Pathfinder 2nd edition at Level 17; Advanced Labyrinth Lord; and other musings

Used as a pivotal scene in the current PF2 campaign

At last another post! After a prolonged absence I have returned. Our big event for the last four weeks has been moving. Not far...we're still in Albuquerque, but in  a nice house in a better neighborhood with a decent commute.

Anyway, my weekly Pathfinder campaign that has been running since PF2 came out is now hitting level 17. I thought I'd make a few comments about life with Pathfinder at very high levels of play. This all with the caveat that we've been doing our gaming on Roll20 for the last three months, so keep that in mind.

First and foremost: combat in most cases feels as quick and smooth as as lower levels, although with some minor hitches. There are monsters, for example, that I think are a pain in the ass to run. This is less about the mechanical side of things and more about design; when you have a species of rats with adamantine bone and teeth, for example, that soak most physical damage then yeah, they're going to be a tougher (read: longer) fight. With the way things work Pathfinder you as GM will see a bit of the cogs behind the curtain and realize that giving something 15 resistance against physical attacks is a bit like giving something 15 extra hit points for every hit it takes of that type. There are probably easier ways to do this that make the book-keeping or math simpler, while still retaining the flavor of "made of adamantine metal" and all that connotates without the extra layer of tracking....but it's hardly a significant complaint considering how much easier everything else is to run at high level.

The second item is the one that is tripping me up a tad: as many of you know, when you get to high level things get wonky. GMs who plan for serious overland journeys, for example, may be disappointed at the wasted effort when the players simply teleport or planewalk to their destination. In PF2, there are still some "fast track" options at high level, but they are considerably more restrained and prohibitive in their use, such that my players are less likely to attempt them unless they really need to....or are backtracking. As a result, some of my campaign assumptions that they would be fantasy-jet-setting around have been stymied, and I've made up for it with NPCs providing a teleportational lift here and there to keep things moving at the expected pace. That said, it also means I need to spend more time familiarizing myself with the possible realities of travel and  high level play in PF2, and specifically how it is more tempered than in other editions.

Third, and this is an odd one: I swear that as you creep up to 20,  the power balance of +/-4 levels as the ideal safe range for encounter design has narrowed. Encounters 3 or more levels lower may take some time, but they are ultimately mostly trivial threats. Meanwhile levels of equivalent challenge to the party level are even or greater matches, and +2 levels feels about the highest level of difficulty I can throw without too much risk of death. As a note: I am keeping to the rules on pacing magic items to roughly PC level (and in some cases higher). This is an interesting contrast from prior editions, where often by level 15 or greater risk of high level PC death was mostly a conceptual space, but not a thing that anyone took seriously. Could it happen? Sure, but the hapless PC will likely get resurrected, sure. In PF2 this is different.....the risk of a TPK still feels like it exists if the PCs bite off more than they can chew, and these really high challenge level encounters in PF2 leave me wondering just how a level 20 group will take on, say, the Jabberwok which looks to me like it has a nontrivial chance of mopping the floor with half of them. 

Still....all things considered, the next time you talk to someone who complains that PF2 is swingy, just note that you are talking to someone who didn't take the time to understand the game on its own design terms. PF2 is possibly the least swingy of all iterations of D&D I've played to date, and the easiest to predict how combats will go by relative challenge level. I can very consistently identify that a fight will go a certain way by simply dropping it 2-3 CLs or increasing it 2-3 CLs, and a big part of the reason for this has entirely to do with the +/-10 degree of critical success and failure baked into the resolution system. When you are fighting inferior opponents, for example, you know their likelihood of failure with each additional attack goes up more than if they were equivalent level. Likewise, a foe of greater strength against the PCs means the PCs proportionately have greater risk of failure on iterative attacks and are wiser not to use them....meaning the tougher opponent takes even longer.

All things considered I like the fact that I can design encounters with a strong sense of how it will work out, but there are variables. My next campaign will, rather than strive to rush to level 20, focus on level 1-10 play for as long as possible. There are a metric ton of monsters and interesting things at this level of play I haven't has as much time with for the last seven levels on Saturday.

