James Maliszewski update and a bit about being human

James Maliszewski, a well-known blogger and designer of material of OSR gaming, has been conspicuously absent from his usually daily blog posting.  His Kickstarter project for Dwimmermount megadungeon project hasn't been updated and people are in a tizzy.

Many people, chiefly people who have backed the Dwimmermount project, were bitching and complaining about not getting their updates and so on, which was understandable given that they'd paid money to back the project.

He has posted recently that he going through a difficult, existential even, crisis and has simply said that everything else will have to wait until he has gotten through this.  I wish him well.


Now that James has made a lengthy, deeply personal, announcement about what is going on with him and asked for patience, people are still bitching.  Not only is it uncharitable, it's downright heartless.  He's not a corporation, he's not even a big company, he's a guy who writes and the gaming side of his life is something that he does out of love.

To the folks who are pissing and moaning and calling him irresponsible and other nonsense: have a little shame. It's not all about you, hounding or denigrating him is not going to get you what you want.  Have patience with people when life deals them a shitty hand, and hope that when the day comes that you need patience and understanding, someone will cut you some slack.

Health and luck to James, I hope he weathers this shock well and comes back to us soon.

Barbarians of Lemuria

Finally broke out Barbarians of Lemuria over the Christmas holidays and ran a session for four of my old gaming buddies. We played a scenario called Crimson Shoals set in Howard's Hyborian Age.

 The scenario was written by Garnett Elliott, who has written a number of BoL scenarios set in Lieber/Lovecraft/CASmith/Howard style settings.

Crimson Shoals is short, but about the right length for a one-shot game or part of a campaign. The pregenerated characters are authentic Howard Hyborian Age anti-heroes and each of them has interesting details in their brief back-story blurbs.

We had a blast playing the scenario. BoL is a great little system with a lot of flexibility and I hope to get more experience with it this year.

EDIT:  I should add that Crimson Shoals, and a bunch of other stuff for BoL, is available on the Strange Stones blog (see blogroll at right).

Codifying "Player Agency" is bad.

Random Wizard's post about simplifying calculations got me thinking about the d20 mechanic.

Using the same mechanic for everything (the d20-roll-high) is one of a few things that I took away from the d20 system as a good idea.

 I still think that they let the whole feat and skill thing get out of hand, though, with 3.0/5. They tried to make everything a skill or feat instead of keeping it fast and loose. Codifying too many things can actually rob the players of "agency".

Fair and flexible adjudication of the game is a better plan. And it makes the person running the game feel less like a robot and more like a participant in something fun, a shared experience.

My Secret Shame (well, one of many)

Your results:
You are Will Riker

Will Riker 85% Spock 72% James T. Kirk (Captain) 65% Chekov 60% Geordi LaForge 60% Worf 60% Deanna Troi 60% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 60% Mr. Scott 55% Jean-Luc Picard 55% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 45% Data 41% Mr. Sulu 40% Uhura 35% Beverly Crusher 15%

At times you are self-centered but you have many friends. You love many women, but the right woman could get you to settle down.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

Tekumel

I've acquired a copy of Gardasiyal: Adventures on Tekumel, and I've been considering trying out a game of Tekumel to see what it's like.  I've been doing a lot of reading about the setting and what people who've run it have to say.

It does sound interesting, so a long-time gaming buddy and I have got the notion to go through character generation as a test drive.  I've also been reading Dave Morris' Tirikelu rules for Tekumel, they look concise and seem to have the flavour of the game built-in, perhaps they'll work better than Gardaiyal.  We'll find out soon.

Fizzle

The fall gaming thing fizzled out after a few weeks, largely my own fault -- I simply didn't have the energy to put into it.  We played a multi-session one-shot of Stuart Robertson's Citadel of Evil mini-module using the Swords & Wizardry White Box rules.

Everyone had a lot of fun and it was great to rediscover the joys of playing an rpg that fit into less pages than the character generation section of many "modern" rpgs.  Seyoung, my wife, had never played a role playing game before; she had a lot of fun and thought she'd enjoy more.

We had started generating characters for Traveller (Classic) and were ready to begin, but it kind of got lost pre-Christmas.  I'll have to see about firing it up again sometime during the summer for a session or two.

Back to the Table/Bamboo Dice Tower

We've recently started playing a loosely organized series of one-shots. My idea was to try out a bunch of different, largely old-school or old-school inspired, role-playing games.
Over the past couple of decades of gaming we've mostly been playing while sitting around the living room on couches, etc. People were always distracted and would start reading magazines or playing with smartphones, etc. during a game, so I decided that when running my games we'd play around the table, no electronics. Just paper, pencils and dice.
It's been working. So far we've had three or four solid sessions with no distractions and everyone playing with their full attention. This led me to look into means of keeping dice from ricocheting around the table and onto the floor.
I bought a number of cheap bamboo pencil holders from the local dollar store, hacked them apart and rebuilt them into a dice tower. It makes a nice clatter that's almost musical and it just looks really nice. Total cost $6 (plus a few nights of hacking, gluing and clamping, then a coat of tung oil.)
If you haven't been doing it, or haven't done it in a while, try going back to the table and leaving the gizmos behind. It's really brought the focus back to the people at the table and the game that they're playing.