Theo Dudek, Ultimate Game Master

I’m always excited to see how roleplayers are depicted in the media, and when a google search for historical comparative values of gold and platinum pieces led me to Gold: The Series, I watched all six episodes right then, right there. This web TV show boasts high production values, good music and a particularly nice opening credit sequence; the producers obviously sunk some money into the series and hope that their hard-spent loot will be rewarded. But what interests me, of course, is: is it good for the hobby? Is it accurate? Will it appeal to gamers? And will non-gamers have their prejudices about gamers confirmed… or shattered???

The story follows a group of players of the “Goblins & Gold” roleplaying game (why must people always use silly alliterative pseudonyms when we all know it’s Dungeons & Dragons? (ー_ー)) Jamie, an elderly gamer, has returned to his hometown after 15 years, and finds Martin, his old GM, still waiting to finish his Zombie King adventure, “that one last campaign.” During this promising first episode I couldn’t help feeling my chest tighten with emotion because every gamer has an unfinished campaign or two in their past; myself, I often dream about my unfinished 3e game from junior high, and still keep track of the players’ addresses and phone numbers hoping that one day we will be able to finish it. Jamie goes back to Martin’s house where they encounter the rest of the party: Brian, who is bald; Hicks, who works at a game store, and Danny, who despite her name is a girl. They gather their old characters (still preserved after 15 years — another good, realistic point) and resume the epic campaign!! Unfortunately, there is out-of-character bad blood between the players, and it all boils up in a steaming cauldron of gore on that fateful night…

For most of “Gold”, I had very mixed feelings. In terms of production values and “flash”, the show is very good. I admired the way that there is loud music throughout, particularly in (or slightly before) the emotional moments; I wish I had such good music in my own games, but it is hard to do moment-by-moment scoring while also rolling dice, etc. I don’t believe the old saying “All arts aspire to be music,” but music may be second best. I appreciate little touches, like the way the DM asks the players to turn off their cell phones. And there are some emotional moments — the line “You’re not the person who used to spend the night at my house… but neither am I” captures some of the complicated blend of feelings in the friendships forged during role-playing. The miniatures and gaming equipment are also convincing.

Unfortunately, there are problems with the show, and as it went on they began to grate on me. I am extremely flexible in terms of newbies making mistakes about D&D, but the script was tantalizingly — or frustratingly? — unclear on what type or edition of D&D they were playing. Based on one reference to Comeliness, they may be playing 1st edition, but references to “shifting” suggest they may be playing 4th; then again, another player dismisses 4th edition with harshly pointed words. Based on references to the Flaeness, they are in any case playing in Oerth… but it could be a homebrew Oerth… anyway, I have to give the makers a “thumbs down” for these inconsistencies. (And in what editions of D&D could four 10th-level characters handle an Ancient Undead Dragon? :/ ) These errors may have slipped in because of the other problem: the show focuses too little on D&D and too much on the out-of-character conflicts. I approve of the filmmakers stretching the definition of gaming by showing different types of gamers: instead of the bright, attractive young faces I associate with D&D, these gamers are middle-aged adults, and even jocks and football players (!). But one of the players actually throws another player down a flight of stairs IRL: is that really the way a person who roleplays a paladin would behave? (Granted, he is a fallen paladin.) Of course there are dysfunctional gaming groups in real life, in fact one of my best friends is currently being sued in a class action lawsuit for throwing dice in someone’s eye, but this focus on alcohol, violence and swearing distracted me from the real action at hand, the in-character action. One of the most important fight scenes in the game even takes place off-camera!! *_*

Clearly only the best DM in the world could bring such a group together, but sadly, Martin is not that GM. I was ready to give the series an “average” review when I got to the final episode, in which Martin does something which should be UNTHINKABLE for any DM or Gamemaster. Frankly I found the final episode offensive and I think that IRL the players would have stormed away from the table, the way I stormed away from my laptop, leaving it alone in the dorm lounge for two hours during which time it was unfortunately stolen (I am writing this from my desktop computer). “Gold” breaks new ground in the depiction of twilight-years gamers, and it is a very well-produced show, but I have to say — MARTIN IS NO GM. With the sixth episode twist, “Gold” jumps the shark and squanders what could have been a promising series.

