Hey Rory! I heard the sky is falling!
Quick! Look outside!
Oh no! the sky is gone!
Paul, did you actually look out the window?
No, I just went to weather.com.
Archive for the ‘legacy D&D’ Category
Rory and Paul on D&D Essentials
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010Mazes and Monsters retro-clone 2: actual gameplay
Monday, July 26th, 2010(As I mentioned in part I, I’m reverse engineering the rules to the RPG from the Tom Hanks blockbuster Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters.)
Here’s the first scene where we see a Mazes and Monsters game being played! And, as we’d expect in this film, which is so steeped in RPG rules that it is practically a Mazes and Monsters manual, we can get a lot of rules information from just the first frame of this scene.
First of all, we can see that this game is played on a board. (I think? It could also be just an awesome coffee table that happens to have a dungeon-like pattern.) Second, we see that there are candles. Lots and lots of candles. Finally, we see what looks like a GM’s screen, shaped like a sweet castle!
Notable for their absence: dice. None of the players have any dice sitting in front of them. What kind of game is this? What do the players stack when they are bored? The only possible answer is NOTHING, because IN MAZES AND MONSTERS YOU DO NOT GET BORED!!!
If anyone had any lingering doubts about Mazes and Monsters being an entirely separate game from D&D, those doubts should be dispelled. Most editions of D&D have some sentence that is a variation on the following: All you need to play this game is a few friends, this book, dice — and imagination!
Imagine that sentence as it would appear in the Mazes and Monsters rulebook:
All you need to play this game is at least three friends, this book, NO dice, a board (or possibly a coffee table), and some personal problems you want to work out. Hundreds of candles are optional but highly recommended.
OK, let’s get to some dialogue!
(more…)
Mazes and Monsters: retro clone
Monday, July 19th, 2010There have been a lot of open-source old-school game clones: OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, etc, letting people legally produce content compatible with older games. One game that has been sadly neglected is Mazes and Monsters
It’s been suggested that there never was a M&M game – that the Mazes and Monsters movie is an excoriating criticism of a fictionalized version of D&D. If so, it is a dismal failure, because as we can see from the movie, MAZES AND MONSTERS IS NOTHING LIKE DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS. Therefore, unless we are to assume that Rona Jaffe and everyone involved in the movie are total idiots who didn’t bother to do the most trivial speck of research, we must assume that the movie is an excoriating criticism of a real game called Mazes and Monsters that I have just never heard of.
Rulebooks of Mazes and Monsters are hard to come by; luckily Rona Jaffe’s movie contains a wealth of gaming detail – enough, I think, to make a workable retro-clone. I volunteer to watch the movie and glean any rules details. The M&M community will have to help fill in any rules gaps with memories and speculation!
My first question for the community: Since the name “Mazes and Monsters” is undoubtedly under copyright, what should we call our retro clone? The suggestions that come to my mind are
- Mazes and Hanksters
- Mazes and MOSRIC
- Rona Jaffe’s Dungeons and Dragons
Vote or leave suggestions in the comments!
Let’s start watching the movie!
Media Uproar
He sounds a little like Howard Cosell.
REPORTER: Mazes and Monsters is a fantasy role-playing game in which players create imaginary characters. These characters are then plunged into a fantasy world of imagined terrors. The point of the game is to amass a fortune without being killed. It’s kind of a psychodrama, you might say, where these people deal with problems in their lives by acting them out.
This is good stuff! Let’s use it for page 1 of our game!
(more…)
gafiation
Friday, July 16th, 2010Here’s a piece of vocabulary from Hartley Patterson’s 1977 article in White Dwarf:
Discussing a dead RPG group, he says “They actually got a couple of moves in before handing over to Geoff Corker, who suffered a sudden and total gafiation and killed the game stone dead.”
I’d never seen the word “gafiation” before. Looking it up, I found the term GAFIA:
Frodo gafiating from the Fellowship
GAFIA (along with derived form such as gafiate and gafiation) is a term used in science fiction fandom. It began as an acronym for “Getting Away From It All”, and initially referred to escaping from the mundane world via fanac. However, its meaning was soon reversed, and thereafter it referred to getting away from fandom and fannish doings. When fans say they’re gafiating, it means they intend to put some distance between themselves and fandom. This can be either a temporary or a long-term separation.
RPG history: Midgard
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
Issue 1 of the Strategic Review (1975) contains an interesting ad: “POSTAL DUNGEONS & DRAGONS VARIANT, a game which combines D&D and MIDGARD will be handled through the magazine, FANTASIA. To obtain full details, write: FANTASIA, Jim Lawson, …”
I just noticed this for the first time yesterday, and wondered, what was “MIDGARD,” which was compatible in some way with D&D? Was it a 70’s RPG I had somehow never heard about? or was it just a D&D campaign set in a Viking world?
Strategic Review 6, in its ‘zine review column, Triumphs and Tragedies, has this to say about the Fantasia magazine:
FANTASIA TODAY is a “magazine of postal fantasy gaming.” It seems to be based on a massive game, using revised “Midgard” rules. The price varies with the size, so get in touch with Jim Lawson, … Vol. I, No. 6, had an excellent article on herbs and magic, complete with sketches of each herb. The printing, though, which runs from fair to poor, relegates it to the status of MINOR TRIUMPH.
