Mock-Artistry

Sometimes you spend your design-time dreaming up marvelous settings, compelling characters, wide open vistas of mapping, devious traps and abstruse puzzles.

At other times you spend it farting around on MS Word trying to create a personalized Character Sheet.

Click to enlarge

Here is the latest iteration of something that took entirely too much time. 

I am by no stretch what would pass as an artist or designer, yet, like the aftermath of an IKEA furniture debacle, I find myself strangely pleased with the result.

I’ve seen and used many sorts of sheet over the years, knowing they can range from the overstuffed 4-page affair to the most elementary notepad scribbles. I find the modern ones unbearably neat and efficient, rather unlike this ransom-note collage.

Given that I want a campaign with character, it follows that the sheet a player is to be best acquainted with should provide a window projecting into just such a world, tangibly evoking something of its aesthetic qualities.

My own headspace, as regards the visual, is very much brimming with images that conjure two names: Steven Jackson and Ian Livingstone. To them, my heartfelt thanks for they are originally responsible for setting me down this path. I don’t know if they did any of the illustration work, but I’ll be sure to check it out in the near future.

It so happening that “Fighting Fantasy” is for me one of the definitive visual aesthetic influences when I think of D&D, I hope with this sheet, and others that should follow, to transmit to players these jolts of nostalgia that are for me an important part of the RPG experience.

It is a fifth edition character sheet, so not exactly system-agnostic, but I at least feel confident saying something can be whipped-up for pretty much any version of the game.

Critique is most welcome, both functionally and aesthetically speaking.

Old School?

Before getting my sleeves all rolled-up in here, let’s get one basic thing out of the way: Refereeing Ethos.

Tail a’wag & salivating, thus spake the war hounds: “Edition-war time!?”

Nay, my bannermen of ruin, no shots fired from my end of the peninsula. As concerns RPGs, I’m both too liberal and too agnostic to embark on that children’s crusade. Let me explain that I began playing with 4th edition, which to many isn’t even proper D&D and that, I would concede, is something of a nadir of RPG design in general, but a perfectly serviceable tactical combat game in its own right. One that I enjoyed heartily, for all of its many faults.

I inscribe my gaming ethos firmly in the old school camp (or, at least, our contemporary perception of what that must have been), but I find that has precious little – though I wouldn’t go so far as to say “nothing” - to do with which edition one is actually abetting. To me it is a matter of how the running of the game is approached.

I, personally, am fine with THAC0, descending AC, Race-as-Class and Save vs. Breath. My player-base? Not so much.

They belong with the crowd of “I’ve purchased every single edition of D&D since 3rd hit the shelf, and I’ll only play the most recent one”.

To which I’ve replied “fuck that noise”, and more than once too. It’s how I got to know that people weren’t too thrilled about having their characters die, not levelling precisely once every three sessions, not having the gold and xp from a slain chimera’s pubic lice equally distributed to the farthing and, above all, a deep-seated resistance to the conceit that the game should be in any way demanding, thought-provoking or, well... interesting.

In the guise of interlude, allow me the good grace to cop-out like a motherfucker and aknowledge that everyone’s mileage varies; I think I shall do this precisely this one time, just so I have a reference to point to whenever I put up with bullshit whose raison d’être hinges on accusing me of never having said anything of this sort.

Now, appreciate that given I’m on the metric system, I don’t even do mileage.

Let that shallow metaphor sink in for a bit as you contemplate the dearth of shits I have to give about narrative storygaming, playing “for fun”, and folks who play _any_ rpg by the book.

This is something that I forgot to mention in the previous post, that the approach I intend to take, no matter how old-hat and dogmatic in your neck of the internet woods, is locally new, different and unheard of, such that in casual conversation with one of the oldest running local rpg’ers, I was astonished to discover that, to him, the notion of experience for treasure was /completely/ unheard of.

Can this approach become, more than just novelty, actually relevant, impactful and vital? That’s what I’m aiming to find, through engaging in some cultural subversion on an unsuspecting microcosmos and braving the consequences. 

Spoiler alert: people don’t usually take well to change and tend to reject it out of hand. I don’t expect things to proceed smoothly and a bumpy ride is pretty much a given.

But then I wasn’t all that popular to begin with…

A Referee-facing Blog

I’ll start with a crude aphorism:

“It’s not a good rpg blog that’s not a self-serving rpg blog”.

All of the ones I follow hew to this blueprint and revolutionary that I wish I could claim to be (I can’t), this is definitely not the crack where I would plant my dynamite.

This whole ordeal got out from under my fingers due to an all-consuming fact: I’ve got games that I wish to start, and I need a place to vent my spleen thoughts such that I can take a step back from the work when it threatens to consume me as well as to indulge in some flapping of the jaw without actually talking to people that constitute one’s would-be player base.

Nothing mines progress more swiftly than wasting time yapping about all the cool shit that’s gonna go down right once we clear just one more river bend… 

Trust me, it never comes; or if it comes it´s guised in the round shape of pear well dipped in disappointment sauce.

So, aiming low, scoring midrung & how to feel good about it?

Not really. Settling for lowest common denominator is what landed me in dubious campaigns, seated alongside social tag-alongs, casual die-tossers and idlers with nothing better to do on a friday evening. Fellows who, despite being perfectly upstanding folk, simply had no business sitting at a gaming table.

Let me be perfectly clear: if you’re trading away one of your weekend evenings of  nocturnal conviviality, it had better well be for some rip-roaring chunk of good gaming. Lukewarm shit-parades plumbed straight from the mines of Cliché’nya belong in but one room of the house, and I already go there frequently enough that I could map it in graph paper, there’s frankly no need to double dip.

So, let me /try/ to be upfront about what this blog is to be about:

- Conceptual innovations in refereeing, otherwise known as: 

1) throw enough shit at the wall that would have a zoo-monkey taking notes. 

2) see what sticks.

- World building.

I don’t fancy myself much of a world-builder but there’s always room for improvement and I do like to engage in some speculative musings from time to time.

- Actual play reports, emphasis on the referee’s perspective.

This means no war stories. It’s either for games that I’m running (Obsidian Portal is far too corporate for my ass*) or participating in. I wish to focus on reporting what worked, what didn’t and my dumb guess as to why. My skewed life experience informs me that failure tales trade highly in both learning value and Schadenfrëude.

- DMing advice.

I’m but an amateur. So is everyone else.

- Random bullshit rants.

Not that I desire to indulge in this, mind you; more because I recognize that, when you have a soap-box, ocasional ranting ends up being a cost of doing business.

- Improving my writing.

I know, the lot of you are right now thinking “you just keep on tackling the base of that cliff, bub”. And you know what? I couldn’t gainsay you if I wanted. Wish me luck, is all.

*Show me up in the comments that blogger is owned by a megacorp, I promise to have the cookie jar handy.

First Post

Welcome one and all to my little brain-tap venture, this vanishing point of escapism you are now reading.

This self-deprecating lark is aimed at organizing my thoughts, laying down structure for games, try to nurture them into blossoming campaigns and getting some discussion going within gaming groups I'm involved with. Sparking some interchange with the thinking heads of the medium ought to be a welcome bonus.

I'm a neophyte DM who got hooked on the game unwittingly after spending years deriding it. So there, joke's already on me to begin with.

RPGs as bread, too much sarcasm for its own good as butter and no politics. These are the things I can promise. Come watch me fail gloriously.