smartest magician agree to play the efreet at chess, stunningly winning twice when the odds were very much against us, and so multiplying all of our treasure several times.

The new schtick between the Jarib brothers is that when we started fighting the first skeletal swordsman, it became obvious that it was only hit by magical weapons -- of which Hakim (me) happened to have 2 from PC generation, whereas Jiri (Paul) had none. So while fighting with a magic sword, I tossed the magic spear to Jiri -- who then started claiming it had been his all along by inheritance. Later we had to wrestle over it, and when I got it back he'd engraved his frickin' name on it! So that got carved off, but in a later fight he needed it again, and the whole cycle started all over. And pretty clearly it's now the "Jarib Family Spear" and I guess we're stuck with that. So see what your "hit only by magic" rule has wrought now, eh?

Very nice content and pacing. I think the party explored 12 areas or so, with maybe 4 or 5 monsters and 3-4 tricks/traps, and plenty of treasure to haul out. Also a nice feature with the in-game cosmic model; that really did conjure some nice campaign atmosphere, and I liked it a lot. Miniatures worked out fairly well (although there was some scrambling for the right room/corridor tiles at times). There was a point where I got totally panic-stricken by the dust monster, who was being represented by the same miniature BigFella will use for big stone elementals/golems, when we didn't really have to be quite so cautious. But other than that, a really nice game.

One thing I'll say I noticed throughout all of our games this year (goes for me, BigFella, and Paul): I could observe a steady improvement in all of our DM'ing abilities. I thought my G2 game was the best D&D I'd run in many, many years. BigFella here showed that he's chosen the right ruleset for his game, and he's getting even better at leveraging all of the rules to his best strengths, running the game efficiently and well. Paul (post on his game coming Wednesday) was also running a fair, pretty tough, really well-balanced game of old-school AD&D, and it very much nourished me to be in that game, too. I felt lots of confidence that rules were being adjudicated fairly, correctly, and quickly, so you could really totally focus on the in-game experience and what move your character/party should make next. Maybe this (the fact that we're all getting better at this hobby) is even more evident when I only play with these guys once a year or so. So there's a benefit, but I'd still trade that to play with them more frequently.

For more on this game:

• Paul's write up here.
• BigFellas's writeup here and analysis here.
  

Super Saturday: Incredible Shrinking Hammer

Most cartoons and comics seem to go through a period of style evolution in their early days. Below are a series of shots of Thor's hammer, starting with his first appearance in Marvel comics.

Compare that to the current "Thor Lightning Hammer" toy based on the design from the upcoming new movie: (Pages from Journey Into Mystery #83, 94, 95, 103, 109, and Thor #130. Penciler Jack Kirby [except Joe Sinnott #94, 95]. Dates 1962-1966.)

Boats & Ships Map Pack

On the one hand, last Friday I crapped all over using miniatures in an RPG game, and expressed pleasure at having (basically) personally ended that.

But within the same week I was browsing at The Compleat Strategist in Manhattan, and ran into a delightful product I couldn't help but pick up: Paizo's GameMastery Map Pack: Boats & Ships.

As you may know, I'm fond of running some D&D-at-sea games, and for that it really benefits you to have at-scale ship deck plans if most of the action will take place on that platform. In the past I've used several copies of black-and-white maps that I print & assemble at home. But no doubt this product blows that away: great, full-color, well-designed, accurately-scaled (in both realistic terms and classic D&D-type statistics), on sturdy cardstock, in convenient 8x5 inch tiled pieces (i.e., half-page, little brown booklet, stick-in-your-white-box size). As miserly as I am, I simply had to buy it. Really wish something this well-thought out and designed had been available years ago.

A couple drawbacks so I'm being fair: (1) There's more masts than I'd want for the technological level I presume; the sailing ships have 2 or 3 masts, whereas I like cruder cogs with just 1 or 2 (to give some nod to the historical period when both sailing cogs and viking-style longships were feasible options). (2) The viking longship has too few rowing benches and oars (positioned every other 5' square, when there should be one every square; but that's easily hand-waved). (3) You can't have two parties fighting on the same ship design if you own just one pack (whereas you can print off as many copies as you like of something from your home printer). You might also want to tape the tiles together or down to the table when you use them.

Philosophical point to conclude a week of miniature wargaming-type stuff: While I'm now fond of avoiding miniatures for in-the-dungeon, single-character RPG stuff (lower level?), I do like being able to run proper outside wargame-type stuff at a larger scale, I want that part of the D&D endgame (higher level?) to be retained and to work "right", and there's all kinds of advantages and traditions to miniatures for that. And on that continuum, I think that naval games present a very nice transition opportunity (mid-levels), where the PCs are leading a single ship's crew of men in the dozens or scores, and adventuring on the wide-open ocean. If possible, and in line with OD&D, I like to switch between high-level mass action and man-to-man deck melee within the same game. And if you do that more than once or twice, having nice ship deck plans helps the experience enormously.

(Photo by me. What appears to be an enormous cat is really a sleepy, polymorphed gold dragon on a lonely isle at sea.)

