There is no post today, because WordPress crashed and ate it and I decided sleep was more important than re-writing a post which I wasn’t really all that happy with in the first place. Instead, here is a video Loading Ready Run put out last week, which I found pretty amusing!
Bill Amend just tweeted this. I guess it’s a student film from Denmark or something. It’s also a perfect encapsulation, in my mind, of what a D&D campaign ought to be. Seeking gold and glory, and having a grand adventure along the way. Excelsior!
The Reward from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo.
I have no idea why I can’t center video by the way. Sorry about that. Also, is anyone else reminded of Torin’s Passage while watching this?
This requires some explanation.
Much as I’d love to devote all of my attention to creative endeavors, I, like most other college dropouts turned artist, have a day job. Not the worst one in the world, but one that I find to be largely menial and uninteresting. Part of this job involves spending a lot of time in a warehouse, alone. I don’t mind the solitude–and in fact I quite like it. It allows me time to think which I might not otherwise find on a busy day. Many of the posts here on Papers and Pencils were conceived while talking to myself as I herd boxes.
Earlier this month, as I often do, I was alternating between humming and singing. This particular day, I was humming my favorite Christmas song: Good King Wenceslaus. It’s a great song which a lot of people, surprisingly, have never heard. Unfortunately, I only knew the first verse of the song, and I wasn’t even sure I had all the words to that right. So at my first opportunity, I printed a copy of the lyrics off the Internet, and began to teach myself the song.
Since committing the entire song to memory, I’ve sung it a lot. A lot. I’ve been telling people that my girlfriend is visiting her parents for Christmas right now, but in truth she said she needed to get away from my constant recitation of that damned song. And as with anything, if you repeat it enough, it starts to sound weird. About a week ago, the way I sang the first line; “Good king Wenceslaus looked down,” placed an unusual amount of emphasis on the “Good.” Doing so made it sound as though this was the good King Wenceslaus. As opposed to the not good one.
The idea tickled my fancy. On the spot I began to compose “Bad King Wenceslaus.”
You may wish to turn back now.
I’m going to warn you: a girl I liked once told me I had a nice singing voice. And despite the fact that no one who wasn’t trying to get into my pants has ever agreed with her, I still have a completely unjustified confidence in my singing ability. Flee while you can.
Paizocon 2012 was the first convention I ever got around to attending. As such, I may not be entirely aware of the proper etiquette involved. However, my understanding is that I am now expected to write a ‘Con Report,’ detailing my activities during the event, along with any thoughts I have regarding the quality of the con.
So be it.
I currently reside in a little town called Auburn, Washington. There is little of value to be found here, which makes the town’s motto of “More Than You Imagined” depressingly ironic. The best thing I can say about Auburn is that it isn’t too far away from the really cool parts of my home state. Ya know…like Seattle. Paizocon was held a little further North than that, but still within easy driving distance. As such, the cost of attending the con ended at the price of the ticket for me. No airfare, no hotel room. That was really nice.
The night before, my ladyfriend and I printed out all of the events we were interested in attending, and put them onto a schedule. We then cut a few based on conflicts, or because there was no way we were going to wait around for 4 hours for something we were only mildly interested in. We discovered that there was really nothing we wanted to do on Sunday, so we decided to limit our attendance to Friday and Saturday.
We arrived quite early on Friday, and were given some toys by the convention staff. Posters, a map pack, a novel, and even a miniature! I’ve been told that this is a custom called ‘swag.’ I found it rather odd that I paid $40 to gain entry to the convention, only to immediately be handed perhaps $20-$40 worth of merchandise. But I have no complaints! I can only hope this entry in the Pathfinder Tales series of novels is a significant improvement over the others I’ve read.
We still had a great deal of time before our first seminar, so we wandered into the dealer’s room. Here I gleefully filled in the gaps in my Order of the Stick book collection by picking up On the Origin of PCs, No Cure for the Paladin Blues, and War & XPs. I also had a brief conversation about skills with a representative from Louis Porter Jr. Design, which I briefly discussed in an earlier post. I can’t say I was too impressed with the Neoexodus setting he was hyping (it sounded like a very generic attempt at ‘non generic fantasy.’) but I was intrigued by two of the other sourcebooks he had available, “Dangers & Discoveries” and “Debatable Actions,” both of which I purchased. Long time readers may recall that I am in search of an improved social resolution mechanic, and hope to perhaps glean some ideas from the latter of the two books.
