#RPGaDAY2021 Day 28 Solo

One of the things I have never really been able to do to my own satisfaction is Solo play.

Day 28 Solo

The idea of solo play is one that does go back to the earliest days of RPGS.  For example, there are plenty of Tunnels & Trolls adventures that are for solo play.  The infamous introductory adventure with Aleena in the Mentzer version of the D&D Basic Red Box is another example.

I had a few of the Endless Quest books, but mostly I got bored with them very quickly.  I tried playing the various Zork games from Infocom (yes including "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" game.  No. I never got the Babel fish.)

Back in the 80s my High School DM and I spent a lot of time programming a BASIC (as in the computer language) AD&D combat simulator.  We could load up to 10 characters and 10 monsters (of an unlimited number on disk) to fight.  It worked out rather nicely.

There are now much better D&D experiences in terms of software that can be enjoyed as a solo player but for me they suffer from the same issue that Tunnels & Trolls did/does.  Nothing can beat the interaction of others.

I suppose if given the choice of an online game with others using just web meeting software (like Zoom) vs a really interactive video game that is as close to D&D as you can get. I'll take the online game.   Not that I don't like video games, they are just not the experience I want when I want to play an RPG. DragonAge and Skyrim feel the closest to me. 

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 27 Fraction

This one took a lot longer to write than expected, and sadly, not one I really wanted to write.

Day 27 Fraction

I love doing blog challenges, blog hops, and themed posts.  It gives me something to look forward to, something new to write about, and it lets me interact with others that I might not be interacting with or even knew before.

Sadly. I am also only getting a Fraction of the interaction here. 

My Twitter posting is way up and my interactions there have increased by about x3 to x4 in this month.  But here? Sadly crickets.

I am not sure why that is, to be honest.  I know there is a faction among the RPG bloggers that hated the April A to Z.  Again it was something I enjoyed, but I saw the drop in interactions and in daily visits. 

It is disappointing. I want to keep my regular readers happy. I also want to expand my reader base.  Interactions from both help me write more and maybe cover topics I might not otherwise cover.

So help me out here.

Do you like these social-media-wide themed months like this and the April AtoZ?

Do you like my other themed months or weeks like I did with BECMI in June 2020 or Troll Week or my week with Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft?

Let me know!

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 26 Origin

I had some ideas for Theory, but none of them really took shape.  So instead I want to talk about Origin. In particular the Origin of NIGHT SHIFT.

Day 26 Origin

Come back with me if you will all the way to 1995-1997.  I had just gotten married, moved into a new house, and was working on my first Ph.D.  Life was pretty good.

That is except on the RPG front.  I was so burned out of AD&D and D&D, approaching my 20th year of gaming with something akin to apathy really.  I had been enjoying all the things the Internet had to offer me in terms of connecting with other gamers, but the games themselves had left me a bit less than thrilled.  TSR was busy at the time going after any website or group that even mentioned "D&D" so my tastes were beginning to sour.

By 1999 I was more or less ready to give up on D&D, plus I had a kid on the way and thought that I would never get the chance to play much (hahahaha!).  Then along came C.J. Carella's WitchCraft RPG.  I have recounted that tale before, but something in that book reignited the spark that had been dying. WotC and the OGL would further fan those flames, but that is still a bit off from here.

WitchCraft was the perfect game for me.  It did everything I wanted and it did them perfectly.  That is except for the things that D&D did perfectly.  I hung out on the Eden Boards and there I met Jason Vey.  He was coming from a similar background as me; we both loved WitchCraft and old-style D&D.  But we also enjoyed a lot of new games too.   From here we worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer together.  Jason would go on to do a bunch fan-created works for both Unisystem and D&D and later d20 and then go on to work on All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Castles & Crusades.  I'd go on to do my various witch books, a lot of Unisystem conversions, and move on to working on Ghosts of Albion. 

A look over our fan-made and published works it would seem that NIGHT SHIFT was fairly inevitable. 

I recall working on a "Monster Manual" that I still have on my hard drive where I took all the creatures from the AD&D 1 Monster Manual and converted them to Unisystem.  Both Classic and Cinematic.  If you are thinking that the seeds of my current "Basic Bestiaries" also began here you would be correct.

NIGHT SHIFT began as a conversation. One according to Jason, but I recall a few different threads that came together.   The first was Jason pointing out that Level/Class builds, like in D&D, can be every bit as flexible as point-buy ones, like in Unisystem.  He was mostly talking about his own Amazing Adventures, but I was also thinking about in terms of the various OSR games.  BTW, you can do both now in NIGHT SHIFT thanks to the Night Companion.