Last week my son expressed more interest in playing D&D, but told me he wants to play "your game," which I realized was Pathfinder. I've been reluctant....it's a bit more complex, but my son appears to be on the path of becoming a budding hipster,* so he wants to play that cool game, not the one the other more plebian D&D gamers are all playing (my summary of the conversation! His statement was more along the lines of "I want to play the cool game, not D&D, that's what the boring guys play." Sigh.....barely nine and he's already edition warring. 

I have tried deflecting, though, by proposing Advanced Labyrinth Lord. I feel like it's at the right level of complexity for him, probably because ALL is at the precise level of complexity that I discovered around his same age with B/X D&D and AD&D, minus the Gygaxian writing. He seems keen on it....after all, it's not "just D&D" (whatever that means to him and his generation). Either way I win as the gamer dad!

In all honesty part of me would like to run a campaign in Advanced Labyrinth Lord just as a contrasting experience, or maybe a palette cleanser to the last twenty years of D&D mechanical design. AD&D never quite frustrated with its power escalation in the ways that contemporary editions of the game (from 3rd edition on) have been capable of, and I'd love to re-explore why that might be. Could you have grossly overpowered PCs back in the day? Yes, but the etymology of how they came to be that way was often easy to decipher, and the GM's power to rectify the matter was ever present. Pathfinder 2nd edition (and D&D 5E) both feel like strong answers to a legacy of questions that started with 3rd edition in 1999-2000, but both answer this issue in ways that draw upon, at least spiritually, the 1st and 2nd editions (and B/X) of D&D. 

Anyway....we'll see. Too much to do and not enough time to game!



*Not just D&D. He lectured me at length on why he won't buy ordinary Hasbro Beyblades, only wants to save his chore money for Japanese imported Beyblades, and the risk of Chinese knockoffs. If your first question is, "What's a Beyblade?" then welcome to my club.

Pathfinder 2E Gamemastery Guide - Essential Book

The 2nd edition Gamemastery Guide has been out for a couple weeks now and I've already been abusing it. I've spent more time reading and re-reading this book than the Core Rulebook, which may or may not be a good thing....but the Gamemastery Guide has so much useful stuff it's hard not to want to absorb its magnificence as much as possible.

The big change from 1st edition to 2nd edition is, in my opinion, the essential nature of the Gamemastery Guide. Key to this change is the fact that the rules (guidelines?) for how to make monsters and NPCs are in this tome, a change from the old form where all those rules were in the back of the Bestiary. A second change is that many of the more interesting magic item rules are now located here, rather than in the Core Rulebook, which means the core rules contain only "useful items a player might be privy to knowledge of," but the GM alone gets access to things like artifacts, relics and cursed items. Trust me: you will want these rules.

The original Gamemastery Guide identified interesting NPCs and the 2nd edition is no different, with about six stat blocks for various common encounters. It's a much needed supplement to the Bestiary. The stat blocks have shifted in tone a bit from the 1st edition, or at least include a few more familiar archetypes that are reflective of the changing times: torchbearers, plague doctors, masterminds and demonologists are reflective of the useful range of stats for NPCs.

There's a whole intro section on setting up, running and adjudicating games and handling players, a generally cleaner and more engaging section than was in the 1st edition GMG (I always thought the 1st edition advice section was a bit droll and boring to read). This isn't really going to be too useful to veteran GMs but the content on handling downtime and is priceless and helps flesh out those mechanics that are now baked in to 2E.

Also of interest is the advice on world building, which conveys information over several chapters. From designing your towns and cities (with full stat block rules) to wilderness hexcrawls this book provides some very useful content, and extremely practical; lots of useable material and not a lot of unnecessary exposition.

The most intriguing part of the book is the section on alternative and experimental rules. The ones which I found perplexing (or interesting but not suitable for my table) included valour points, stamina rules (e.g. Starfinder hit points/stamina), and alignment variants (neat but too fiddly for my needs). Other methods of stat generation allow a GM to bring the core rules back to a more familiar ability generation process. Magic Item variants let you set up rules for scaling magic items in games where you want fewer and more meaningful magic items (or alternatively no magic items).

