This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone…

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Also, your character could die during character generation. Or so I am told.

As fortune would have it, I’ve read a number of (non-Dungeons & Dragons) novels lately that have contained clever references to D&D. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is chock full of them. Lev Grossman’s The Magicians has a good number as well. Nerd references are the cool thing these days. But The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians, has officially one-upped it with an even more nerdy RPG reference in the name of an online mental-health support group one of the protagonists joins:

…the support group really was pretty dandy. It was something special. It was founded by a woman who’d worked successively at Apple, and then Microsoft, and then Google…. before she rolled neurochemical snake eyes and a bout of clinical depression knocked her out of the sky…. So she retired early and started Free Trader Beowulf.

Free Trader Beowulf—you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it.

It would’ve been even better if Grossman had not let on that it was an RPG reference, so that people like me could feel all superior for noticing it. It’s a shout-out to Traveller, a classic sci-fi RPG first published in the 70s. (It’s still around.)

If D&D references have become commonplace, then a Traveller reference is at least kicking it up a notch. Mark my words, next year it’s going to be Tékumel and Tunnels and Trolls references. You read it here first!

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Why Are Gary Gygax’s D&D Modules Still Unavailable?

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The cover of "Keep on the Borderlands," perhaps the most famous and influential roleplaying adventure ever published.

Next month, Wizards of the Coast is reprinting the 1st edition AD&D core rulebooks, with some of the proceeds to benefit the Gygax Memorial Fund. (And if you missed it, yesterday was the fourth anniversary of Gygax’s death.)

I’m really glad they’re bringing back, even if just for a limited print run, some vintage D&D books. But as cool as that is, it also reminds me how crazy it is that almost all of Gary Gygax’s most famous and influential work is out of print. Long out of print.

In addition to the assorted early edition D&D rulebooks, Gygax authored some of the most influential, fondly-remembered, imaginative adventures and campaigns: The Keep on the Borderlands, Tomb of Horrors, The Temple of Elemental Evil, the “Against the Giants” trilogy, and oh, about a bazillion others.

All of those are gathering figurative dust in Wizards of the Coast’s basement someplace, instead of being available to gamers or civilians who want to delve into the history of the roleplaying hobby. From a gaming perspective, the craziness of keeping the hobby’s greatest hits out of circulation for decades is obvious. And from a non-gaming perspective, it’s odd that, given Gygax’s influence on pop culture and the attention his death received by mainstream news outlets, none of his defining works are available. As anyone who’s read or played those old modules will tell you, Gygax’s voice and writing style are incredibly unique; it was in these adventures and campaign modules that his quirks as a creator and visionary were truly apparent. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that there’s real literary value in keeping his early D&D works available.

More Gygaxian awesomeness in "The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth."

Low-quality scans of most of these works were available as (legally purchasable) PDFs for a while, but were yanked offline by Wizards of the Coast a few years back for reasons that, uh, I suppose made sense to somebody. And you can grab a lot of them used from the usual suspects online, but prices for some of them have skyrocketed. (And I have to imagine that most Gygax modules still out there for sale are tattered, bescribbled, Mountain Dew-stained relics you’d be afraid to actually open, lest they crumble into Cheeto-flecked dust.)

The limited reprint of the AD&D rulebooks is a promising sign, as are the promises that the upcoming 5th edition of D&D will somehow bridge gaps between the various editions of the game. And maybe if the AD&D reprints sell well, we’ll see an anthology of Gygax’s greatest adventure modules follow. With the rising popularity of ebooks and the maturation of print-on-demand technology, there are many ways a creative publisher (I’m assuming it’s Wizards of the Coast, but Gygax Games might or might not have some say in the matter) could make Gygax’s work available to modern readers without a massive financial commitment. Here’s hoping.

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The voice behind the filing cabinet

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Here’s a fascinating series of posts documenting the experience of playing D&D with Mike Mornard, AKA “Old Geezer,” who himself once played at Gary Gygax’s game table in the earliest days of D&D. There are all sorts of interesting anecdotes about how Gygax played D&D. For example, here’s a story that sounds almost too awesome to be true:

Mike gave a fascinating account of a typical early D&D game, with a peculiar detail that I’d never heard before. Gary never used maps or minis: maps and minis were Dave Arneson’s thing. Gary ran games in his office, which was provided with chairs, a couch, and file cabinets. While playing, Gary would open the drawers of the file cabinet and sit behind them so that the players COULD NOT SEE HIM. They only experienced the Dungeon Master as a disembodied voice.