The next conversation was the two of us talking about all these ideas we still had for various games, regardless of, or divorced from, their systems.  Eventually, we decided that we should be making this game with these ideas.

For me, the origin was one of pragmatism.  I wanted something to fit the "Buffy-shaped" hole in my life.  Not just in terms of fandom, but yes that, but also in terms of system.  The same can be said of "Ghosts of Albion."  I LOVE the work I did on both of those games and I am proud of it.  But neither game is completely "mine."  Buffy has also sorts of baggage attached to it now that people are finally seeing what a douchebag Whedon was and is.  "Ghosts" for as much as I love it will never see another printing, no supplements, no new material.

NIGHT SHIFT is my game. It is Jason's too. And as I always say, once YOU buy it then it is YOUR game too.  But it is a game I can love unconditionally and support without worry or feel like I am investing in a sunk cost. I have D&D 4th Edition for that.

If you go through NIGHT SHIFT and have been reading this blog then you will see where things in the game got their origins.  Read Jason's blogs and you will see where other things in the game got their origins as well. 

NIGHT SHIFT is a new game, but its origins go all the way back to the turn of the Millenium and before.

Don't forget NIGHT SHIFT The Night Companion is nearing its last few days.  Give us some support. If we hit the stretch goal I will give a new Night World and this will keep me out of trouble for a while.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 25 Welcome

I thought it might be nice to Welcome new readers to the NIGHT SHIFT.

Day 25 Welcome

I have picked up a few new readers so I thought it might be nice to welcome them to my blog and to my game NIGHT SHIFT.

Right now NIGHT SHIFT has a Kickstarter for the first supplement, The Night Companion.  This book adds new classes, monsters, magic, species, point-buy characters, and more.  

But what is NIGHT SHIFT?

NIGHT SHIFT is a modern supernatural/horror RPG.  The system running the game is called O.G.R.E.S., or the Oldschool Generic Roleplaying Engine System.  It is a system that should be familiar to many since it is derived from the d20 SRD in an old-school, or even OSR, fashion.  So if you played D&D in the 70s or 80s you will find a lot here that feels familiar.  But the system is only half the picture.

The genre of NIGHT SHIFT is modern supernatural horror.  Written by myself and Jason Vey, this RPG combines everything we know and have worked on over the 30+ years we each have in the RPG writing industry and 20+ each writing professionally. Games on our collective CVs include, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Army of Darkness, Night Bane, Ghosts of Albion, Amazing Adventures, Spellcraft & Swordplay, the Witch, Castles & Crusades, Ravenloft, and more. NIGHT SHIFT takes all these experiences and distills them down to what we hope is the most enjoyable RPG we have ever worked on. 

NIGHT SHIFT has a genre but no default setting. This way you can create your own world to play in.  We DO however provide you with four different "Night Worlds."  These are places to set your game in an move on from there.  These include Jason's "Veterans of the Supernatural Wars" (the closest we get to a default setting) and "The Nocturnumverse" based on his campaign of something like 20 years or more. I also provide my "Generation HEX" a world where magic has come back and it only rests in the hands of tweens and teenagers, to "Ordinary World" where everyone is some sort of supernatural creature trying to get by in a world full of humans that would rather seem them all dead.

So give our game a try.  We think you will enjoy it. 

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 24 Translate

Heading into the back end of the challenge. What do we have for today and how does it relate to NIGHT SHIFT?

Day 24 Translate

Continuing on the ideas in Simplicity and Substitute, I often try to Translate material from one game system to another for different sorts of experiences. 

In many ways, the ultimate representation of this is NIGHT SHIFT.

NIGHT SHIFT began as a way to take something my co-author Jason and I loved; the games we worked on and played back in the 1990s and early 2000s and translate it to a rule system we also loved.

The simplest way to describe NIGHT SHIFT is "Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Basic D&D rules" but that doesn't really capture all of it.

In the 1990s my game world of choice for AD&D 2nd Ed was Ravenloft. I loved the horror elements, I loved the trappings of Gothic Horror, and I loved that I could bring in characters I have been playing for years over to it.  The Masque of the Red Death Gothic Earth supplement was a dream come true since it also brought in my beloved Victorian era.   It was perfect...almost.

Near the end of the 90s I was getting really burned out on D&D.  Thankfully I had discovered C.J. Carella's WitchCraft RPG.  Here was yet another "Gothic Earth" only this time coming at from a different angle.  I loved it.  Of course, as the supplements for WitchCraft were released I thought of many ways to "translate" Ravenloft over to WitchCraft.   In a way, I got my wish and wrote Ghosts of Albion.  A horror-soaked Earth, in a Victorian setting.