I’d never heard of a 70s Midgard RPG, but then again, I’m not exactly a grognard. I got into D&D in the late 80’s: anything before AD&D and the Red Box is ancient history to me. But, as you’d expect from someone who is drawn to pseudo-medieval fantasy, I like ancient history. Just as mountain peaks gain majesty with distance, so do nerds (even putting aside any majesty-reducing hygiene issues).
(more…)
gaming with the bullies
Friday, July 9th, 2010The first D&D game I ever played was in my 5th grade classroom, right before summer vacation, when our teacher had basically given up and let us do what we want. Everyone – nerds, jocks, bullies – was united in their obsession with D&D. (It was the 80s.) The DM was one of the Bullies.
“You walk into a room,” he said to one of the jocks, whose fighter was on point duty. “Where do you walk, the middle of the room, or the sides of the room?”
Most of us didn’t really know the character generation rules, so we’d all given our characters 18 in every stat. The jock had brought his beloved character sheet from home. His fighter had a 13 intelligence, so we called him “Stupid.”
“I’ll walk in the middle of the room,” said Stupid.
(more…)
Wealth by level in BECMI D&D
Thursday, May 13th, 2010From the Basic D&D Companion set (1984):
When designing adventures to fit the needs of the characters, you don’t need to guess the proper amount of treasure to place; a bit of simple math will help. Use 125,000 XP as the average needed per level. If you want a group of 4 characters, all level 12-25, to advance 1 level after completing 5 successful adventures, then they will need a total of 500,000 XP to do so. They should earn about 1/5 of it (100,000) by defeating monsters and another 1/8 (62,500) by reaching their goal and performance; subtracting that, the remaining 337,500 must be from treasure. Divide that by the number of adventures (5) and you find that each adventure should bring them 55,000 gp-if they play well.
In both 1e and basic, the vast majority of XP comes from treasure. It’s mentioned in the Basic Red Book and again here: 2/3 or more of XP is from treasure. So almost by definition, an adventurer of level X has earned Y amount of money.
Still, this “wealth by adventure” advice from the Companion set, published a year before Unearthed Arcana, is reminiscent of the 3e “wealth-by-level” calculations. The reason for the advice, though, is far different. In 3e (and 4e), you need to have a certain amount of money to make sure your magical gear isn’t over- or underpowered for your level. In Basic, a massive amount of cash doesn’t make you overpowered for your level – it makes you higher level. These “wealth by adventure” guidelines are for pacing.
Basic D&D decided that one level should be 5 “adventures” long. In contrast, 4e says that one level should be 10 encounters long. I know what an “encounter” is, but I wonder how long an “adventure” is? One prepublished module? One dungeon location? One quest? I’d imagine there’s a lot of variation in exactly how much fighting there is in a single “adventure”; a game session with, say, 3 battles might count, as might a 20-encounter clearing of a dungeon. Therefore, since treasure is doled out by adventure, you could say that the vast majority (80%) of XP in the Basic game is “quest XP”: it’s given to you based on how many objectives you’ve solved, not the difficulty in doing so nor in how many enemies you killed along the way.
Cumulative Chance
Sunday, February 28th, 2010If you want to see a hilarious list of bad things that happen to a D&D character, look through the 1e DMG for the word “cumulative”. Gary invented the peculiar mechanic, which as far as I know wasn’t widely imitated in other editions and games, of the “cumulative chance”. If something had a 1% cumulative chance of happening, there was a 1% chance the first time, 2% the second, 3% the third, etc. The cumulative chance was invariably used for calculating the odds of something terrible happening to a PC.
It seems logical to have a bad event become more likely the more times you do something stupid, but “cumulative chance” is strange because normal chance is already cumulative. If there’s a regular old 1% chance of a bad outcome of an action, and you do it 50 times, your odds of triggering the outcome are reasonably close to 50%. (Actually 40%.) If you have a 10% chance of the event, it takes between 5 and 6 times to bring you to 50%.
Cumulative chances accelerate the process in a startling way. A cumulative 1% chance has a 50% chance of having triggered after only 11 uses; a cumulative 10% chance after 3 uses. Cumulative chances give you a pretty good chance to survive a handful of repetitions of a dangerous activity: then, WHAM! Brutal punishment is almost inevitable. Of course, all this is tracked secretly by the referee: the PC’s only clue is the fact that the DM makes a note and maybe gets a pokerface every time he uses the Horn of Blasting. Typical arbitrary cruelty that makes old-school gaming so hilarious.
For your enjoyment, here are some of the appearances of the cumulative chance mechanic from the 1e DMG:
-There always exists a chance of discovery, no matter how simple the mission. The base chance to be discovered is a cumulative 1% per day of time spent spying, subject to a maximum of 10%, minus the level of the spy. Even if the latter brings chance of discovery to a negative percentage, there is always a 1% chance.
[This one is peculiar: seems like a lot of calculation for something that is happening offscreen, and a good argument to hire a level-9 spy. And never shell out extra for a level-10 spy.]-If continually provoked and irritated in order to get a response, there is a 1% cumulative chance per round that the insane individual will react with homicidal mania.
