And This is the Alignment I Usually Play

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article2.asp?x=dnd/dx20001222x

Thanks to Yax at Dungeon Mastering

Freaks and Geeks

I finally got the chance to watch the complete first - and sadly only - season of Freaks and Geeks. In the third installment of reviews of things I think are excellent in every way, I offer this sadly defunct television show. It is now available in a DVD boxed set, and I recommend it very highly.

The basic premise of the show centers around one primary family in the early 1980s. The younger brother in the family is the 'geek', so to speak, while the older sister is just beginning to rebel and do stereotypical teenager stuff. I suppose she's the 'freak'. Each moves in their social stratum at the same high school, one of junior and senior burnouts and rebels and the other of freshmen geeks and social outcasts. The two groups intermingle as stories unfold, and all of the characters develop and change over time in sometimes very surprising ways. As the show progresses, you learn more about each of the other people in their lives, and things remain interesting.

This show does a lot of things that almost no shows do anymore. One of them is to be persistently understated. On TV, most shows seem to be trying desperately to present every vapid teenage dilemma in epic terms, as if it was actually somehow of tremendous importance whether absurdly attractive teen #1 breaks up with absurdly attractive teen #2, both played by thirty-year-olds. This show never tries to break out of the scale of story that it has allotted itself.

That being said, you get a lot more genuine emotional connection with the characters in this show - I think for the specific reason that everything happens in such a believable way. There aren't a lot of over-the-top absurd comedic scenes that I am starting to find so trite now. When its funny, its funny in exactly the way that my life is funny, or your life is funny. When it is sad, its sad on that scale. When there are surprises, or uncomfortable scenes, they exist on a very believable level.

The skill behind the show is best demonstrated by this understatement, I think. Periodically the fact that you're watching a television show almost disappears. It documents without the usual tropes of a documentary. It entertains without the usual melodramatic crap presented as entertainment. Its simple without being stupid. Its funny without being slapstick or raunchy.

In some ways, it was a relief not to be watching a show that seems to be working to overwhelm you with every scene. After going through a lot of episodes of shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica recently (the first I like and the second I love), that's a welcome respite.

A second major thing that this show does is it demonstrates a lot of honesty. Issues like drug addiction and sex and even being born with ambiguous genitalia are all handled in the show without turning into MTV Real Life or an infomercial. The characters respond to difficult situations in believable ways while still surprising you. The characters are also allowed to make mistakes, and they make many of them. Things aren't resolved at the end of each episode - well, not too much. This was for television after all. But you get to watch characters you like and identify with make sometimes serious mistakes with their lives. Other times, they surprise you by doing the right thing. Just like real people.

I heard about this show a lot and I'm really glad I finally watched it. Its yet another show that got canceled, as far as I can tell, for being excellent. That's just the punishment you get I suppose when you artfully tell a good story.

A final amazing show that this show avoids - working the expected 80s tropes for laughs. Of course there's significant nostalgia factor in a show like this, but this show is set in the 80s like The Lord of the Rings was set in Middle Earth. You're there. Its convincing. There are no little nods or asides when the kids are playing Space Invaders on their new Atari or when someone listens to a cassette tape. It isn't That 70s Show at all. They even get a lot of touchstones right. When the kids are at lunch, they're drinking from those plastic barrel thingies with colored fluid in them. When they play D&D, they are using the crappy plastic dice that actually came with the game. (They even reference the art in the Deities and Demigods supplement! Sigh...) Watching relatively closely, they really get most of these details exactly right as far as I can tell.

And thank the freakin' Jesus, its not reality TV. Crap like The Apprentice or American Idol, Flavor of Love or Moment of Truth make me want to put a gun in my mouth. And not just for the taste either.

Descent: The Road to Legend Review

I just got a chance to play two consecutive sessions of the new Descent expansion, The Road to Legend. What the expansion does is allow campaign play with the Descent game, which before this expansion was a one-off game. In The Road to Legend, you select a character as usual, but the character persists and develops over time. You earn experience instead of Conquest points and spend the experience and gold that you find to upgrade your character's abilities and attributes.

The expansion also adds an overland map which connects a number of dungeons and other kinds of outdoor encounters (yes, random encounters!) with an overall strategic element to the game as you move from city to city and try to keep them from being conquered by the Overlord and his (in our case) Lieutenants. There are rules for the cities to be placed under siege and conquered, and once they are conquered, the players cannot make use of any of their resources, including the Market, a Temple and an Alchemist.

In each city there is also a Tavern where you can spend some gold to hear a rumor. The rumor is a special one-off quest that modifies one of the dungeons and adds a new story element.