Still as perfect as I think WitchCraft and Ghosts of Albion are, they still didn't give me something.  Sure it was a minor thing, but there was still something I was looking for. 

Jason did something similar.  While I went for the themes I wanted, he took the Unisystem rules found in WitchCraft and went a different direction with Dungeons & Zombies; a way to translate D&D experiences and adventures into Unisystem.  Like myself, he also had a few "fan" based products.

We really have been dancing around NIGHT SHIFT for decades.

I wanted a game where I could translate anything I have done over the last 30+ years to a single game system.  I feel NIGHT SHIFT does this.

Don't forget our Kickstarter going on right now for The Night Companion.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 23 Memory

The natural choice here is to talk about a great RPG memory.

Day 23 Memory

I will admit I have a lot of really great RPG memories.  Here are a couple of highlights.

Getting My Hands on the First Monser Manual

It seems only fair to start with my first D&D memory, and indeed my first any RPG ever memory.  The first time I held the AD&D Monster Manual was a defining moment. Here I became introduced to the game that so many of us love.  I can remember afterward riding my bike around the neighborhood thinking about it and what the game was. I had no rules yet, the copy of Holmes Basic had not made it its way to me just yet, so I could only imagine what this game could be like. 

Summers Playing D&D/AD&D

As much as I would have LOVED the connection to the world via the Internet we have today (and believe me I tried with my little TRS-80 Color Computer) I am also glad I got to spend all my summers in the 80s playing D&D.  First D&D with a group of kids from Jr. High and then and another, semi-related group, in High School with AD&D.  The cut off there was not perfect, I remember we mixed a lot of Holmes and Moldvay Basic with AD&D, but these are the broad strokes.  I can still remember fighting Liches, getting trapped in the A Series, and battling the "Queen of the Succubi" in Jr. High. Later moving on to bigger things in AD&D in High School.  Oh, there was my short live Atlantis campaign in College before moving on to Ravenloft/2nd Ed but none of those lasted as long as my misspent youth in the 80s. 

Teaching My Kids to Play

One of my greatest joys and successes in life is getting to be a dad.  Honestly every other achievement I have made and am proud of takes a back seat to this one.  So teaching my kids to play was one of my greatest joys and memories.   The look on my oldest son's face when he would hit a monster, or better yet, roll a "20" and proudly proclaim "DOUBLE DAMAGE!" or just the wacky character my youngest would come up with was pure joy.  I taught them both using D&D 3rd edition and now we all play 5e.

It has truly been fantastic. 

I also have some great memories of various Cons I have played at over the years.  The time the guy playing an Occult Poet composed an epic poem on the spot, the time my son's character plunged the Sun Sword into the Forge of Moradin to re-ignite the Sun,  the time I got to play Piper in a Charmed game.  All great memories. 

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 22 Substitute

Related to yesterday, in my desire for systems that "get out of the way" I often substitute a rule from one game for another.

Day 22 Substitute

When I write a supplement or a core rule book I assume that people are going to play it more or less as written.  At least that is, one time.  After that I make no assumptions of how someone is going to play something.  Generally speaking, I also don't play things rules as written.  I am always substituting one set of rules for another.

In Post-2000 D&D skills are much better defined than they are in previous versions.  So I find when running an older version of D&D (say AD&D or Basic-era D&D) then I find myself often asking my players for a skill check.  To make life easier for all of us I will typically use 5e style names and tell them what they need to roll.  It moves the game along faster in most respects.

I am not limited to substituting one form of D&D for another. I will also grab ideas from other games.  I will for example allow a character to use a skill that is not tied to a particular ability.  For example, in Unisystem the skills are independent of Abilities.   So the Art skill can be tied to Intelligence for knowledge of a particular bit of art. Or use it with Perception to determine if a piece of art is a fake. Or with Dexterity to create a piece of art.  In D&D 3, Knowledge is always tied to Intelligence. But sometimes I let characters tie it to Wisdom if they came upon their knowledge via practical experience instead.  

And these are just for skills.  I use the Bloodied condition from 4e for some monsters in combat.  I use the conditions from 5e in old school games, and more publically I use the 5e size modifiers in almost all my D&D games now.

In some ways, though I still prefer AD&D 2nd ed, d10 initiative roll, but 3e-5e's d20 works roughly the same way.

What rules do you like to substitute?