Following this I briefly attended a sort of round-robin discussion group titled “Game Mastering 101.” It was focused on Pathfinder Society play, and I left after the second discussion group failed to offer anything of interest. Instead I sat in a hallway making notes for upcoming posts until it was time for the first workshop Morrie and I really wanted to attend: “Gaming Terrain: Working with Styrofoam. “
This is a hobby I’ve been interested in for a long while. Despite the fact that I’ve always felt reservations about the use of miniature figures, the prospect of crafting landscapes and environments is enthralling to me for some reason. Recently my ladyfriend learned about this craft, and became pretty excited herself! She spent the last month buying tools and materials, setting up a crafting table, and working on her first few tentative projects. Like this one pictured to the left.
Sean K. Reynolds (one of Pathfinder’s developers) ran the seminar, and we probably learned more from him in an hour than we had learned from the several dozens YouTube videos we’ve been watching. I was particularly happy to learn about hot wire foam cutting tools, which we were able to try out ourselves. I also didn’t know that nailpolish remover melts a crater into the foam, though I don’t know how much of an application that has.
After the foam workshop was over, we were allowed to sit in on a second terrain workshop. This one focused on plaster. I’d never actually heard of this before, and it was fascinating to watch. It seems as though the molds are not difficult to acquire, and the results looked fantastic. I have no doubt I’ll be looking into this, and posting about it, more in the future.
Following this there was a seminar on freelancing which I wanted to attend, but during the two terrain crafting workshops we had made friends with another couple in attendance. We instead opted to have a nice lunch with them, wherein we discussed gaming groups, RPG mechanics, and stories of heroism (or lack thereof).
Once we had finished eating and parted ways, I was able to sneak into the last 45 minutes of ‘Everything You Didn’t Need to Know about the RPG Industry,’ which I must say I’m still somewhat confused by. This was the description of the seminar online:
“What was the dress code at TSR? What was playtesting like for 2E? Why did Gary make that table? All this & less will be revealed at our sekrit panel seminar! Expect nothing & be pleasantly surprised.”
I suppose I broke the rules by expecting something. But based on the description, I thought it would be a lighthearted bit of goofiness where some experienced industry professionals told amusing stories. And maybe I missed something in the first 15 minutes, but really the whole thing was just about maps. How much they can affect a game world, and how important it is for freelancers to include nice maps with their modules. And based on the large number of map samples they had on hand, it was obviously something they had planned to talk about.
On Saturday we again arrived early in the day, this time with the intent of finding a place to eat breakfast, since we had been unable to eat at home. To our delight, we found that there was a huge farmer’s market being run only a few yards from the buildings the convention was being held in. Thanks to this, all of our meals on Saturday were absolutely delicious treats prepared masterfully by some very talented cooks. Being the fat nerd that I am, I particularly liked the fresh banquettes which were stuffed with Italian sausage and bell peppers.
A few more vendors had set up since early Friday morning, so we again visited the dealers room. I picked up copies of The Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design, as well as The Complete Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, both of which have been on my list of things to purchase for a long while now. They gave me a free set of dice with my purchase, and I was able to spend several minutes talking to the Kobold Quarterly staff about their submission policies.
I also snagged “Zombiepocalypse Now” and “Thrusts of Justice,” two choose your own adventure books aimed at adults, both written by Matt Youngmark. I haven’t had a chance to dive into these myself yet, but I’m curious to see if it was handled well.
At 10am I made my way to the first seminar I was attending that day, which focused on how to create a homebrewed game world. Amusingly the panel was largely made up of Kobold Quarterly staff, one of whom I had been chatting with only a few minutes before. There was some very solid information presented here, particularly with regards to how magic items and religion can be used in a home brew game world.