That was the greatest GenCon ever!

As I work on new campaigns and wait for D&D 5e to come out (hastily trying to finish all my uncompleted 4e products in the meantime) /o\ , I have been thinking the question that all gamers must ask at some point: how should gamers relate to the society around them?

Unless you are lucky enough to live in Lake Geneva, Indianapolis or Seattle, chances are that you do not live in a roleplaying-friendly environment. Even when I was going to school in Glendale and playing in as many as four campaigns at once, if I asked a random person on the street “What do RPGs mean to you?” chances are they would give me some answer about facebook games. Even with recent advances in the acceptance of roleplaying, D&D is still being described as “human lunacy” and stars like Viggo Mortensen, afraid of being outed, still rush to deny the slightest rumor that they are gamers. Gamers in most of America live in a roleplaying desert, a gaming vacuum. Gamers who want to play RPGs during their lunch hour, for instance, may face the hostility of their coworkers; I even know a group of gamers who played in the restroom for fear of being seen. :(

IMHO, social opportunity is essential for the psychological well being of a person. Speaking as a DM, I am always looking for a bigger gaming group (email me if you live in Escondido!!! theodudek at gmail !!). What opportunities does the non-gamer society provide? When American men get together, they usually talk about baseball, football, women and interest rates, while drinking beer and wine. These things may not generate interest in a roleplayer. He may feel isolated and alone among them. Of course, a gamer who roleplays online may meet other gamers easily. But what about traditional table top roleplay? What about LARPing? What about the personal touch, that Mark Rein*Hagen said was 1,000x more important than the cold, clammy touch of lead miniatures and computer screens??

The answer, I think, is: don’t be ashamed. Don’t be overwhelmed, and remember your mission: the conversion of people to gamers so you have more people to roleplay with! Be proud of your gaming, and soon you’ll have new PCs popping up where you least expect it. Here are some suggestions:

* leave gaming materials on your desk, in your dorm lounge, etc. If you are worried about the expense, make photocopies or printouts.
* choose RPG-specific email addresses, nicknames, cubicle names, team names, etc. “Green Dragon Design Team” is much more enticing than “Mobile Team #2″, and maybe someone will ask about green dragons, giving you an opening to talk about breath weapons, etc.
* When someone asks you a question about something non-gaming-related, turn it towards gaming! Often people don’t realize just how much they have in common with roleplayers. “Flipping” houses can be interpreted as a sort of fantasy treasure acquisition or dungeon crawl. Fantasy sports are an easy gateway to gaming; come to a fantasy football meeting and bring a new, made-up player instead of using the statistics provided by the group, or, actually roleplay a specific player instead of a team manager! Remember: anything can be a RPG!
* bring polyhedral dice with you and roll them occasionally. It’s not necessary to actually have an aleactoric lifestyle, like the hero of the 1971 nonfiction study The Dice Man, but if you make people familiar with the instruments of gaming, the rest may follow. (Players of diceless RPGs may instead write on character sheets, etc.)
* Never be ashamed of who you are. Wear the noble name of roleplaying with pride and dignity, even in the face of ridicule, slander and persecution.

The challenges we face are surely less than those that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson faced! The grassroots of gaming have now grown all across America, and it’s just a question of making them grow, like vegepygmies. Like Richard O’Brien wrote, “Don’t dream it… be it.” Don’t be discouraged and start your RPG campaign today!!

While I was playing the Battlestar Galactica board game the other day (in a brief break from DMing ^^ ), I realized:

Wizards needs to make a D&D-branded version of the Battlestar Galactica game.