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 21 Simplicity

When I first started in RPGs I was all about complexity and systems that mirrored everything, these days, I am more about simplicity.

Day 21 Simplicity

There used to be big debates in RPG circles, narrativist vs. simulationist.  Gamist was thrown in there as well. You don't see that as much anymore. Well.  You do, but now the focus has shifted a bit. 

This debate has waged on in various formats, various permutations, over the decades. But in the end, the one that wins out for me is Simplicity.

I like a lot of games. I like to read and play a lot of games.  I don't like needing huge volumes of pages to explain to me how to play a game.  Sure I understand the value and the place of supplements and "Splat" books, but the core needs to be simple and complexity for complexity's sake is not a value. 

AD&D is a great game, but let's be honest. The rules are a hodge-podge of systems that are largely unrelated to each other save in a post hoc fashion. The layout of the rules is equally poor. We learned it then because it was what we had and we didn't know any better.  AD&D 2nd Ed is better organized (sort of its purpose) but there are still bolted on systems.  Honestly look no further than skills and psionics.   Also, AD&D 2nd ed loses some of the charms of AD&D 1st ed.  Is the charm in the complexity or is the charm in our memory via "Nostalgia Goggles?"  Hard to say. 

D&D 3rd Edition did a bit of a better job of this. 5th Edition does a better job still.  Still neither are at the level of say WitchCraft, Ghosts of Albion, or even Doctor Who Adventures in Time and Space.

I am not trying to imply that simpler is always better.  For example, many of the Powered by the Apocalypse games are quite simple and none of them have ever really grabbed me.  In fact, I usually find them too simple.  

But for me, I desire to remove unneeded complexity for complexity sake and keep my games and my designs a little more simple. 

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 20 Lineage

Today's alt-word has been on my mind a lot lately.  I have been wanting to talk more about it so today feels like the day. 

Day 20 Lineage

Since its inception, D&D has had race as a feature of the game.  However, since its inception race has been more or less been misused.  Really Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and Humans are different species.  Now while it is true humans can interbreed with elves and orcs I am going to stick with the notion here that they are species.  

Race, as a term, has a lot of negative connotations about it.  There is the idea of ethnic or phenotype determiners of race. There is the colonialism notion of races, and how that was used to justify all sorts of crimes against humanity for centuries.  There are even the Theosophical ideas of races which seem to be the well that D&D has drawn from.  In the end "Race" is not only not even the proper word, it is a woefully loaded word.

I like Species myself.  But you might say "but species can't interbreed!" except of course when they do.  There are sterile hybrids between species, there are even fertile ones. These range from plants to animals and even mammals.   Even in humans, there are fossils that may be human-neanderthal hybrids and many scientists think that we may have killed all the other archaic hominids or we may have bred with them until their genome was absorbed into ours.  We know from mitochondrial DNA scans that Neanderthals share more alleles with Eurasians than with sub-Saharah Africans.  

I also remember having debates in my Philosophy of Science class that species only serve the needs of scientists making taxonomic nomenclature.   

So can all the D&D Player Characters be different species? Of course. Can they interbreed? Absolutely some of them can.  But this is not really the full picture either.

Let's take the term used by the latest D&D 5e book, Lineage.  

Lineage has none of the baggage that race does. Nor does it have to overly complicated scientific logic that species does.  Lineage allows you to build what your character is.  

From Tasha's Cauldron of Everything:

At the first level you choose:

• Creature type. You are a humanoid. You determine your appearance and whether you resemble any of your kin.
• Size. You are Small or Medium (your choice).
• Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.
• Ability Score Increase. One ability score of your choice increases by 2.
• Feat. You gain one feat of your choice for which you qualify.
• Variable Trait. You gain one of the following options of your choice:
• Darkvision with a range of 60 feet.
• Proficiency in one skill of your choice.
• Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for your character.

Simple.  You can rebuild any race you want.  

Just prior to Tasha's Arcanist Press released their Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e.  A fantastic guide.  Where Tasha's uses "Lineage" this uses "Ancestry," which is in my opinion just as good.  But this product also includes "Culture" in the mix.   So what if you are a human raised by elves?  Or in the case of my own Sharis Val, a drow raised by dwarven clerics in a monastery.  It can even explain the already established differences in the three types of halflings/hobbits with fallohides/tallfellows having halfling lineage and living near elven culture.  Yeah, they are taller and the like, this is a blog post not comparative biology. 

You can also vote for Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e for the 2021 ENnies awards. It is up for:

• Best Electronic Book
• Best Supplement
• Product of the Year

Pathfinder 2nd Ed also does something with all of this too.  Their system is more mechanically oriented.