It’s too perfect—the idea of playing D&D while the gamemaster hunches unseen behind a filing cabinet making his pronouncements like a low-budget Wizard of Oz. The account goes on to describe such experiences as tense and almost fearful for the players:

During games, cross-talk was discouraged: the party caller did most of the talking, and other players only talked if they had something to contribute. If the players chattered too much, they’d miss what the Disembodied Voice was saying, and that would be, as Mike put it, “suicide”. “You could feel the tension in the room,” he added.

When Wizards of the Coast reprints the original AD&D rulebooks this April, I’m hoping to run an old-school game or two to celebrate. But I don’t think I’m willing to haul the filing cabinet into the gameroom just so I can hide behind it while GMing, as tempting as it is.

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That’s impossible! Oh, wait, never mind.

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There must be a specialized term (hopefully a ten-syllable German one) to refer to this phenomenon of video gaming:

You spend hours trying in vain to get past a difficult spot in a video game, dying and reloading countless times, and finally quit in frustration—swearing by the Implementors that the game is simply impossible and the game’s creators are sadists.

Then, a few days or months later, you fire up the game again and get past the difficult spot on your first try.

This used to happen to me all the time with Infocom games back in The Day. It happened so frequently that, upon encountering an excruciatingly difficult spot in a game, I’d purposely take a week/month off, knowing that when I did return, the solution would seem trivially easy.

And it doesn’t just happen with insanely difficult Infocom games. Just this week, playing an action shooty game, I got stuck in a battle of such ludicrous difficulty that I actually wondered if it was mathematically possible for the player to survive. I died at least a dozen times before calling it quits. And the next day, I fired it up and breezed through it instantly, easily, on the first try.

I know it’s happened to you too.

So, what do we call it when that happens?

P.S. You want to know one gaming puzzle for which this did not happen? That abominable Royal Puzzle maze in Zork 3. Somebody’s going to burn in the afterlife for that one.

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F.E.A.R. of a flashlight

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Been a while, eh? I bet you’re interested in what video games I’ve been playing. Well, you’ve talked me into it.

In my spare time, I’ve been playing through an old—and it pains me to use that adjective to describe a game released in 2005, which seems like it was just yesterday—first-person shooter called F.E.A.R. (with the periods; it’s an abbreviation for something). F.E.A.R. combines the venerable first-person shooter genre with the J-horror “scary long-haired girl” genre. So it’s like The Grudge, if Sarah Michelle Gellar had an AR-15 and was being constantly attacked by evil clone troopers.

It could be worse. You could be working for N.E.R.V.O.U.S.

It’s a neat game; it’s kinda scary, and the gun battles are fun in a way that I hope real-life gun battles are not. But one thing really stands out as meriting comment: the Flashlight.

You see, much of the game takes place in creepy, poorly-lit environments from which scary stuff is frequently jumping out at you. In some areas the lighting is so dim (or non-existent) that you cannot see at all. Fortunately, the game has a solution: you have been equipped with a Flashlight.

But not just any flashlight. You see, your flashlight has 20 seconds of battery life before it switches off and must be recharged, a process that takes about 5 seconds. So travelling through dark areas is a matter of racing forward while your flashlight battery drains, then standing still for a few seconds while it recharges; at which point you switch it back on and move forward for 20 more seconds.

One understands the design motive behind this gameplay device. To make sure you spend at least some of the game in the scary dark, illumination is treated as a somewhat limited resource. Doom 3, which came out a few years before F.E.A.R. and relied on a similarly shadowy environment to creep you out, did something similar and was roundly mocked for its solution: you can have your flashlight out, or you could have a weapon out, but not both at the same time. I didn’t mind this tradeoff too much as it forced some tough choices every now and then (and really, I’m OK with not being able to wield a plasma cannon in one hand a flashlight in the other); but it’s hard to argue against the typical gamer complaints: if you’re such a bad-ass space marine, why don’t you just duct-tape the flashlight to the barrel of your gun? Or hold it in your teeth like they do in Hollywood movies? Or tie it to your helmet?

Why, indeed. F.E.A.R.‘s attempt to make turning on your flashlight a tactical dilemma is even worse, though. You’re a high-tech commando employed by some awesome secret agency, and you can’t get a flashlight that lasts more than 20 seconds? That is the worst flashlight ever. Let’s be honest: my 4-year-old daughter has a plastic flashlight shaped like a bee that diffuses its quickening ray from the “bee’s” rump, and it’s a more practical flashlight than the one they give you in F.E.A.R.