Immediately after that was a panel on the art of Pathfinder. Not being an artist myself, I don’t really have a lot to say about this. It was very interesting, but we largely attended for Morrie’s sake, as art is a hobby of hers. Unfortunately much of the discussion focused on art as a profession, which didn’t really help either of us out. Though I did find it extremely amusing that one of the artists on the panel said they were a biologist by training, artist by trade. My ladyfriend is currently training in a lot of biology classes, but insists art will never be anything but a hobby. I prodded her in the ribs a few times when he said that.
Reaper Miniatures had a table set up out in the hallway where anyone could come up and paint their own miniature for free. This is something I’ve been wanting to attempt for awhile now, but I’ve always been a little bit nervous about ruining my nice pewter minis. I’m thankful I was able to make my first attempt with a free, plastic miniature. I’m sure my second attempt won’t be much better, but at least I know it won’t completely ruin the figure at this point. Personally, i think Morrie’s knight turned out a great deal better than my dwarf did.
After breaking for lunch (fresh pizza baked in a wood stove!) I attended a seminar on rules design by myself. Unfortunately I can’t discuss that seminar, but once it was over I attended my final seminar of the convention: Secrets of TSR.
As best I can determine, this is a bit of a Paizocon tradition. They get 4-6 fellows from TSR to just…sit around and talk about the old days. I actually had a little bit of small talk with the group of them before the panel started, not realizing who they were.
Once the panel began, I managed to score a seat in the front row, and get my voice recorder up on the podium so I could have the talk for posterity. It didn’t turn out very well, but that’s okay, because someone very kindly uploaded the entire thing to YouTube!
[EDIT January 27, 2019: This video seems to have been removed. Very sad.]
I’m pretty sure you can hear my laugh more than once. I’m often made fun of for the volume of my laughter.
So that was Paizocon. Conclusions? It was a lot of fun, even though it caused me to question my place in the Pathfinder community. It was educational as well. I do feel as though most of the content was geared towards someone who thinks about tabletop games far less than I do, but that’s not exactly surprising. And it’s not as though anything was ‘beneath me.’ I learned a lot about a number of subjects I’d never really thought about. All in all it was a good time, where I learned some useful skills, and had some great (though unrelated) food.
As a general rule, I try to keep things on this blog strictly related to Paper & Pencil role playing games. Not only do I feel I owe it to my readers to provide content in keeping with the blog’s purported theme, but I find that having a focused topic helps me keep more of a focused mind. However, every now and again, something comes up which cannot go unshared. Something which may be only tangentially related to the blog’s subject matter, but is so profoundly awesome that to keep it to myself would be criminal. Legends of Grimrock is one of those somethings. It’s an oldschool style dungeon crawler, like the ones which were popular in the late 80s through mid 90s–many of which were licensed AD&D titles. Games like Eye of the Beholder, where the player took on the role of a party of adventurers, moving through a dungeon 5ft square by 5ft square.
Legends of Grimrock appears to have taken that formula of a video game infused with grognard style, and updated it in the best way possible. Just take a look at their beautiful trailer:
Looks amazing, right? But that’s just a trailer. Any game can have a good trailer, the question is what the game plays like, not how awesome it can look when you video-capture all the most visually impressive moments.
Well they’ve got plenty of gameplay trailers out as well. Like this one:
I’ve really been getting back into World of Warcraft the last few weeks. (I used to be quite the WoW nerd!) But after seeing these trailers, I can’t help but wonder if my subscription’s days are numbered. I haven’t been this excited about a game’s upcoming release since Batman: Arkham City.
Legend of Grimrock will be released April 11th, and will be available through Steam for $14.99 USD. BUT, if you’re as excited as I am, save yourself a few bucks! Go to the Legends of Grimrock website and pre-order the game for a measly $11.99 USD.
I’m sure I’ll be doing a full writeup of the game once I’ve had some time to play it. That is, if I remember I have a blog to maintain at all!
I have a pretty odd hobby for a person my age. During the summer months, I spend every weekend in my car, driving through residential neighborhoods, looking for garage sale signs. I’ve always found Garage Sales to be somewhat romantic. There’s not much technique to searching for them, you just wander about, taking turns at random, following your gut and the signs which may or may not lead you to something you’re looking for. You catch a glimpse of sheet-garbed card tables down the road, and you pull in to take a look. You scan the tables, mentally screening out all of the junk to look for a treasure. You don’t really know what form the treasure will take. Maybe it’s an old book, or an NES cartridge, or a piece of kitchenware you’ve been lacking, or a pile of empty binders in good condition. Then there’s the barter. We have so few opportunities to barter in American culture. It’s something of a lost skill among our people.