Personally, I prefer this over the systems we have been using.  

I would adapt these to Old-School play, but I am going to wait to see how Chromatic Dungeons does it first. 

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 19 Theme

Should be easy to stay on theme today.

Day 19 Theme

If my participation in the Character Creation Challenge in January, the April A to Z Challenge, and this month's #RPGaDAY Challenge, is any indication, I do love a nice theme to work with.

In my blog posts, it gives me a little extra focus and a little extra motivation.  It gives me something to look forward too and apparently, my readers agree.  My hits tend to go up during these times.

This year I am going to be doing my usual October Horror movie marathon and I am considering doing a Lovecraft film fest.  While that has some appeal and something I wanted to do for a while, but sadly many of the movies are not very good.  Not to mention I have seen most of them already.  Kinda defeats the purpose of the Horror Movie Challenge.

I will also be participating in the RPG Blog Carnival for October. The subject, naturally enough, will be Horror.   I have a few other treats for October planned as well, it is practically my holiday.

Other themes I enjoyed recently were BECMI month last year, Troll Week, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and for a deep cut, Superbabes.

I still want to do a series of Superhero posts including some different approaches to the superhero genre.  I could easily spend a month on that. 

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 18 Write

Today's word is Write. Something I do every day.

Day 18 Write

Theodore Sturgeon, the American science fiction author, once stated that "ninety percent of everything is crap."  This has been come to be known as Sturgeon's law. 

I am not sure about his quantification, but I agree with the spirit of his adage.

Once upon a time, I did not consider myself a good, or even a fair, writer.   I enjoyed doing it for myself, but I never felt I would have anything worth publishing.  But at some point, it became obvious to me that the only way to get better at it was to keep doing it.  Not just do it, but also to get feedback and use that feedback.

These days I like to think that I am much better than I was.  Am I good?  That's hard for me to tell on this side of the keyboard.  I look at things I have written and often think "Wow. That is some good stuff...but it could be better."  Even books I am really proud of, Ghosts of Albion, the first Witch book, I look back on and see things I really would like to go back and "fix."  Not that they are broken per se, just things I would have liked to have done differently.

I am not talking about game design, I am always tweaking that (my "Basic" Monster stat block is a good example), but rather wording.

Blog posts are a good place for me to practice this and to get some feedback.  So if I have over 4,730+ posts up now (with a little over two-score in draft mode) that would mean according to Sturgeon that would mean that just north of 4,200 posts here are "garbage" and only 470 or so are "good."   I would like to think the good posts are a little higher, but again I can't argue with the spirit of these numbers.

Even if over 4,200 of my posts are garbage they did serve their purpose. Sometimes that is just have something to ponder while working something out, a bit of playtest, or at the very, very least, practice writing.   And this is just the stuff you have all seen.  I have a lot, maybe even a near equal amount that has never seen the light of day and may not.  That's fine. 

This is also one of the reasons I like to participate in these sorts of challenges.  While some ideas are easy, others require a lot more thought on how they relate to me. Writer workshops often have work sessions where you are given a prompt and have to come up with something.  This is the same idea only I have a bit more of a heads up. 

Hopefully, after 14 years of doing this blog I am still getting better.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 17 Trap

Traps seem ubiquitous in D&D. But honestly, I have never cared for them. The same goes for mimics.

Day 17 Trap

Traps.  Back in the early days of D&D traps were everywhere.  Their existence was one of the early reasons for the thief class.  These days the trap finding and removing the role of the thief is somewhat lessened and for me that is fine.  Because honestly I never really cared for traps.

Sure I don't mind them in small amounts and I like to include at least one or two in a dungeon I don't like to go nuts with them.

What's "nuts?"  Tomb of Horrors always struck me as excessive.  

Back in the 80s traps were all the rage, with Grimtooth's Traps as something of the gold standard.  Back in Jr. High I got my then DM a copy of one of the Grimtooth's Traps books, Traps Too, I think. Big mistake. I got characters trapped in something he had added to the A Series, he never made it out alive.  I let my kids know this when we played the series. I suggested if they found maybe his body was still there and they could loot it!  Sadly (or luckily) they never found him and I honestly could not recall where the trap was added.

Today the traps of choice are Mimics.  

Like traps, I never used a lot of mimics. They are great once, but then after that, they lose their appeal to me.  

In a 5e game, my lack of desire for traps is no big deal. The thief/rogue class has a lot more to do than be the trap finder/trap remover.    But in my War of the Witch Queens, which is a D&D B/X game, I really should have more. 