The alternative rules which are most interesting to me, and which I will likely want to try out sooner or later included zero level characters (simultaneously a way to start a very early career campaign, a way to introduce new players with minimum fuss, and a way to run funnel style dungeons ala Dungeon Crawl Classics using Pathfinder), alternative skill point rules which bake the older skill point mechanics back in to the system, and a very interesting "Proficiency without Level" mechanic that in about one page gives you the complete rules for turning Pathfinder into a bounded accuracy system ala D&D with minimal conversion headache. Indeed, the notion of Pathfinder as a bounded accuracy system with all of its interesting implications sounds like it would be a novel experience to try out, at least once.

Overall....very happy with this book. Now that I have the finalized monster and NPC stat design rules you may finally see some more game-specific content from me soon. I am hoping I'll have some time and energy to do some conversions of existing monsters soon; I am seriously considering a Chirak adaptation, too, though I had only made it 70% of the way through my D&D 5E conversion so not sure I have the energy for that just yet, we shall see.

TFT Decks of Destiny - More Versatile than just for TFT

A few weeks ago my Decks of Destiny mega boxed set arrived, a second monstrous package to add to my Fantasy Trip Legacy Edition boxed set from last year's Kickstarter. Decks of Destiny contains a lot of stuff.....if you're not familiar with it, here's the web site (here). Yes, a lot of stuff.

Well, the odds I'll run The Fantasy Trip anytime soon while Pathfinder 2nd Edition has a death grip on all of my gaming groups is slim to none, but I've already been using the Outdoor Encounter Cards for months with Pathfinder to spruce up overland travel, so why not some of the Decks of Destiny?

Decks of Destiny has content pretty specific to TFT: orc and octopus encounter cards (it's a TFT thing, trust me), character sheet cards for all sorts of stuff, an excellent monster deck, and lots of hex encounters. There are also some square sized card decks for treasures and rumors. Of this content, you can get the most use out of the following:

Hex Cards and more Mega Hex Tiles- the hex cards let you build labyrinths easily, and moving to a hex based map for Pathfinder is trivial (and even solves some incongruity with grid movement), and the mega hexes work great with Pathfinder figure flats or minis.

Treasure Cards - the two treasure card decks provide plenty of easily converted content to Pathfinder 2nd edition, and add a lot of new stuff to help flesh out the slightly sparse treasures in the Pathfinder 2E Core book. I've been using them on the fly with no issues.

Rumor Cards - aside from occasional references to the default TFT setting, these rumor cards may prove very handy in generating random and exotic rumors you can use as is, or assume are filthy lies.

Okay, all that aside, most of the Decks of Destiny work best with The Fantasy Trip, and it honestly really, really makes me want to run TFT just as soon as I can convince my regulars to let even one of our ongoing game nights switch to a different system. Until then, I can at least get some use out of the set with ongoing games!

Side note....Hey Paizo, you should do some products like this for Pathfinder! The recent card decks you have produced (and the upcoming Bestiary Cards) are awesome....but treasure decks, encounter decks and other cool GM resources would be amazing.

2020 Gaming Plans

My tabletop gaming plans for 2020 are very consistent: keep gaming, as much as possible, on the two nights I have free to do it. My strategy toward this end remains simple: keep focused on the game systems that let me maximize my prep to play time, and cater best to my GM style of gaming. So far that means I can safely expect to play more Pathdinder 2nd Edition and Cypher System; indeed, these two games alone encompass almost everything I need in gaming right now for my above outlined requisites. There are other games I would like to try out soon though! These include:

Forbidden Lands - this boxed set which is really just a box to hold two enormous leatherette bound Player and GM guidebooks is an amazing product. It has old school design and a strong focus on exploratory hexcrawl-styled gameplay, with plenty of tools to evolve the story as you go. It's a product so good that even if I can't get my players to try it as a system, I will appropriate its GM content for use in another game.

