Theo Dudek, Ultimate Game Master

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. ^^

I recently started DMing Maid: The Roleplaying Game, the first ever translated Japanese TRPG. The same people were originally planning to translate Tenra Bansho, a samurai-esque sci-fi/fantasy high-drama RPG, but instead they went for a game about maids, which I think pretty much expresses how anime and manga fandom has changed in the last decade.

Maid RPG is an anime-style (optionally) romantic comedy RPG in which the players play maids and/or the master of the house which employs them. This has become a very common anime comedy trope, easily surpassing the “wacky high school hijinks” formula seen in the old 1980s American RPG Teenagers from Outer Space. The nice thing about a maids-and-master situation, relative to a high school scenario, is that is provides a much firmer structure for the game. In TFOS or Big Eyes, Small Mouth the characters are just free to goof off randomly, but in Maid the goofing-off is constrained (barely) by the need of the maids to keep the Favor of the master or get fired and kicked out of the house (the equivalent of dying). To earn the master’s Favor, the maids must spend time trying to please him, take baths with him, cook him nourishing meals, argue over who gets to change his clothes, etc. They don’t *have* to, but if they don’t, they won’t get any XP… I mean Favor.

In short, the nice thing about Maid RPG is that it formalizes the dominant-submissive nature of tabletop role-playing. However, despite what some TRPG-ignorant reviewers in the anime community have written, the GM doesn’t *only* play the master; in fact, in larger games a player may play the master, and the GM may just play side characters and so forth. Still, the master and the maids are linchpins of the game. Basically, you gain Favor (which, since it can be spent to reduce Stress, is a bit like XP and HP combined) by pleasing the Master, since “your powers come from your role as a maid.” However, using the optional Seduction rules, players may seduce one another; allowing the seducer to grant Favor to the seducee (but the seducee has to do whatever the seducer wants). The designers do comment on the potential squick factor and warn players to try to keep it at a PG or PG-13 level. Another concern that some players have expressed to me is that the game might get ‘creepy’ or ‘sexist’ if it has a male GM and nothing but female players. I solved this by roleplaying a female master, however.

The game is very random. It happily acknowledges the interchangeability of most anime & manga moe characters by forcing players to randomly roll up their characters, from their Maid Type (Pure, Heroic, Boyish, Lolita, Sexy, etc.) to their hair and eye color to their Special Qualities (which can be anything from “hair that comes down over one eye” to “actually being a monster/fairy/undead creature/etc.”) This is a silly game of quick reversals and madness, so there isn’t much effort at ‘balance’, but everyone has some sort of power. All rolls are handled with just a few six-sided dice. If you want even more randomness, you can randomly roll for items and costumes that show up (there’s a major cosplay element — but maids lose some of their powers when out of uniform!), for the statistics of the Mansion, for the statistics of the Master, even for Random Events. In fact, at any time in the game, maids may spend 1D6 Favor to trigger a Random Event from one of several Random Event tables! Most of the Random Events in the book are really extreme and can derail any plot (a UFO lands, etc.), so the GM is encouraged to make up their own Random Event tables for specific scenarios. The Random Events table can also serve as a way for players to describe their own events, for GMs who like a more cooperative attitude towards GMing. o_0

I myself have come up with a few Maid house-rules:

MY MAID RPG HOUSE-RULES
* Starting Spirit = 5xWill instead of 10xWill. In my test games, the characters rarely took enough Stress to have a full-scale Stress Explosion, so this rule should make characters more vulnerable to freaking out… and more in need of the Master’s favor! ^^
* Random Events: The characters can still spend 1D6 Favor to create a Random Event, BUT it must be a Random Event which is something ‘mundane’ and disruptive within the household (i.e. the stove explodes, the dog runs through the house, the laundry is ruined) OR something which is tied in to their character (either they or the GM can choose what exactly). Alternately, the characters can spend 2D6 Favor to roll on the Random Events chart. I make this suggestion because the Random Events chart is so incredibly crazy and disruptive that it might be better if its use is limited. Also, this encourages the players to develop their characters in the form of Random Events, something many players are otherwise timid to do. It might be a good idea to write up a Mundane Random Events chart. In any case, Random Events, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the character, must ALWAYS cause chaos to the household, thus incurring the Master’s disfavor… that’s the risk you run!

Maid reminds me a bit of another game I like, The Dying Earth, in that both games assume that the role of the player-characters is to cause chaos. The rules provide a way to channel that chaos and keep it under control, by Temptations and Persuasion in Dying Earth, and by Favor and Stress in Maid. In my experience, going wild is exactly what most players like to do while gaming, so I enjoy Maid for the chance to take that wildness and encourage it and strap it down in maid uniform ^o^ I can’t wait to play with Shesh!

“Old Jerusalem is a medieval city, not an adorably restored medieval city like Heidelberg, but a real one where you can smell the medieval sanitation and smack your head on the dirty, low medieval ceilings. The fortress-fronted, time-soiled limestone houses are built all over each other. The boulevards are steep, twisting, littered and as wide as a donkey. Some streets are roofed in stone; most have steps cut in the pavement, and they seem more like staircases in a crypt than city avenues. Lamps are few. Signposts date from the Ottoman Empire. Each shadow holds some sinister passage or dwarfish portcullis. The place is the original for every game of Dungeons and Dragons.”
– P.J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell (2000)

Apparently, according to a friend of mine who knows some people in Japan, the mangaka group CLAMP are fans of tabletop RPGss. Unfortunately, I haven’t found direct evidence for this in any of their manga (unless you suggest that since Cardcaptor Sakura is about Tarot cards, it’s gaming-related @_@ ) but apparently they used to play RPGs together in the ’90s when they were a young manga group. Could this have anything to do with the RPG-themed manga “Magic Knight Rayearth,” which seems more based on 8-bit console RPGs but might also have a bit of a tabletop theme? Now I wish I had gone to Anime Expo in 2006 to ask them about it…