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 16 Villain

Having a hero is great, but a hero is only as good as the villain they battle.

Day 16 Villain

Villains are great.  I have talked about villains and big bads, and all sorts of bad guys over the years. 

Who have been my favorites?

Yoln, the Shadow Reaper & Hand of Leviathan

Yoln, the bad guy so nice I used him twice.  He was a human general that rose up through the ranks to become a Pit Fiend and the general of Hell's Army in the Dragon Wars from my 1st Ed AD&D game.  He was defeated there and cast out of Hell into the Astral where he was recruited by the Mad God Leviathan where he became the big bad of my Buffy RPG campaign, the Dragon & the Phoenix.  Is he really dead now?  Who knows. He might be back someday.

But after that I decided that no big bad of central villain would work for Season of the Witch.

Cult of the Dragon

The cult that gave my first campaign with my kids so much trouble. 

Come Endless Darkness

My favorite villains though are demons.  In my interconnected Come Endless Darkness the demons are overtly the bad guys with Lolth and Grazzt giving the Order of the Platinum Dragon so much trouble.  Demogorgon is behind all the cults in the Second Campaign.  And Orcus is challenging all the characters into my Into the Nentir Vale campaign.  But all are being deceived by Asmodeus, with the help of Grazzt.  Asmodeus in turn is being deceived by Tharizdûn.  In the end, Tharizdûn hopes to reign supreme with the devils under his control and the power structure of the demons destroyed.

War of the Witch Queens

My newest campaign deals with the death of the ruling Witch High Queen and the power vacuum that creates.  The villains of this piece are Kalek and Skylla.  I talked about their involvement last year's #RPGaDAY.  I am also thrilled to see that they are getting new minis for the next D&D 5e book.  That set also includes the fan favorite, Warduke.  Maybe I should add him in for nostalgia's sake.

Looking forward to that set as well as all my players coming up against all these great villains.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 15 Supplement

Today's word has gotten me thinking about what are my favorite RPG Supplements.

Day 15 Supplement

RPG supplements are kind of an odd thing.  Some very much have the feel of "leftovers" or things that were meant for the core book but for one reason or another they didn't quite make the cut.  

Others do feel like a very nice addition to the game they are supporting.

Back in the earliest days of my gaming, I did not really see supplements as something "Extra." Indeed the marketing worked well on me I and I often saw this or that book as somehow "required" to play.  I have naturally relaxed that attitude a bit.  I have all the major hardcovers for AD&D 1st ed, but I stick mostly to the cores for AD&D 2nd Ed and D&D 3rd Ed.  4th Edition is somewhat different, but I do have a "core" I stick with. Same as Pathfinder.

The first real supplement that I ever bought was for a game I didn't get to play all that much, but the supplement was worth every penny I paid.  That would have been Chill Vampires for 1st Ed (Pacesetter) Chill.   It really changed how I played vampires in my games so much that when Ravenloft finally came around later I was already using character sheets for my main vampire villains. 

Another one that also had a huge impact on my games was Original D&D's Eldritch Wizardry.  

Demons. Druids. Psionics.  It was everything my Basic D&D game was missing that I wanted. I didn't care all of this was in AD&D, that cover and those pages just called to me. I am impressed that it is back in print. Well, Print on Demand anyway.  I hear the PoD copy is also rather nice.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 14 Safety

There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years of safety tools.  I think most people get what these are for wrong.

Day 14 Safety

Safety tools are not new in RPGs.   Anyone that has ever played a horror game over the last 40 years has encountered these once or twice. 

Back when I reviewed the new 5e Ravenloft there were a lot people whinging online about safety tools in that book. I had to point that the exact same advice had been given in Nightmares of Mine over 20 years ago.

I also ran into this back when Monte Cook Games released their Consent in Gaming free PDF.

Seriously. Is there a contingent of gamers out who have decided that it is their "Gary Given Rights" to be a bunch of dicks?  If that is what you want in your games, fine. Just don't expect me to join anytime soon.

More to the point if someone else wants these in their games...let them, and then SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT.  

You don't get to tell others how to play while simultaneously complaining that they are telling you how to play.

Since my first go at this there have been more safety tools that have come out and others that have been out for a long time that I have just become aware of.  

Personally, I am glad these things are out there. They are great for conventions because there have been too many examples of people men not having enough damn sense on how to act in public let alone around mixed groups.

