I Be Sucking At Regular Blogging Lately

There's just been a lot going on, so I've taken a brief break from blogging - as well as participating as much social media. I blog because I enjoy it, and feeling like I have to put up a post every couple of days kind of takes that enjoyment out of it. In the next few weeks I'll be getting back into my normal routine, but until then there are changes afoot.

Gotta Lot Of Catchup Questions

I kind of slacked off, so I'm doing a few days of this non-D&D blog challenge all in one shot. I'll break it up with some images so it's not too boring.

What non-D&D monster do you think is as iconic as D&D ones like hook horrors or flumphs, and why do you think so?

I would say Cthulhu, but its just iconic period and not only in relation to RPGs. If I were to take a close second, I'd say Ducks from Glorantha. They're such an odd species to have around, but anyone who reads about them remembers them.

It's hard to take any character seriously when you imagine they sound like Donald Duck

What fantasy RPG other than D&D have you enjoyed most? Why?

I'd love to say Exalted...I really would...but I've enjoyed reading the books far more than I have the times I've played it. So that honor has to go to Palladium Fantasy (1st edition). We played the hell out of in high school as our first non-D&D fantasy game, and I have a lot of good memories of it. Unfortunately, in the late 1990s we had a nostalgia kick and I picked up the second edition...and we didn't enjoy it nearly so much. It was partly because of changes made to the system to make it compatible with Rifts and partly - well, fuck, it was just the system.

Yeah, the kobold looks whimsical now...

What spy RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

If we're going for only "spy" rpgs, I'd have to say 007. We played some Top Secret as well, but I really had fun playing 007. I don't remember a thing about the system though, or my character, other than his agent number was the one that always dies in the movies (006 maybe?).

What superhero RPG have you enjoyed most? Why?

I've not played many superhero rpgs, mainly because it's not my forte. I've played Champions a handful of times and didn't enjoy it much, but before that we played a lot of Marvel Superheroes in junior high and had a blast. It was my first introduction to adjective-based attribute descriptions (I still remember one of the levels for Intelligence...Feeble maybe...had the text "Has trouble with doors"). One of my best friends in junior high was way more into comic books than I was, and having him as a player in the game helped tremendously. I used to scour his Marvel Universe books for characters, and still remember all kinds of details even though I've never read the comics.

No one was surprised when I took an interest in VisiCalc 

What science fiction RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

In some ways, science fiction RPGs have traditionally been more in my wheelhouse than fantasy games. It's really a toss-up between CP2020 and Mekton, both of which we played a lot. I've run so many different games using Mekton, and we had Cyberpunk games that lasted for years. 

For some reason I always think the one on the left has an afro.

What post-apocalyptic RPG have you enjoyed mot? Why?

Tribe 8 which should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog or my posts. Why? Because of this:

He has such a jaunty little hat...

When NPCs Lie

This is an interesting article on research into using natural language for NPCs in video games, specifically things like trade, gossip, and lying (which unfortunately is hardly mentioned, even if it's in the article's title). This subject has always intrigued me, because of this phenomenon I've noticed among players:

Players nearly always believe the NPCs. As a corollary, when they do decide to distrust an NPC, it's nearly always the one they should be trusting

It leads to some very interesting developments, for sure, as an NPC can spout off nearly any sort of complete nonsense and the players will follow it right into a trap or worse. I'm not sure exactly what causes it but I suspect part of it is something I've also observed as a player:

GMs who never have their NPCs lie

Once a player comes to expect that NPCs will always be truthful, they're completely unprepared when they're not, and often skew the other direction by never trusting an NPC again.

It's possible that my experience is atypical and most GMs portray believable NPCs who don't exist only to infodump on the players. I mean, one of the most cliched pieces of advice ever for GMs is to give NPCs personality. Right? Right?

But just in case my experience is one of the more common, the article points out some great things about interactions with NPCs - namely, that NPCs who gossip and can use that relatively meaningless talk to make determinations about how much they trust the PC (or not). It doesn't mean that unimportant (or even important) NPCs should be full of all kinds of deep conversation. Quite the opposite, actually. Time to drag out those old rumor and gossip tables and let the NPCs just say some random shit mixed in with the crucial bits the PCs need to hear.

What other old school game should have become as big as D&D but didn’t? Why do you think so?

Day 5 of the non-D&D blog challenge

This is a loaded question, because I think it has a lot more to do with who was first out of the starting gate than anything else. Any game that amassed the following that D&D had, was a reasonably decent game, would have made it and crowded out the other contenders. D&D was the one that would become as big as D&D in that case. It set the stage for what was expected of a role playing game - had it been a Pride and Prejudice inspired game, we'd have a hobby with very different priorities than we have today.