Alien RPG - this came out in December so I've had no time in 2019 to play it, but for 2020 I would like to run a short campaign at minimum to try it out. I am very much hoping it does what I've always wanted an Alien RPG to do.

Starfinder - I would like to get back to this at some point, especially now that I am looking at the system through "PF2E lenses" which allows Starfinder to make more sense to me.

Cyberpunk Red - I have to be honest....I am not aware of any new games coming out in 2020 that are tempting me right now, other than the hoped for release of the Cyberpunk Red full product. My attempt to secure a print copy of the Introductory Cyberpunk Red has met with continuous failure, but I am very much counting on securing a copy of the final product. 90% of my gaming in college was split between Cyberpunk 2020 and AD&D 2nd edition, so there's a compelling interest for me to get this.

Savage Worlds Adventure Edition - while still being the same game, the new "SWADE" edition of Savage Worlds manages to fix so many little bits and bobs that it's sort of impossible not to love. It fixes things you never knew were broken, but once the fix is seen it cannot be unseen, and I am really eager to play Savage Worlds again, and soon. My only worry is it will take a long time for new updated genre books to arrive.

Outside of the above I keep a small stash of "ready to play" RPGs handy for pick up games, filler sessions, or "we need a break" moments. This bundle includes Traveller (and Cepheus Light by proxy), Swords & Wizardry Complete, White Star and of course Savage Worlds. One game missing from my collection I keep kicking myself about (since I sold it on EBay) was Beyond the Wall, a game which did such a great job of making B/X D&D into something literary and mysterious that I must order new copies again soon, especially now that my son is getting old enough to grokk this stuff properly.

In the end....it is entirely possibly 99.5% of my game time this year is spent with Pathfinder 2nd edition, but I am the GM; my word is law! I just need to put the time and effort into one of these other games to make it happen.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition Here At Last!

I picked up my books this morning but didn't get to dive in until after work. I also snagged a second set of books at a convenient sale price with discount through Barnes & Noble.

So! How is it?

Well, the core rules are 638 pages long. Thankfully knowing how to read a RPG means knowing where to skim and where to dive deep....and I've spent the evening designing characters and exploring the action/combat mechanics. A few observations so far:

Most characters look and feel a lot like 1st edition PCs, but there are twists along the way. Ancestries make the racial component of characters more significant. Because of how ancestries work there are no optional character races in the Bestiary, unfortunately....they need several pages to flesh out the core traits plus ancestry feats. I predict a big, fat Advanced Race Guide 2nd Edition in the near future.

I've made a few characters so far...you can design a level 1 character more quickly (once you do it a couple times) than in PF1.

Multiclassing is using the feat mechanics touched upon in the playtest. They work, and they make multiclassing as a concept a more focused and easy to do thing.

Literally everything in the game is now dominated by the proficiency mechanic. It's not entirely unlike D&D 5E's proficiency system, but with the Pathfinder twist: you have a ranking of 0/2/4/6/8 based on being untrained, trained, expert, master or legendary. This mechanic impacts your weapon skills, armor skills, plain old skills, saving throws and even class mastery. It is the most unifying mechanic I have seen tackled in a 3rd edition variant; it makes Pathfinder 2.0's design distinct and I am very intrigued to see how this mechanic affects play over time.

The equipment section is comprehensive and well organized.

The proliferation of feats in the game is heavily cataloged and codified by when and what sort of feat you can take. The entire book is, at its core, extremely tight in how it organizes the data and this makes PF 2.0 feel much more accessible than its predecessor. Attention to "finding that thing you need" was clearly a priority.

The concept of the Class DC is cool and intuitive. It's basically the DC set by your class and key trait that applies to relevant class abilities. Smart design.

The action point economy and its symbol system is the first thing you are introduced to. It is easy to understand and follow their intent. I am plowing through the mechanics/actions/combat content right now and this feels, again, like taking and codifying prior edition rules into a coherent and consistent whole. This appears to be PF2.0's major theme: organize, categorize, and make it easy to follow.