Pre-order F.E.A.R. 4 from Gamestop and get the limited edition KR-31 "Killer Bee" flashlight with which you can illuminate all your foes.

It’s an interesting game design problem, though. Like most FPS games, F.E.A.R. proudly boasts an extremely detailed and realistic environment. Buildings look and are laid out like real-life buildings. Your guns behave in a way that your typical basement-dwelling game nerd would consider realistic. Bullets knock nicely detailed chunks of concrete out of walls and shatter windows; rooms fill with blinding gunsmoke after lengthy gun battles. All of the graphics and combat mechanics work overtime to be as life-like and immersive as possible.

Yet it’s also fun to force the player travel through scary areas without reliable illumination. And so in the specific case of your flashlight, the game chucks immersion to the wind and gives you a wonky lightstick that has to be “recharged” every few seconds, because that’s more fun.

You can have realistic and immersive, or you can have gamey and fun; but when both are present in the same game, it’s a big distraction.

I’m reminded of an excellent essay on the lasting appeal of the original Doom, which had infinitely less believable environments but which turned that into a virtue:

While some of Doom’s levels have a very thin fiction via their title (eg “Hangar”) and general texturing theme, if you actually explore them you find they only resemble real locations in the loosest sense possible. This is precisely what allowed Doom’s level design to present a wide variety of interesting tactical setups. Level designers didn’t have to worry about whether a change made something look less like a hangar or a barracks, just whether it was better for gameplay. This was especially critical for a style of game that was just finding its feet in 1993.

As the march of technology has allowed ever-higher graphical fidelity, virtually every FPS since Doom has attempted greater and greater representationalism with its environments. While games like System Shock began to show that a real sense of place can be a huge draw in itself, designers of such games will always have to manage the tension between compelling fiction and optimal function, unless you are willing to go all out and have the kind of weird, abstract spaces Doom has. I would love to see more modern games break with this conventional wisdom and see where it leads, if only in an indie or experimental context.

F.E.A.R. is fun and elaborately crafted. But so was Doom, and Doom didn’t feel obliged to painstakingly recreate entire office blocks. Doom threw together a minotaur maze, slapped blinking lights on the walls, and called the level “Nuclear Plant.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, my flashlight is fully recharged and I’ve got to get back to the shooting.

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One man’s trash is another man’s campaign notes: the archaeology of used games

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I never visit a used bookstore without checking its science fiction/fantasy section for used board or roleplaying games. If you’ve ever come across an amazing find in a neglected, dust-covered stack of old games at a used bookstore, you’ll agree that previously-owned games are much more fun to buy than brand-new shiny ones.

There’s something satisfying about reading and playing a game that somebody else has enjoyed. Flipping through a rulebook filled with somebody else’s signature, gameplay notes, or character sheets, you wonder: Why did they buy this game? What did they do with it? Did it entertain a group of friends for years, creating memories that they all recall fondly to this day? Or was it played once and set on the shelf to gather dust?

The used games on my bookshelf are filled with interesting artifacts of their previous owners. One of my first roleplaying purchases was previously owned—I bought the 2nd edition AD&D rulebooks from somebody who had upgraded from 1st edition but then decided that he hated the changes between editions. (He ranted as he sold me the books that the new edition was the death knell of D&D—an argument that’s trotted out to this day everytime a new D&D edition is released.)

All throughout the Player’s Handbook, whenever he came across a difficult vocabulary word, he penned in its definition above it:

Gary Gygax was the best thing to happen to my teenage vocabulary and reading comprehension.

Used boxed games are often a treasure trove of insight into their former owners. I have quite a few filled with custom character sheets and campaign notes. Here’s an example of such a character sheet from my used copy of Twilight 2000:

Meet Alexander Kaliber, no doubt a carefully balanced and realistic character. Check out that armament!

Paper-clipped to that character sheet were ten pages photocopied from a book about modern (in the 1980s) chemical warfare. I hope that was just in-game research.

You can also get a sense of how people prepared for their games. Several of my old D&D adventure modules contain map notes scribbled in by devious gamemasters. My tattered copy of The Great Old Ones for Call of Cthulhu is filled with highlighting—presumably the GM needed some help remembering important game details:

Seriously, the entire chapter is highlighted this heavily. It's headache-inducing.

And occasionally, you find something just bizarre in an old game. Last weekend, my wife treated me to a trip to the local used bookstore, where for a Father’s Day present I picked up a banged-up but mostly complete copy of the wargame 2nd Fleet. 2nd Fleet is a complicated, realistic emulation of NATO-Soviet naval warfare in the North Atlantic. So what did I find folded up and tucked guiltily into the rulebook?