This past summer I found a number of remarkable things. Useful things, like a bed frame, and a bike; items which could have easily cost me ten times more had I bought them new. Other finds weren’t so much useful as they were amusing. This latter type is how I classify the 4-disc DVD set of the 1983 Dungeons and Dragons cartoon ostensibly co-produced by Gary Gygax himself. At the time I was only really familiar with the show from screen captures posted on /tg/. Friends who grew up in the early 80s had told me they remembered it fondly, but everyone seemed to agree that the show was pretty bad. $2 to satisfy my curiosity seemed like a good deal.
I wasn’t exactly eager to dive into this show, particularly not after watching the first few episodes. But after 7 months, I’ve finally seen each of the show’s 27 episodes. And let me just say this: nothing gives me more hope that I can succeed as a writer than knowing someone actually got paid for writing this drek. Where can I even begin in picking it apart? The dialog is so stilted and canned that innocuous conversations sent me into laughing fits. Sometimes it seemed as though characters are simply reciting cliches to one another, since the lines they were reading didn’t form any substantive back-and-forth. And while a lack of proper continuity might be expected from a children’s show in the 80s, it was none the less painful to experience.When there’s an entire episode about the characters unleashing a cataclysmic force of evil, I expect more follow-through than “it got bored and left.”
And that doesn’t even take into account how legitimately offensive the show is. There’s only one non-white character, a black girl named Diana. When the Dungeon Master assigns all of the kids their classes in the show’s opening, he makes her the acrobat, and as we learn later in the show, she’s a world-class athlete. But that’s not even what really bothers me. Making the black character an athlete is a little stereotyped perhaps, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s overtly racist–even if Acrobat seems to have been specifically created as a class just for her character. What is overtly racist is what she’s wearing. Lets get this straight. All the characters show up in this world wearing adventuring gear. The ranger gets a green jerkin, the cavalier gets armor, the wizard gets a robe, the thief gets an admittedly sexualized skirt-and-leggings getup…and the black chick gets a fur bikini? Am I the only one seeing this? I get that this was the 80s, but I have a hard time believing nobody was upset about this. I suppose we can at least be thankful that she’s not a sexist caricature of a teenaged girl like Sheila, the only other female character in the show.
Honestly, the show is so bad that I’ve thought about doing a series of episode-by-episode mockery posts in the style of my Traipsing Through the Timmverse blog. But this isn’t a television review site, it’s a tabletop RPG site. So lets talk about this show from the perspective of a tabletop gamer. If possible, looking at the show through that lens only makes it worse.
I now find it ironic that when I first wrote about player agency, I used a picture of the Dungeon Master character from this cartoon. I cannot now think of any worse example of a GM who promotes player agency. Nor even a worse example of a GM who is vaguely competent. Even if we are not meant to take the kids as the “players,” or Dungeon Master as the literal DM, he simply does a shit job of facilitating the kid’s adventures. He is overtly controlling, and steps in to give the kids directions any time they don’t have a clear goal to pursue. And half the time he doesn’t even let them accomplish the goal, but rather lets them get within sight of the goal, so he can step in and impress them with his ability to solve their problems.
It was actually my ladyfriend Morrie who noticed this phenomena first. As we watched the show together, it became a running joke to point out instances of terrible game mastering. Such as the time the characters come up with an elaborate plan to defeat a horrible monster called Demodragon. Their plan ends up being completely ineffectual, but it doesn’t matter, because earlier in the episode Dungeon Master had put a wreath of “Dragonsbane” around one of the character’s necks whilst in disguise. The dracocidal herb takes care of the monster, nullifying any value the kids’ actions may have had. Then there’s the episode where Dungeon Master is captured by the villain, which causes the players to go looking for him. When they find him, Dungeon Master frees himself, and defeats the villains handily, because the whole thing was just a ridiculous test. There is episode after episode after episode of this shit.