Hear me out. Battlestar Galactica is, after all, basically just an expanded and science fiction (“SyFy”) branded version of Shadows Over Camelot, so you could just as easily say “Wizards needs to make a D&D-branded version of Shadows Over Camelot.” What I mean is, D&D should make a boardgame which mixes the D&D tactical combat gameplay (as seen in the existing D&D beginner boardgames like Ravenloft et al) with the Galactica/Camelot “one or more players is likely going to betray the other players, and you don’t know who it is” gameplay.

How would this be done? It’s simple — alignment!! ^o^ And not simplified 4th edition alignment, but delicious, oldschool 3rd-edition-and-earlier alignment. The way the game would work is, the players are going on a dungeon raid, like in the Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashkardalon boardgames. They can choose certain character race/class combos, etc. But each player also has an alignment which is drawn randomly at the start of play, and there are victory rules associated with each alignment, as well as decision points (like the Crisis Cards in Battlestar Galactica) during which players have to make certain choices which may reveal their alignment choice. The players may suspect that there is an evil or chaotic person or two among their midst, based on their behavior, but that person won’t necessarily be revealed until later in the game. And yet, unlike in BSG/Camelot, there isn’t necessarily a *single* evil side, the evil players may just be out for themselves and (if there are enough players) different evil players may even end up fighting each other. Perhaps Lawful Evil players would have rules which reward the different evil players banding together, and Chaotic Evil players would only get rewarded for helping themselves, for example.

I’ve never liked the 4e alignment simplification and I think this would be a good way to reintroduce the many exciting shades of alignment to D&D. Because let’s face it: based on the success of Battlestar Galactica and Shadows Over Camelot, people *LIKE* boardgames where there is an option of doubt and treachery, rather than just shiny happy cooperation. “Should I work with these people, or should I compete against them? Can I trust my fellow party members?” So, I command Wizards, GO FORTH AND MAKE THIS GAME! I know this game must be made, and oldschool alignments reintroduced, for one simple reason: if I experience more actual role-playing while playing the Battlestar Galactica game than I do while playing D&D, something is seriously wrong. >_>

Wikipedia defines ‘high fantasy’ as being fantasy set in imaginary worlds, and ‘low fantasy’ as fantasy set in the real world (or ‘a rational and familiar fictional world’) with fantasy elements. I think this definition is misleading. A story isn’t high or low fantasy based on whether it’s set in an imaginary world; low fantasy is an attitude.

If high fantasy is The Lord of the Rings, low fantasy is Conan. High fantasy is ‘shiny’ and over-the-top and often though not always optimistic; low fantasy is about low tech settings where life is short. Larry Elmore is high fantasy; Erol Otus and John Blanche are low fantasy. Monty Python and Terry Gilliam’s Medieval stories are low fantasy, with their emphasis on mud and blood and grass and grime.

If you look at trends in MMOs over the last 12 years, they’re basically a progression to higher and higher fantasy. Ultima Online, the first major commercial MMO back in 1998, had all the visual flair of a bunch of Renaissance Faire people running around in the woods of Michigan (it didn’t even have nonhuman races!), but Everquest, which overtook it in popularity, had more dragons and orcs and stuff, and in World of Warcraft, fantasy is almost indistinguishable from superheroes.

There are still some popular fantasy franchises which are more low-fantasy than high, like the “Song of Ice and Fire” series (an important character being murdered in the privy is definitely low-fantasy). But would anyone play a lengthy RPG or spend days in a virtual world if it put them at a *worse* situation than in real life—grubbing for roots, patching worn clothes, suffering leprosy and fighting off continual hordes of goblins?

My site was down for part of the day today as I moved to Dreamhost, but now I’m back. ^^ My friend Jay did a great job with the site migration. Stay tuned soon for some D&D stuff based on my Neo-Pegana campaign, including 10 (!!!) different kinds of lizardfolk!