HelgaCon IV - Siege on the Borderlands

I've run this game a couple of times now (see links at bottom). Interestingly, it's never run the same way twice in the number of times that I've played it. There's a really interesting scramble at the beginning of the game as each player tries to feel out the new (to them) rules, finds it not working exactly as they first expected, and then spar with cat-and-mouse adjustments. Here's possibly the most interesting run to date -- this occurred on Saturday afternoon at HelgaCon, out on the porch (which gave delicious lighting, although somewhat out-of-theme for the dead-of-night monsters-over-the-walls action). I had two players whom I'll call Ms. A (attacker) and Mr. D (defender). Ms. A had never played a wargame before, but was very intrigued. Mr. D had done stuff like this before, and had great helpful comments at the end. Here's how it went (remember 1 figure = 10 men scale, Book of War escalade rules):

Summary of Play

Turn 1 -- Setup. Attacking monsters in blue (setup anywhere by player choice), defending men in red (fixed start per the classic module). Ms. A has setup her monsters about how I always personally envision -- and yet, she's the first monster-player to ever do so. She's got the weaker types ringing the lower outer bailey (goblins, orcs, hobgoblins with crossbows), and the stronger types positioned against the higher inner bailey (ogres and giants; some goblins too). This is advantageous because the higher bluff at the back is harder to climb (potentially even a fatal fall), and the giant-types counteract that with their higher strength. There are also some reinforcement monsters currently left off the table (see the chair at the top).



Turn 3 -- Advance. Here, you can see two turns of monster move attempts up the bluff. On Mr. D's first turn, he made a highly unexpected move: "Is there any requirement that I keep men in the outer bailey?", he asked. Receiving an answer of "uh... no", his first move was to immediately pull every unit out of the outer bailey, consolidating them all in the higher inner bailey (as you can see below). Privately I was thinking, "Oh crap, that's broken, I'll have to institute a rule penalizing lack of defense for the civilians in the lower town..."



Turn 5 -- Insertion. So with no one defending the walls of the outer bailey, the monsters could pull up their crude ladders and scale over the perimeter freely. Below, you can them packing in as tightly as possible, having entirely taken over the outer bailey (and the main gate). Now they're starting to exchange missile fire with the men atop the inner fortress (the inner fortress gives 2 figures complete protection, but others are hittable on a "6"). Again, all of this was unprecedented action.



Turn 6 -- Giants! Don't forget that there are ogres and a squad of giants trying to climb up over the higher bluff/wall of the outer bailey. The giants were delayed for several turns as they served artillery-fire with thrown stones at anyone in sight on the rear walls. Now that red has tired of the losses and retired from the wall (those 3 figures in the keep fortress are also invulnerable from missile-fire), the giants have ascended and are about to boost each other over the wall. (In a recurring theme for me this HelgaCon, frost giants are again the featured antagonist.)



Turn 7 -- Multiple Breaches. So here you can see that giants and some ogres have both gotten into the outer bailey, and are stomping on anyone in reach. (Frost giants have taken 3-of-10 hits; there are also some unfortunate goblins who have suffered falling deaths and routed.) But here's another intriguing move by Ms. A: instead of rushing ahead helter-skelter with her big mob of monsters (which is usual thing) she's showing the utmost patience, degrading the red defenders from a distance with missile fire as much as possible before moving from her position in the outer bailey. One figure in each tower is fully protected, but there is still one figure in the inner fortress that is a valid target, and there are a lot of hobgoblin crossbows firing each turn.



Turn 10 -- Collapse. The orcs, goblins, and hobgoblins in the outer bailey are now surging forward en masse. Partly they're trying to scale over the wall of the inner fortress, and meanwhile they're attempting break down doors into the towers on either side (one unit of orcs is now in the west tower, battling with red defenders). Ogres have been mostly killed, but the giants have actually stormed the main keep fortress and cleared out all of the defenders there!



Turn 15 -- The End. The defenders actually kill quite a number of monsters as the fighting turns hand-to-hand through each tower and building. However, the jig is clearly up. Below you can see one of the last defender units in an extremely bad situation. (Hey, it's almost like I designed those tower-tops to exactly fit that figure base or something...)



So the winner in probably the most lopsided game to date: Ms. A playing the monsters in her first-ever wargame. That said, Mr. D was incredibly gracious at the end of the game, giving great compliments on how it played out, and saying how impressed he was that his pull-everyone-back move failed to break the game (among other observations). At the end we realized that there's a specific rules clause already built in naturally that made it a very bad move to vacate the lower bailey -- but no one (including me!) really understood what the ramifications of that move were until very late in the game. At some point when Book of War is released I'll link back here and see if you can spot what they key rule is. Really fascinating play and an opportunity for some emergent-behavior discoveries. I'll skip the "what went right" section (pretty much everything, so no need to pat myself on the back too much)...

What Went Wrong (Things to Fix)

1. Paint in Doors. An important part of the gameplay involves the monsters reaching inward-facing doors to the castle towers, bashing them in, and then meleeing with the defenders inside (thereby accessing other walls, the inner bailey, etc.) Every time I play there are numerous question from players about exactly where the accessible doors are, where they lead, I should have a map of B2 to confirm where they are, etc. Mr. D made the point that I could just paint in those doors to visually indicate where they are. Yeah, I painted in almost everything else except the one feature that's actually critical to scenario gameplay. Big "duh" for me, and great observation from him.
2. Doors should Close. On the same point, I've been playing that once a tower door gets bashed in, anyone can freely move through that access point from then on. Mr. D made the point that's not exactly realistic, that winners of the tower should probably be able to board it up again, hoist the door, block it with shields, etc., thereby forcing other attackers to break it down again. I think that's good, and it has the further advantage of not having to remember which doors are in place and which aren't. (A secondary-level priority for my game is to not have any record-keeping other than what's immediately visible on the table.) So that's what I'll do next time.
3. Morale on Bluff. One thing I'm a little wiggly on is the propensity for monster units climbing the high bluff to take a loss from falling, fail a morale check, and then get committed to climbing back down the dangerous bluff (as you can see for the goblins in the photo of turn #7 above), possibly taking more falls and more deaths. That's kind of a judgment call about what seems more dangerous: the deadly precipice below, or the looming defended castle wall above? Not sure where to take that. (Suggestions?)
   

Some prior games of Siege on the Borderlands:

• At home.
• At RECESS.