A downside: so far it is clearly framed as "Adventures in the Age of Lost Omens" which is the next chapter in Golarion I guess. There's a chapter on the setting in the book. My issue is not with this element, but the utter lack of interest in providing discussion or direction to GMs who want to do their own thing....maybe they will reserve this content for the Gamemastery Guide 2nd edition coming out in January, but it's hard to say.....I think they are aiming for stronger brand awareness of their IP, but at the expense of the many gamers who prefer to do their own thing. Not a big issue; 99% of this book is usable just as PF 1.0 was for whatever you want, but even just a nod to the kind of gamer who doesn't follow the published setting material would have been nice. Starfinder has this same problem.

So far this has proven to be a familiar game with a face lift....and that's a good thing. It looks like I should be able to prep for a game on Saturday to test it out, see how PF2 feels now that its out in the wild. I'll have a "first game" analysis up after Saturday!

OHMAGERD Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers 2nd Edition PDF Just Arrived

Just discovered an email with my complimentary code for the PDF of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea 2nd Edition.....which means, at last, that the hard cover is not too far away!!!

Verrrry excited for this. Will definitely be running a campaign in the ASSH2E rules soon......

If you don't have it yet and want the PDF, looks like it's on sale for $12.75 right now. At 622 pages it's a steal! If you stake your corner of the OSR on AD&D 1E and Robert E. Howard's influence on gaming, then ASSH really is a must-have.

ASTONISHING SWORDSMEN & SORCERERS OF HYPERBOREA 2nd Edition Kickstarter

It's in the wild! The Kickstarter to produce the hardcover 2nd edition of this amazing pseudo-retro-clone is now available. If you're wondering what it is, AS&SH is a rule set derived from AD&D 1E, with some interesting rules modifications for clarity and efficiency similar to the way Swords & Wizardry tweaked OD&D, making for an experience both familiar and new. It's core conceit is a "What if Gygax had based AD&D on all the non-Tolkien fantasy in the Appendix N" sort of approach, and the result is a great rule system with an elegant core setting in Hyperborea that is easy for GMs to flesh out. The modules for this game have all been great as well, and the entire game fits my own style of gaming really well.

Gathering Greyhawk

First it started with the dndclassics.com release of the original Greyhawk boxed set from 1980ish. This was a nice scan of a product that runs rather high in price on Ebay, and a look into one of the first published settings for an RPG (and the first officially defined setting for D&D). As a kid I knew it existed but could never find a copy and have cash handy at the same time. By the time it was feasible other stuff like Runequest and Tunnels & Trolls were too busy taking my money instead.

Buck back to now...this budding obsession migrated to looking at what else they had on offer over there in the way of Greyhawk PDFs. This led to a mixture of excitement and disappointment when I decided to jump forward a bit and check out the tail end of the 2E-era "year 591 cy" setting, post "Greyhawk Wars" era from the early 2E days. This was cool, but the scans for "Player's Guide" and "Adventure Begins" were terrible. These are the two books that collectively define this era and are also the basis for the 3E Greyhawk material, I am led to believe....but for some reason the scans are atypically poor with cropped pages and a dismal grey-bleed background that implies the books might have been printed on some off-color paper or had bad watermarks/bleed-through.

This led me to find the books on Ebay, for surprsingly cheap yet pristine copies. No idea now that I've seen the original as to just why the scans on sale are so bad....I could make a clean scan easily (and am tempted to do so then donate it to WotC, if I could figure out the donation process in a legal way).

But.....and here's where it all goes off the rails....

I'm rather enjoying exploring Greyhawk. Prior to...oh...the last few weeks Greyhawk has always been that old setting that I knew a bit about but never got to play in (or run) and mostly was a sort of relationship by association, as I converted most modules from the setting to my own worlds. In a way, that puts a bit of Greyhawk in all my games already.