I hadn’t mentioned it, but earlier this summer the second volume of “that graphic novel about RPGs” — the one full of thinly veiled references to me and my gaming group — came out. (I don’t like to mention the title because I don’t want to give publicity to this author who considers my life to be OGL content.) -^- I’m always skeptical of books and movies about gaming written by non-gamers — “Game first, THEN judge!!!” is what I would say — but there are so many problems with this book, it’s hard to know where to begin. My copy is already full of yellow sticky notes, just from a first readthrough.

From the first book, it was clear that the author doesn’t really play RPGs but was just faking, and from the 2nd book it doesn’t seem like he had a late-in-life conversion. Anime/games/RPGs references are crudely scattered throughout, but they feel like insincere fanservice, as if the author had cribbed from Wikipedia, or bribed unpaid interns with Fortune Cards to make sure his lingo was accurate. When depicting tabletop RPGs he makes a confused muddle of 3.0 and 4E, and he depicts plastic minis as still being widely available, apparently unaware that production ceased earlier this year. In another scene, the author depicts a MMORPG PvP tournament being suddenly turned into a PnP RPG tournament at the last minute, as if they were interchangeable, not depicting how incredibly difficult this would have been for the DM in question. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that only the greatest DM on Earth would have been able to make a horde of angry MMO players, and the tournament organizers, accept such a substitution.

Several events which happened IRL are absent from the narrative, such as Malakbel and Moggrathka’s first PvP match in WoW (oddly, since the author seems eager to show gamers hurting gamers in other contexts), and our road trip from Escondido to Irvine. Jen, Mike, Callie and Bill, all of whom are valued members of my gaming group, are almost absent from the story, something they are surely grateful for. But a much bigger problem is the “over the top” presentation. Everything is loud, loud, loud, turned up constantly to 11. It reads like a bad Pokemon fanfic. In the author’s world, tabletop roleplaying is a barrage of loud noises, explosions and player-on-player IRL violence, as if it wasn’t exciting enough without adding a bunch of special effects. It’s like if in the movie version of Gandhi’s life, Gandhi (a pre-eminent political and ideological leader of India during the Indian independence movement) has to fight the Thuggee cult and defeat the reincarnated Kali Durga, the tentacled death mother goddess, by driving the Howrah-to-Hoogly railroad into her body. Disputed dollar figures of property damage caused by gamers keep getting trotted out in some lame attempt at ‘authenticity.’ My foldout dice sling is shown being used as a deadly weapon, instead of a nonviolent crowd dispersal device.

The truly sad thing about this is that it misses all the quiet, emotional, character-driven moments that the author could have focused on. The way that we had to bathe Shesh’s body with hand towels while he was in the middle of his WoW spree, for instance, or the many touching player-and-DM moments between the encounters, when we loved, laughed, or just looked into one another’s eyes before rolling the dice. If the author truly loved gamers, he would have shown this soft, intimate side of gaming, akin to the romantic, sympathetic way that Kio Shimoku presented otaku in “Genshiken,” or Bryan Lee O’Malley in “Megatokyo.” But instead, gaming is just grist for his “excitement mill,” which he uses to shake excitement wantonly all over the table, like Adam Sandler as the waiter at the Italian restaurant in that Saturday Night Live skit on youtube.

In short, this book is the latest in a long line of negative depictions of gamers. I only hope that, instead of causing people to flip through it and think “Bah! Gaming is lame!” and turning into hardened RPGophobes, people will at least let the word “RPGs” stick in their head and maybe, the next time they see a man on the corner playing D&D or the next time someone comes to their house asking them to make a character for their campaign, they will stop and lend them a helping hand or at least cock their head quizzically and ask them “This RPGs thing…. is this like that book?” And then, the gamers can explain what RPGs are REALLY like, and the door will be open for a dialogue between gamers and non-gamers. In that way, at least, the author may have inadvertently helped cast Knock on that formidable barrier.