Why--what were you expecting to find hidden in the rulebook for a highly-complex historical simulation?

I feel a strange compulsion to leave that keep that lurid sketch in there—at this point, it’s almost part of the game.

I can only hope that when I sell off my games, I leave a few gems hidden away in them for future gamers to discover… and feel uncomfortable about.

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Horribly overused apocalyptic-sounding words you should avoid putting in the name of your cheesy book, movie, or videogame

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I know you want your edgy, violent media product to sound suitably grim and epic. But from now on, please consider these terms off-limits:

  • Redemption
  • Prophecy
  • Legacy
  • Salvation
  • Fate
  • Dead
  • Legend
  • Trinity
  • Dark
  • Age
  • Creed
  • Tale
  • Blood
  • Doom
  • Resurrection

If that scuttles your plan to release Blood Prophecy: Legacy of Dark Redemption, here are some woefully under-utilized, kinda-religious-sounding words you might try instead:

  • Transubstantiation
  • Monophysite
  • Dispensation
  • Cloister
  • Homo(i)oúsios
  • Diffused
  • Thummim
  • Pseudo-Dionysian
  • Semipelagian
  • Hermetic
  • Exegesis
  • Ordination
  • Exhortation

Any I’ve missed, in either list?

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Won’t you think of the (fictional) children?!

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A lot of things in your life and attitude change when you become a parent. That is, of course, not exactly a brilliant insight for the ages. But I was unprepared for one minor but very definite change in myself that took place almost immediately upon the birth of our daughter three years ago: I became utterly unable to handle the sight, or even the thought, of a child’s suffering in books, movies, or the newspaper.

Before our daughter’s birth, my tastes in entertainment were pretty “mainstream American”—that is, jaded. While I didn’t enjoy the extreme end of cinematic violence, I could watch a Tarantino movie without flinching (much). I played ultra-violent video games. I approached fictional violence and death involving children the same way I approached violence and death involving adults: sometimes unpleasant, sometimes tear-jerking, but nothing that merited emotional investment beyond what the film’s (or book’s) narrative called for.

Then our wonderful, beautiful daughter was born.

I noticed the change a few months after that. My wife and I were watching an episode of The X-Files during one of those rare breaks in between infant care. In the episode, two young children—a toddler and a slightly older boy—are murdered by the villain. Nothing graphic; the deaths take place offscreen.

I can confidently say that before parenthood, this wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest, beyond establishing that the bad guy was really bad. But I was physically shaken. I wanted to turn off the episode. Afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. How impossibly cruel, to kill these fictional children! How impossibly painful for this fictional family!

Beyond being upset—something I could easily explain as anxiety about my own daughter’s safety—I felt something stronger: real anger and resentment toward the episode and its creators. On one level I was angry that the writers had successfully exploited my new emotional weakness. But I was actively angry just at the thought of somebody using the suffering and death of a child in something so tawdry as a TV show. I tried to imagine the sort of empty-souled shell of a human being that would use a child’s death (even a fictional one) as a mere plot device.

Since then, this emotional hot-button of mine has shown no signs of going away. I can’t watch or read even the mildest instance of cruelty or violence inflicted on a child without wanting to physically get up and leave… and punch the screenwriter/author. Just seeing a kid threatened with violence—say, by a villain trying to blackmail a movie’s protagonist—is enough to freak me out. The other day I actually threw a book down in anger, something I don’t think I’ve ever done before, when a character in the story cruelly hurt a child. When I read or watch such a thing, I wonder about how the fictional child’s fictional parents will ever cope; and now even when an adult is hurt or killed, I wonder if the fictional adult has fictional kids whose lives have just been ruined.

I had never really thought about how common it is to use threats against children to drive plots and increase suspense. Intellectually I don’t have a problem with that storytelling device, but these days I demand that there be a really good narrative reason for it.

I imagine this will fade a bit with time. But right now, I find myself avoiding movies, books, or video games where I even suspect a child may suffer.

I can understand why my mind has reached this point, but the suddenness and completeness of the change caught me off guard. And I should note that I don’t especially miss being jaded about this topic—it’d be nice to feel less emotional wimpy while watching movies and TV, but I’m not really interested in going back to being a person who didn’t bat an eyelash at the fictional portrayal of violence against kids.

It makes me wonder at all the other commonplace narrative setups—rape, domestic violence, murder, grief, loss of a loved one, etc.—that go right past me without registering but prey on the emotional vulnerabilities of people who’ve experienced them in real life.

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