But now I'm tempted to run an actual campaign in Greyhawk, possibly due to subversive propaganda, but also possibly because it's something that has the veneer of being both old and familiar and fresh and new to me simultaneously. If I do it, I'll set the game sometime around the year 591 cy, and start with the other three books I picked up: Return of the Eight, The Star Cairns and Crypt of Lyzandred the Mad. These are good modules...and the only reason I never investigated all of this before was that I just never used pre-made setting material back in the day unless it was obviously easy to reskin. It's not Greyhawk, personally....I didn't pick up Forgotten Realms stuff, either.

If this happens, I'll have to post some details on RoC. The next question is: what system? There's a temptation to use AD&D 2nd edition as was intended for these tomes, but it seems silly not to do the conversion dance and use D&D 5E. On the other hand I recently acquired the Adventurer, Conqueror, King System (ACKS) and that seems like a really great fit for Greyhawk, at least with the "escalating from hero to king" part (in other areas it lacks a bit...no halflings, demons, or other D&Disms that are core to Greyhawk). There are other OSR games that could work well, too. Hmmmm....decisions, decisions. I'll probably sick with 5E, because that edition speaks to me like no other has, and it will let me do some Greyahwk to 5E conversion blogs down the road, too....

AD&D 2nd Edition House Rules: Removing multiclass restrictions and bumping humans up the food chain

Humans: generating XP for elves who hit them hard enough since 1974

My Saturday group is now rotating with me running D&D 5E (or 13th Age after the 5E scenario concludes) one week and my long time friend and host running AD&D 2nd edition for the first time in ages. It's been a lot of fun, but as I have been perusing my nice Premium edition AD&D 2nd edition books I was reminded of the key issues I always used to have with the game. Even more amusing than the rules with problems was the fact that --let's face it-- they were problems even back when 2nd edition released, enough so that the authors spent some time in the DMG or PHB explaining why the rules were there, with what amount in retrospect to some pretty amusing rationales.

The rules I refer to, of course, are multiclassing (and the even more restrictive dual-classing rules), level limits and the implicitly squishy nature of humans. If you're not an OSR fan or you are somehow under the age of 30 you might not be old enough to have jumped into the hobby at a time when multiclassing was a thing and the idea of a non-human paladin was anathema. Here's a summary of the rules that I have never particularly liked:

Racial Class Limits: Paladins as humans only; dwarves are never mages....stuff like this

Racial Level Caps: demihuman player races have hard level caps for most classes

Multiclassing: demihumans alone can multiclass

Dual-Classing: humans can only dual-class, and even then only if you are rolling exceedingly well for stats to begin with; almost statistically improbable you would ever see a dual-classed character in play without using a lot of trickery of cheating to get the numbers you want

All of the above were wiped out in 3rd edition and will never return. Going back to AD&D (either edition) requires either accepting these as given or hacking them off like the weird barnacles they are.

The 2E DMG provides optional rules for allowing various demihumans to advance past their level limits, but warns at length that being overly kind here will make humans obsolete....literally!....and turn the game into not just a story about elves, but the entire fantasy world. It's a weirdly amusing piece of logic because it implictly assumes that you can't or wouldn't be able to impose in-game restrictions (such as low birthrates) for species like elves who would then by default still find themselves at a disadvantage of the rabbit-like humans of fantasyland. But I suppose it's not worth arguing....this was a contention presented in the DMG in 1989, and its interesting because its clearly there to reinforce the design parameter set out by AD&D which survived to 2nd edition, and is not actually aimed at seriously considering all the implications of a fantasy world that is literally run by physical laws defined by the game rules as presented (cherry picking, if you will).

So what would be the harm in ditching these four limitations in AD&D 2E? As I see it, there are no real arguments that support the issue. You have the multiclass guidelines allowing any class combination you want, you know humanity's greatest threat is not elves unlimited but quick-breeding orcs and goblins, and as DM you can continue to enforce design limits on players like I used to.