“(Gilligan) grew up in Farmville, Va., a town of roughly 6,000 people, not far from Appomattox, the site of the South’s surrender in the Civil War. His father was an insurance claims adjuster, and his mother was a grade-school teacher who had a brief career as a wing walker. “Vince was an acolyte in the Catholic Church,” Gail Gilligan says, though she notes that he also played Dungeons and Dragons. “There was certainly a lot of evil in that game, but it never seemed to affect him adversely.” C.C

– From the New York Times article about Vince Gilligan, creator of “Breaking Bad”:

Over the last year there have been a lot of arguments about D&D 4th edition and what it did right or wrong. I know this article is a few years late, but here goes anyway. -_- Was 4e successful in bringing in the casual gamer, boardgaming, MMO crowd? Why did so many people rebel against 4e, even though D&D has as a huge amount of visibility, with high-profile people like the Penny Arcade guys and Stephen Colbert talking about it all the time? Is Wizards going to be able to keep the ship afloat in these turbulent times where military unrest has raised world plastic prices to the point that they can’t even keep producing miniatures? (Will they have to go back to lead? @_@ ) How well are D&D sales *REALLY* doing? ^~^

Obviously I think D&D erred by moving away from the simulationist attitude of 3e and towards a more ‘gamey’ attitude, but I respect some of the innovations in 4e, such as the much improved use of the battlefield with all the new movement effects, etc. The granting of self-healing to everyone in the form of healing surges, and the opening up of healing and healing-esque powers to non-magical classes such as the Warlord, are also good ideas. But, I agree with others who have complained about the fact that combats take too long because everything has too many hit points, and also, especially, about dissociated mechanics.

The latter is probably one of the weirdest things about 4e. Basically, in their attempt to make the classes all fit into the “four roles” and make them play similarly, it does feel like they made too many classes play the same and ended up designing powers based on “ooh, I thought of a mechanical idea we haven’t used yet” rather than “I thought of an idea which has lots of flavor and fits the concept of this class.” Of course there are many higher-level powers which are similar — do X damage to Y opponents, grant Z bonus to your allies — but it’s the at-wills and core class abilities where the differences really *should* come across, and it’s depressing when they don’t. For instance, some of the worst 4e classes, the Bard and Artificer. You’d think a bard would be able to play music all the time and have continual music-related abilities, but…. nope. You’d think an artificer would be able to have mechanical toys and minions they could unleash on the battlefield as at-wills or follow them around continuously like a beastmaster ranger, but… nope. The desire for excessive similarity and ‘game balance’ is, in the end, damaging to the game. It makes it dull. -_- You *NEED* some inbalance in the game to keep it interesting. You NEED to push against the boundaries of what’s acceptable and occasionally create something like the 3rd edition Geomancer and just trust the DMs of the world to not allow it in their campaign if it gets too ridiculously overpowered or time-consuming. (And really, some of the complicated power descriptions in 4e are just as time-consuming as any wizard spell in 3e.)

Anyway, the 4e red box/essentials materials are interesting because (1) they do make some of the classes more mechanically different again and (2) they’re obviously aimed at new players, with the low price point, larger type and the limited number of choices. (!!!) ~o~ The latter is, honestly, the #1 problem I have with Essentials. It’s one thing to have a very limited number of character options in the Red Box, since that’s a standalone game, but I was aghast to see the limited number of powers-per-level and the simplified builds in Heroes of the Forgotten Lands, Heroes of the Fallen Kingdoms and Heroes of Shadow. Does this mean the Wizards designers are simply running out of new mechanical ideas to use in their new power designs? :/ For a total newbie, it’s useful to have your powers pre-chosen for you, but I would like to think that anyone who is at the point of buying Heroes of Shadow would want more options, i.e. the delicious heavy crunch and large number of options found in the old 2008-2009 PHBs and Power sourcebooks. Basically, it’s troublesome to me to be given less powers, less text, for a sourcebook which costs roughly the same amount of money. Really, the Essentials books remind me of what I have seen of Basic D&D in the old 1980s; very good for newbies, but not really deep enough for hardcore players. I don’t know where Wizards is planning to offer those kinds of tasty options… online maybe? The question for me is “Will Wizards still produce a sort of Advanced D&D for the l33t players?” or “Will Pathfinder become Advanced D&D?” -/-

Anyway, though, regardless of what happens with Essentials — I wish them luck and wish they are able to get a new plastic or pewter hookup for the miniatures — I have been working on… SOME NEW 4E CHARACTER CLASSES!! I’m trying to create classes which are distinctly different from the others and don’t have that feeling of ‘too much like old classes’ that I got from the Bard and Artificer. I’ll post them on the site when they’re ready!