With that being said, given society and culture at the time I'd think it would have to be another fantasy-type rpg that would have become as big - and I'd put my finger on Runequest over any of the other contenders such as Tekumel. Runequest was accessible, had its own style, and could have easily become as popular as D&D became.

What other roleplaying author besides Gygax impressed you with their writing?

Day 4 of the non-D&D Blog Challenge

Gygax never impressed me with his writing...it just never clicked. So I guess my answer is, "Quite a few".

Since I'm not really part of the OSR community, nor do I play OSR games, I don't know how much of a pedestal Gygax is put up on. I acknowledge that he is, for all practical intent and purpose, the father of the roleplaying hobby. I was starstruck in the way that only a teenage nerd can be when I met him at a convention in the late '80s. But my experience sitting down with Mike Pondsmith for something like 45 minutes at a convention was a much greater influence on me. The authors who have impressed me is a long list and growing, and include - in no particular order - Kenneth Hite, Robin D. Laws, Fred Hicks, Josh Mosqueira, Marc Vezina, Greg Stafford, Steve Perrin, Sandy Petersen, Cam Banks, David Pulver, S. John Ross, and many, many more.

In what system was the first character you played in an RPG other than D&D?

This is for Day 2 and Day 3 of the non-D&D Blog Challenge, since I got nothing done yesterday.

In what system was the first character you played in an RPG other than D&D? How was playing it different from playing a D&D character?
This is kind of hard for me to remember. I DM'd a lot in the early days, and didn't get a chance to play much. There are two candidates though, both of which were probably about the same time (late junior high/early high school). My parents had friends who would often watch me when they needed a sitter, including when they took trips that I didn't go on. They had a daughter who was quite a bit older than me, and she had a boyfriend who played rpgs. He was really big into the 007 rpg, and I played a short campaign with him one summer. He also bootstrapped me into grokking Traveller, and I remember running a few sessions for him. There was also a guy who was a grade or two older than I who lived in our neighborhood, and I played Call of Cthulhu with him. So it was either 007 or Call of Cthulhu. How playing the character was different...I couldn't tell you. I remember the CoC character more than the 007 character. I created the character with the intent that he would be unhinged. It was, perhaps, my first brush with intentionally doing something that might harm my character (SAN loss from reading tomes and going toe-to-toe with Mythos creatures). He eventually went completely mad and I lost him as a PC, but for that brief time he was a M1911 in one hand, spellbook in the other type investigator.

Kinda like this.

Which game had the least or most enjoyable character generation?
Mekton II had the most enjoyable character creation, because of the novelty of the Lifepath. It was one of the few games where I would create a character just to roll on the Lifepath tables. A close runner-up would be Traveller, for the same reasons. Having the mini-game include uncertainty made it fun. For least enjoyable, I gotta say Hero. I spent three days making a character for a Hero game once and I think I came away from the experience with less of an understanding of the process.

What was the first roleplaying game other than D&D you played?

So, I just found out about the non-D&D March blog challenge. This one might be quite a bit more relevant to me.

The first rpg that I played other than D&D was Star Frontiers. Technically it was the third rpg I owned, since I was given the Traveller boxed set shortly before I got my hands on Star Frontiers. This was back when you could get rpgs at Toys 'R Us, which is likely where I got mine. Oddly enough at the same time there was a Sears Outlet close by my parent's house that also had rpgs - I remember seeing Universe and Lords of Creation there at one point - so it may have come from there.

It was the Eighties...this was considered exciting

I grew up on a cul-de-sac with a handful of kids that had lived there their entire lives. My parents moved in just after the condominiums were built, and I was young enough to not remember the previous place we lived. All of our families knew one another, and I had made my best friend when I was five years old - Richie - who was also the one that I taught D&D to.

Then there was Melissa Broadway. Her and her dad were relative newcomers to the neighborhood. I don't think the sisters that lived next door, Missy and Heidi, liked her very much. But I was in love with Melissa from the first time I saw her. She was lanky and tomboyish, with dark hair, and we got into all kinds of trouble together. We played action figures, she played a game called "kingdom" with Richie and I where we each had a "kingdom" with borders and a ruler and an army, we got into dirt clod fights at the construction sites nearby, heck I think I even played dolls and "house" with her. We also played Star Frontiers.

I remember playing it with just her and also with Richie, but I can't quite remember the characters. I want to say that Richie's character was a dralasite, while Melissa had a Yazarian. I know that we played through the published modules - while I created and stocked a lot of dungeons for D&D, Star Frontiers was off the beaten path enough that I never considered creating my own adventures for it. Because of that, Melissa moving away a year or two later, and starting to get into Traveller, we stopped playing Star Frontiers once we go through the published modules.