I once had a methodology for player guidance that worked like this: I'd give the players 10 points to spend as a group on their racial options. Humans cost 1 point, dwarves, halflings, gnomes and half orcs cost 2 points and elves cost 3 points (elves were fabulously popular in the 90's, there is no contesting that nightmarish fact). 10 points was what could be spent among 6 players, typically. This meant that they could all play humans (6 points), but with 4 points left over up to four of them could upgrade to a demihuman choice. If the group wanted to be elf-heavy this meant that no more than 2 of them could be elves, meaning you could have 4 humans and 2 elves instead (total 10 points).

That method was how I kept my 2E games from being elf-heavy from 1990 to roughly 1994 when I stopped caring and let people play parties 100% comprised of entries from the Humanoids Handbook JUST BECAUSE.

Today, I'd do it like this:

Eliminate the Restrictions: No more class restrictions for any race. No more multiclass restrictions for any race. No more level restrictions either. Dual-Classing is allowed because if you meet the qualifications and want to, then more power to you.

Human Bonuses: Humans, however, should get some sort of compensation for being so awesomely human, though. As a result, humans can get a bonus proficiency slot, a +1 bonus to an attribute of their choice for being so awesomely human (but they still have to meet ability cap maximums) and, most importantly, I'd let humans multiclass. I know the DMG explains that humans are woefully short-lived creatures who can't absorb the lifetimes of discovery necessary to juggle two or more classes simultaneously, but alas for that logic the 2000's happened and now those arguments make no sense.

So, the advantages? Now you can build almost anything you like in AD&D 2E without restriction, which might not fly well for certain worlds and styles, but in settings like I run where my world of Chirak has seafaring dwarven hydromancers and minotaur ranger-wizards it should greatly facilitate the style of world that allows such madness.

Removing all those multiclassing restrictions as well as pumping up humans will go a long way toward providing an easier model of the actual weird fantasy that D&D always stemmed from....maybe not the Gygaxian way, but Appendix N will thank you.

30 Days of Dungeons & Dragons Day 7

Day 7: Favorite Edition

This can be a tricky one, because there are merits to every edition, and people tend to favor the ones they got the most out of over time. I like each edition of D&D for different reasons, but I have to say that it was AD&D 2nd edition that was the version which I got the most mileage out of over time. Even though I am no longer so enamored with it, it's still the edition that I played the most (at least until 3rd edition, combined with my time in Pathfinder). Why?

2nd edition AD&D was the version that started looking at the broader picture of fantasy gaming. It wasn't just about dungeons, it tried to shed some of the more stoic and crusty mechanics of 1st edition and utilized a style that was more appealing to people who were interested in gaming and enjoying the story as much or more than crunching numbers on their character sheet. I've heard 2E criticized for dumbing down the text a bit, but honestly I enjoyed the more readable and easy-to-use, easy-to-reference approach to 2E. The fact that AD&D 2nd edition cleaned it up so much, made it easy to use....it was a huge, huge bonus. It was a game that demanded less effort to master than its predecessor and other contemporaries (in retrospect I have to scratch my head at what possessed me to run Dragonquest for a whole year, for example!)

2nd edition introduced the idea of multiple settings for D&D, a different flavor to cater to different audiences. Ravenloft as a setting, Spelljammer, Planescape....all AD&D 2E. It also introduced bad business practices (thanks Lorraine), or at least accelerated them. The novel lineup for AD&D got dramatically more robust in this period.

When 3rd edition arrived it was time for a clean-up. AD&D 2E was getting crusty by then, and the game was getting too convoluted in the post-Player's Option era of expansions. That said, 3E introduced its own set of problems with mechanics that despite an aim toward a unified resolution mechanic remained as arcane as ever. All I really wanted out of 3rd edition was "2E, but with better multi-classing options." 3E did introduce a lot of new concepts I ended up embracing....but it never felt quite as accessible and easy as 2E, and only got worse over time as the char-op mini-game permanently changed the way D&D was played.

AD&D 2E Premium Edition Books Out (and an interesting podcast)

The AD&D 2nd Edition reprints are now out!