A game that previously got a 5 out of 5 continues to amaze. What sealed the deal for me was that the game comes with full-color cardboard boxes to hold your character's miniature, skill and ability-cards, attribute bonuses, gold coins and cards that represent party upgrades.

I don't want this review to get tedious, considering how long my last one was, but suffice to say, if you are spending money on Descent, the basic set or any of its expansions, it is money well spent. Once again, this game gets a 5 out of 5. Knocked out of the park. With The Road to Legend, Descent officially does everything that Dungeons and Dragons does, but it does it better.

My Secret Game Design Agenda

Sometimes I wonder whether I really am, or should be, a game designer. Mostly this is because its difficult as hell writing a game from scratch while also going to graduate school and working multiple jobs (even though they're easy jobs for the most part). But there is also something behind that.

I don't really have many even semi-original ideas. Most of what I'm writing and doing is in response to things I don't like about other games. If there was an audience for hacks of existing games, I would do that in many cases.

For example, there are some "new" things about Parsec - that is, a few things that aren't just lifted from other systems, as so many elements of any given game are. But some of what is in Parsec is driven by what I don't like about Burning Wheel, or about Shadowrun. In some cases, I have systems in a game that are, in my mind, almost comments on other games, saying "this is how I would do it".

I'm working on Horror! because I've only had one horror RPG session actually scare me, and that was mostly due to the skill of the person running it and the very high buy-in the players had. Ostensibly, we were playing Kult, but we were using modified World of Darkness rules from Vampire 3rd edition and adding a lot of elements of Mind's Eye Theater, as well as a lot of excellent set-up by the storyteller. So what we're trying to do with Horror! is to make a game that actually scares us, rather than, say, Call of Cthulhu, which generally grosses me out at most.

I love running Mage games (Ascension, not Awakening as much), but when I do I have pages of house rules. I essentially re-worked the entire 'magick' system to get rid of the many, many loopholes and exploits that are in it, to give some of the Spheres a more defined identity and function, to make Paradox and Quiet and Resonance and Marauders more interesting and coherent, and so on. When you get down to it, its a different game. But not different enough to actually be another game. Its a Mage hack, and that's all.

To a lesser or greater degree, I've been working on Epic Dawn for years. The original impetus behind it was two friends of mine and I realizing that the magic systems in epic fantasy games out there sucked. They didn't make any sense - and they weren't anywhere near as interesting or well-developed as real-world occult beliefs. They were absurd and arbitrary in most cases, with the possible exception of Ars Magica, and in that case the game has a lot of setting specificity that is limiting. So we started creating an epic fantasy game from the magic system outward, with a few little nuances like making it a game set in a fantastic Bronze Age Egypt/Mesopotamia rather than the massively overdone European Middle Ages. This began in 2002, and I still haven't found a fantasy RPG that has a satisfactory magic system. For the most part, they're still pretty atrocious. Of course, I can't talk, because Epic Dawn isn't done, and may never be done, so I'll have nothing to back up my claims.

I have to keep in mind that I can't just take other ideas and tweak them. That isn't enough. On the other hand, every game system steals rampantly from other systems, meaning they're all derivative of something else. Turtles all the way down. So I can still design games, and have my little commentaries hidden in there too, I hope. The idea, I suppose, is to make it so they're not so obvious.

Go Play Descent

A couple days ago I got to play the boardgame Descent for the first time. The first impression it gives is of being a huge boardgame. The box is enormous and is packed with interesting stuff. The production values are superb in all cases - this is a well-made, complex, crunchy game.

The heart of the game is a dungeon that the Overlord constructs on the table. The Overlord is in charge of the dungeon, and it is the Overlord's job to kill the player-characters. The Overlord does this by spending Threat as the game progresses, using Threat as a currency to purchase traps and monsters as well as special abilities for himself. For example, during the course of the game, our Overlord would do things like spend 18 Threat to add one Power Die to the attack roll of his monsters (more on that), or spend 20 Threat to change the game rules so that every time we opened a treasure chest, he got 5 more Threat.

We had four player-characters for the game. We got to choose from an enormous stack of player-characters in three general categories: Melee, Ranged and Magic, each category corresponding to the main way you deal damage with that character. In our game, we had one Melee (a half-orc), one Missile (an elven ranger-type), one Magic (a human-looking person) and one hybrid, my character, who was part Melee and part Magic (an elf dervish). Each player-character card has its own stats and abilities listed out, and you also select a number of abilities from different decks - a Melee deck, Missile deck and Magic deck. As the game progresses, you can also improve your hero's stats and buy new abilities.