And then there’s the riddles, or whatever they are. As if Dungeon Master descending from on high to deliver every quest wasn’t bad enough, he always leaves the kids with some ridiculous nonsense phrase. The “riddles,” (if you can call them that) are supposed to help the kids figure out what to do when they inevitably end up in a tough situation. Because telling them what to do, and often doing it for them, just isn’t good enough for Dungeon Master. He needs to be able to take credit even for the problems the players overcome on their own. Half the time they don’t figure the riddle out until pure happenstance has already caused the riddle to resolve itself anyway, which isn’t surprising. The riddles are so abstract and convoluted that the only way the characters could possibly figure them out is by being characters who are written by the same writers who wrote the riddles in the first place. If I’m ever so unclear in my communication with my players, I hope they have the decency to punch me in the face.
The essential problem is that things happen *TO* the players, rather than *BECAUSE* of the players. This is the cardinal sin of neglecting player agency. Let there be no ambiguity on this point: Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and most tabletop RPGs are games, not mediums for storytelling. The game is what puts the ‘G’ in RPG–literally. The stories which are created can be amazing, yes, but they do not flow in a single direction from behind the GM screen. The game’s story is an incidental element, created by a group of people who have real control over their actions and their destinies. And it is because of that control which the players have that the stories created when we play tabletop RPGs are so compelling. They are not carefully constructed narratives. Unnecessary scenes or characters aren’t edited out because they fail to support a predetermined climax. And those things which might be considered useless in a constructed narrative often build to a compelling climax all their own.
There is one episode, titled “The Dragon’s Graveyard,” where we get to see a small glimpse of Player Agency. As the episode opens, the players are just about to go through a portal which will take them home, only to have the portal blocked for some reason by the villain, Venger. This is a pretty common scene, but normally it’s at the end of the episode. As the players are sulking about how they’ll never get home, they start to get riled up. They’re tired of constantly having the path home snatched out from under them. On cue, Dungeon Master shows up, offers them some half-assed sympathy, the immediately starts outlining what their next quest will be. Something about the Duke of Dread. Hank, the ranger and party leader, cuts him off. He tells Dungeon Master that they are tired of his bullshit, and they’re done letting him treat them like toy soldiers. They’re going to find the monster which can kill Venger, and they’re going to convince that monster to kill Venger, and then they’re going to go home, end of story. And how does Dungeon Master respond to his players finally taking control of their characters’ destinies? He starts acting like a little passive-aggressive asshole. An act he keeps up until the end of the episode when the players decide not to hurt Venger, and to leave the magical weapons they’ve found behind.
I honestly weep for the players of any game master who got involved in the hobby because of this show. Most eleven year old GMs are bad enough without having been inspired by the single worst example of a game master in the history of gaming. I have a hard time believing that Gary Gygax was actually involved in this project. More likely, he simply received a co-producer vanity credit because his name was so heavily associated with the Dungeons and Dragons brand at the time. I cannot imagine him actually endorsing the Player/Dungeon Master relationship shown in this cartoon. Even if you consider that the kids and Dungeon Master were not intended as literal representations of players and DMs, it’s simply a poor representation of the product.
When will we learn that Dungeons & Dragons will never translate favorably into a linear narrative? How many terrible shows and movies must fans suffer through before the madness ends!?
I’ve been a Loading Ready Run fan for years now. (LRRmon for life!) I’ve always enjoyed their nerdy brand of sketch comedy, and it’s especially fun for me when their nerdiness culminates in a Dungeons & Dragons video. They’ve done a few before (and even a Pathfinder video once!) but those aren’t exactly news. This video was just posted today:
LoadingReadyRun : Rarelywinter
For the record, I’m pretty sure Jer is being a bad GM intentionally for the sake of comedy. But it still serves as a good example of what not to do. Here are all the GMing pitfalls I caught in the video:
Again, I’m sure Jer knows all these things. The video was funny, I just thought I’d do a quick critique of the GM to add some content to the post.
This doesn’t count as your regularly scheduled Monday post, by the way. That will still go up later this evening, as normal.