Seriously. People bitching about this stuff are pretty much confirming every worse stereotype of gamers as knuckle-dragging, mouth breathing, troglodytes,  we have been trying to get over for the last few decades.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 13 Doom

It's Friday the 13th on #RPGaDAY!  Always a fun day here at the Other Side.  Let's see what the day has in store for us.

Day 13 Doom

I have to admit Doom was one of the first words that jumped out at me when I was reviewing all these words back in July.

Back in High School, we ran a set of interconnected AD&D adventures. My DM would run games that included me as a player and games that didn't, I ran games that included him and others that didn't.  All of these games and a few that bled over into my early college days came to be known to me as the Dragon Wars.  They were designed to be a huge world-ending event.  And to a degree they were.  Our individual worlds ended and what would eventually become to be known as Mystoerth to me now was born.

But I am not talking about rebirths and Mystoerths now.  Today I want to talk about the end.

I suppose in a way "Flood" also works into this since there are so many myths out there about a great flood destroying the world, only to lead to rebirth.  But my worlds were not destroyed by water, it was fire that got them.

The scope of that game was epic. I wanted a real Return of the King vibe to it and I got it.  So much so that when I did my next "world ending" series of adventures, The Dragon and the Phoenix, for the Buffy RPG I went back to ideas from the Dragon Wars to help fill out some elements for Buffy.  I even brought back Big Bad from the Dragon Wars to fight against Buffy and the Scoobies in TD&TP.  That series of adventures also ended with "No Other Troy."

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

- William Butler Yeats,
No Second Troy

These days there is no great Doom hanging over my worlds; at least not ones that will end in the world being destroyed and then reborn.  The Dragon Slayers have managed to re-ignite the sun, the Treasure Hunters are only now getting into the darkness, the Undead Hunters are learning the plans of Orcus.  While any of these could destroy the world it is not likely that it will happen now.  The Dragon Slayers already saw to that.  But I am still instilling a sense of doom in the Players and Characters.   They have to feel like the world rests on their shoulders.  In a very real sense it does, but not for the reasons they think.

Maybe it is just the games I have played over the last few decades, but a little doom hanging over the PCs is a good thing.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 12 Triumph

This one was much harder than it should have been.

Day 12 Triumph

What would I consider my greatest RPG-based triumph?

I have had some great opportunities in the RPG world.  I have had some great gaming groups over the decades, met some fantastic people and I have worked on some great projects.

But I have to admit that Ghosts of Albion is one of my greatest triumphs.

Back when Eden Studios was working on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG I was part of the team.  But I was also, for various reasons, growing dissatisfied with Buffy and the license.  In the process, I got the chance to meet and talk with Christopher Golden.  He had done some original fiction for the game and was interested in the process.  He was at the time also working with Amber Benson on a new property with the BBC.  It was about two siblings who discover they have a legacy of magic to live up to and a country to fight for in early Victorian England.  The new animation, written by Golden and Benson and directed by Benson, was Ghosts of Albion.

From the very start, we wanted it to be compatible with Buffy and Angel. It had more magic and more powerful creatures.  While Buffy had vampires and Angel had demons, Ghosts would vampires, demons, as well as fae creatures and of course ghosts. And all of these could be player characters. 

It is one of the highest-rated and best-selling titles I have ever worked on.  People still tell me how much they love the magic system, the content, and the rules.  I have to admit that sometimes I read over it and think to myself "wow, I wrote that!"

I love the Victorian era, I love writing about magic and honestly, I loved working with Chris and Amber.

I have worked on many licensed products before and this one was by far the best experience I have ever had on a game.  

Here's to hoping I can do more with NIGHT SHIFT to capture the same sort of feeling. 

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 11 Wilderness

The name of the game was Dungeons & Dragons.  So there was a certain expectation on, well, dungeons.  But that is not all of what we got.  Sometimes we went outside.

Day 11 Wilderness

Live-Action Role-Playing was not really something we knew a lot about back in the early to mid-80s.  Yes even in my little town we had heard about SCA but that was something that happened far away in places that sounded exotic to us.

We did know about live D&D. 

Of course, we had heard stories of people getting trapped in their make-believe world. I mean we had seen Mazes & Monsters right.  But still in the time after discovering D&D and before discovering easy access to alcohol there was a time when my D&D group would run around the woods wearing all black to play "live D&D."  Sometimes this was near the train tracks near the Hospital north of town but most often it was at the local Boy Scout camping area out way west of town.  Known as Ebaugh County Park, we always called it Ebaugh Corner since it was on this corner of old Route 36.

It felt a lot bigger than what is on that map I can assure you.