A friend of a friend pointed out that someone is making a new movie about Dungeons & Dragons, called Zero Charisma. It’s an indy project funded by Kickstarter, which I need to use to fund my new idea someday — imagine a tabletop roleplaying campaign featuring player groups around the nation, DMed by one person traveling in a bus around the country DMing games every night, like a rock band on tour going to different venues! Zero Charisma, created by Andrew Matthews, Katie Graham and Thomas Fernandes, is a movie about a 30- or 40something guy who DMs Dungeons & Dragons, and his clashes when his group is invaded by a “hipster neo-nerd” who disrupts his campaign.

This is an appealing idea with lots of human interest — a conflict between a DM and a problem player, the relationship between a DM and his players — but will it be a good movie? More importantly, will it be an accurate and respectful representation of roleplaying? After being burned many times, I am generally skeptical of movies about RPGs. Gamers have many of the same complaints about their representation in Hollywood as other minority groups, as seen in sites such as Racebending, whose very site summons up thoughts of common fantasy races such as elves and orcs. Looking at Zero Charisma, I see several errors just in the trailer:

* The players are playing 3rd edition D&D with miniatures but not using a Chessex mat, Dungeon Tiles or any form of graph paper. Are they using rulers to gauge distance, as in Warhammer? o_0?
* In the trailer video at 00:23 the main character is painting a miniature, but the miniature they show is not an unpainted mini but a prepainted D&D mini! Of course he might be touching up the mini, as they sometimes had bad paint jobs — but is this going to be commented on in the plot, or is it an actual error?
* At 00:33 the main character tells a player “Minus 2 for a half action”. A half action is not a standard D&D3.0 term. Is he referring to a move, minor or standard action, or perhaps to a multiple attack such as rapid shot? It’s difficult to tell from the context and in any case, the terminology is nonstandard.
* In the same scene, the characters appear to be rolling initiative between every round, instead of only once at the start of combat. However, this can be explained away by house-ruling.
* The normal charisma scale in D&D 3.0 actually runs from 3 to 18+. The title “Zero Charisma” is probably intended for humorous exaggeration, but it is a slight misrepresentation of the rules. In D&D1e, yes, a being with 0 charisma is hideous and repulsive, but in 3e, charisma equals force of personality, rather than mere attractiveness/comeliness. In 3.0 (which the characters in the movie appear to be playing) a 0 charisma would not mean that the character is ugly and socially awkward, but rather that they are a mere shell upon which others can force their ideas… a ‘slave race’ or a being with no willpower, like the Ood in their early appearances in the David Tennant Doctor Who.

These quibbles aside, the moviemakers (who list no RPG experience on their credits/bio pages :/ ) seem to have done at least a bit of research about D&D. But does the dungeon master need to be played by this actor in this stereotypical ‘nerdy’ style? Couldn’t the original dungeon master look cooler, and the hipster DM be correspondingly cooler still, or perhaps a different kind of hot vs. cool style to maintain the personality conflict element? When I think of potential DMs for a movie about D&D, I think of actors like Zac Efron and Justin Bieber, people with a lot of box office potential who can attract potential D&D players of both genders. Of course a small Kickstarter production may not be able to attract such high-profile actors, but actors like those (or visual kei singers) would be my ideals for the part. Perhaps Matt Smith or Crispin Glover would bring the proper sense of ‘weird, but very cool’ to the role, keeping the pun in the title “Zero Charisma” but making D&D look more exciting to the uninitiated. I will hold my judgment till I see it. ^^