The purpose of going into the dungeon, of course, is the treasure, and Descent has treasure cards in heaps, categorized as Copper, Silver and Gold treasure. I can vouch that Gold treasure is very powerful and very satisfying to use on monsters the Overlord throws at you. Speaking of which, each monster has its own heavy plastic mini, quite detailed and up to Fantasy Flight's usual standard of quality. The game comes with piles of minis to start, and each expansion has even more minis - probably for not much more than an equivalent number of WotC minis; but with Descent, you get a whole lot more for your money than just cool little monsters (which are perfectly sized, by the way, to use with other D20 games).

A lot of things in the game are represented with high-quality full-color (everything in the game is both, basically) cardboard markers - hearts for health (had us thinking of Zelda), gold sweat-drops for fatigue points, squares for conditions (like Poisoned, Stunned, On Fire, etc.) and for increased character stats, images for potions and so on. All of these just get stacked on your character card or around your character on the table so everything is always very clear. All of the book-keeping takes place using these tokens, making everything quicker and easier.

Descent also has a special set of dice, customized for the game. Each face has a lot of information in many cases. There are basic dice that tell you whether you hit - a red one for melee, a blue one for ranged and a white one for magic. There's a 1 in 6 chance you'll miss with each. Then there are yellow dice, which are often rolled to add range inrements, and green dice, which more often add damage. Finally, black power dice add range, damage and surges depending on which side you get.

Damage is measured in a number of small hearts on the side of a die -the most I saw was three. Surges are little lightening bolts that function like action points - they increase your abilities when they come up on the dice, boosting attacks and doing other cool things depending on your skills. Range just comes up as numbers, from 0 to 3 I believe, and those numbers tell you how far away a target can be that you hit with the attack.

Once you're in the dungeon with your characters, you have a lot of options. You have three basic kinds of moves that you declare when your turn starts - an Advance, which means you move and then attack, a Battle maneuver, which means you attack twice, and a Run, which is a double move. You can also assign what are in effect special held actions. You can Guard, which means you can interrupt the Overlord's turn to attack anything that comes in range. You can Dodge, which lets you force the Overlord to reroll any dice you want him or her to when they're attacking you (this is one of my favorite abilities in the whole game). You can Rest, which lets you recover all of your fatigue. There is a fourth option that I frankly forget, unfortunately.

In short, I'm going to give the game 5 out of 5 stars. Yes, that's right, 5. The game is very well-designed, very well-balanced, very well-made and nice to look at, high-quality in its construction, crunchy and detailed but still pretty simple to teach (not quite as hard as D20, but with at least as many fun crunchy bits), and does exactly what it sets out to do. It puts you through a dungeon-crawl that is basically as good as dungeon-crawls get. Frankly, for all of the variables and fiddly-bits, the game went very smoothly. Designing it was a daunting task, which Fantasy Flight has accomplished with gusto. This game just kept impressing me from beginning to end.

If you want to run a dungeon-crawl, play this game. If you want to run a board-game that has loads of fun details and is also competitive between players and Overlord, play this game. If you like good-looking stuff with miniatures and fighting and tactics, ditto.

I would also say that this game could be a great way to introduce someone who already gets board games to a D20 style game. It can be a hybrid, and there's as much chance to roleplay as there is in your average D&D game - that is, the rules don't help you do it, but the setting and situation encourage it.

The only person I wouldn't recommend this game to is someone who doesn't want anything more complicated than Settlers of Catan. If you want a simple game, play chess.

From the Man Himself

Taken from a GameSpy interview with Gary:

GameSpy: Last question. I hope this doesn't sound morbid, but what would you like to have written on your tombstone? How do you want the world to remember you?

Gygax: I was gonna say, "Better here than Philadelphia," but I think somebody already did that. [Laughs] I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else.

RIP Gary Gygax

I'll write more on this in the future, but I felt I had to acknowledge it in some way right when I found out. He died earlier today. Whatever you think of Dungeons and Dragons and Gygax himself, he is a major reason why we all have the hobby that we love.

Its ironic that he's best known for Dungeons and Dragons, of course, but the first Gary Gygax game I ever played, the first RPG I ever played and ran period, was Dangerous Journeys, which almost no one has ever heard of. But for about two or three years, that was the game I ran for my friends every weekend we could. Only later did I come into contact with D&D, specifically through the Dragonlance books and modules at first, and then like everyone else I started my own settings, stories and rules hacks.

I hope he died content. I think he did. He seemed like someone who had found what he was meant to do in life and did it all the time. Even with failing health, he ran a weekly D&D game as recently as January, or so I read.

Its sad that the first time I go to GenCon will be the first GenCon without him there.