We didn't get out there often.  Our town was hit with Satanic Panic back in the mid-80s and we worried the cops would come out and harass us. 

Not a lot of D&D was played here really.  Frankly, my eyesight was getting bad then (and it never got better!) so running around in the dark was not something I could well.  I was actually pretty pathetic really!  I remember my last time there too.  June 1987 right before college.  

I never really did try live-action D&D again. Was never really my thing.

This has come up again recently as I am getting ready for a trip to the Renaissance Faire in Bristol, WI.  My son and his friends are all dressing up in Assassin's Creed gear. I have been there in the past in Steampunk gear.  Though I must admit I want to go in period clothing and keep a Star Trek badge hidden, just in case.

Hope to head there this weekend.  It might not be the actual wilderness, but for a city kid like me, it is close enough.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 10 Advantage

Going for another alt-word today. Plus it gives me the chance to talk about one of my favorite topics.

Day 10 Advantage

One of my favorite new mechanics with D&D 5e is the Advantage / Disadvantage ruling.  It is pretty simple really. A situation is in your favor, roll with Advantage, that is roll two d20s and keep the highest.  If a situation is against you then roll with Disadvantage; roll two d20s and take the lowest.   

It's not really revolutionary, but it is a nice quick way to adjudicate rulings and many rules use it.

Simply if you have advantage due to one condition and advantage on another one you still have only two d20s.  If you have advantage and disadvantage they cancel each other out. 

The thing that I like about it the most is the nice probability curves they generate. 

You might recall that prior to selling my soul to the dot com world I was a Statistics professor at the University of Illinois colleges of Education, then Medicine. I taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels for years.  I LOVE statistics.    

I knocked together some simple frequency graphs of rolling a d20 normally, with disadvantage, advantage, and with a simple +3.   These are chances of rolling the number (1 to 20) or higher on a d20.

The Data

The Graphs

Rolls are on the X-Axis (1 - 20) and the Probability on the Y-Axis (0.0 - 1.0).  

The red line is our normal d20 roll. Blue is disadvantage (2d20, take lowest), yellow is Advantage (2d20, take highest), finally, the green is normal +3. 

Is it much?  Not really in the short term, but over 1000s of rolls over the last 7 years the effect has added up.   And it is always a lot of fun.  Especially when you are rolling and get two 20 (a 1 in 400 chance). Fun when you are rolling with advantage, but fantastic when you are rolling with disadvantage.

I have adapted it for use in my OSR games and it works great.  

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 9 Medium

It's a Monstrous Monday and it is also Medium day for the #RPGaDAY. 

Day 9 Medium

Most of my monsters in the various Basic Bestiary are Medium-sized.  This works out well for a number of reasons, but mostly it is a boon for something I had been wanting to do for a while.

In D&D 5 monsters have different HD die types depending on their size.  It works out like this.

Table: Size Categories

Size	Space	Hit Die
Tiny	2½ by 2½ ft.	d4
Small	5 by 5 ft.	d6
Medium	5 by 5 ft.	d8
Large	10 by 10 ft.	d10
Huge	15 by 15 ft.	d12
Gargantuan	20 by 20 ft. or larger	d20

So Medium monsters use the common d8 for hit dice and the truly monstrous Gargantuan creature gets a d20.  While AD&D and Basic D&D went more for larger creatures having more HD this works for what I call the giant baby problem.  A gigantic creature can have a lot of hit points, but no combat ability, two things that HD covers. 

I also like this idea for personal reasons.  When I moved from Basic D&D to Advanced D&D I often used a d10 for monster hit points and not the RAW d8.  I figured the monsters had to be more "advanced" so they got more hp.  I also rationalized this with the fact that Basic fighters use d8 for hp, and Advanced fighters used d10.  Of course on average, this is only 1 extra point per HD, but I liked it all the same.

3e and 4e also used different die types for hit dice, but these were different for different types of monsters.  I like the 5e way of using these for size. 

You might have seen these in some of my write-ups.  The Mad Hatter Goblin is a small creature. I list it's standard HD is 2 and it's average hp from a d8 and it's Con mod is 9 +2 or 11.  As a small creature, the same 2 HD and +2 con mod gives the creature an average hp of 7 +2 or 9.   Sure not a lot of difference, but enough over the long run. 

I am presenting both sets for people that want to use my "Advanced" set of size-based hp calculations or the standard RAW ones.   I have been using this for a while now and while there might not be a significant difference in the play of the vast majority of monsters, the ones it does affect really affects them.

I hope people, especially in the OSR crowds, take to the change.