Can't decide if I'm going to get them or not. In the interim, there's a great podcast on WotC's site about the inception of 2nd edition right here, featuring an interview with Steve Winter. Fun stuff to listen to, and I am sure bits of it will rankle some of the hardcore pre-2E fans who disliked where the game went, but you know me...I consider 2E the edition that actually got me back into AD&D, and also made getting games together in college a much easier experience, and it was pretty much my go-to system for the 90s.

Well....I imagine if I do get them I could then unleash an unholy mashup of Labyrinth Lord, Castles & Crusades, AD&D 2nd edition and B/X D&D upon the world sometime. It would be....pretty much what we all do, I guess!

The AD&D 2nd Edition Premium Covers

So the AD&D 2E reprints will have these covers. Very nice, I like this look a lot and it makes better use of the famously atrocious art in the revised editions (still not as good as using the pics from the original first printing covers, but a nice leatherette green covering it all up is still a better way to go!

More D&D releases now up: 2nd edition reprints, Dungeons of Dread S Series cover, and more

Wizards of the Coast updated their product lineup for 2013, so we can officially see what the S-Series module cover will look like, there are now actual entries for the 2nd edition reprints of the core rules (yay) and the first "Sundering" module from Ed Greenwood is now listed for an August 20th release.

It's interesting, as the module seems to very specifically avoid mentioning system requirements...it's just for "D&D," so I wonder if they plan to release it in a manner compatible with any of the editions that are now (or will be) back in print? Wonder if 4E will be overlooked here, too.... Either way, the fact that it doesn't specifically talk about serving as a lead-in or intro to 5th edition suggests the module will be designed for cross-edition functionality, but without actually saying that, its all just the usual conjecture and speculation.

Anyway, here's what the Dungeons of Dread S series cover is going to look like:



Nice. It's now slated for a March 19th release....so not too far away. I may have decided that 1st edition and I just don't agree with one another, but the modules are a different story, and I'll be able to use this just fine with the 2nd edition rulebooks.

Speaking of which, the three 2nd edition rulebook cover images look like placeholders--please, please PLEASE let them be place-holders, because the DMG/PHB images shown are from the black-border reprints circa 1995ish and those were some notoriously butt-ugly covers. The Monstrous Manual, however, was always a pretty decent cover so I won't complain if they recycle that one.



No cover yet for "Murder in Baldur's Gate" but read the description here. Between this module and the recent release of Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition for PC and Mac (I'm holding out for the android edition), we will be able to party like it's 1998 all over again!


UPDATE

Also, MIke Mearls is talking details about the "core" or simplest version of the game (here), on which additional rules/options will layer. It's interesting stuff, not least of which because the core rules he's describing sound about as old-school and "back to roots" as D&D can get short of the reprints...and maybe moreso, since this will be a refinement of the game that does a redux and dispenses with both the modern layered complexity to simplify its core, and also the old school complexity that arose from the stitched-together rules-bedlam that was common in the early days as the game began to grow.

Starships & Spacemen 2E

I grabbed this today, one of "Dad's Xmas gifts" to himself: Starships & Spacemen, 2nd edition from Daniel Proctor and co. at Goblinoid Games (PDF here). It's the official second edition to a game which came out back in...ah...1979? And which Goblinoid Games bought the rights to and rereleased in all its typewriter-font glory a little while back. The 2nd edition is a classy revision, with the rules heavily upgraded and made compatible with Labyrinth Lord, although it looks like the rules, while compatible, aren't sacrificing SF-flavor just to be easily meshed with LL.

Anyway, it's a rip off...um, homage to Star Trek, and even includes things like a random alien forehead bump generation table so you can find out what your alien of the week looks like. Great stuff, I feel like running a campaign with this By The Book already, set in the mysterious parallel universe of Space Fleet!

It's also gotten my mind off of the horrendous tragedies of late, so another big plus. Goblinoid Games continues to deliver fun stuff that prays on nostalgia but in a good way....Rotworld was my last purchase from them (also a great game), and I have been waiting to see what was next from them, and S&S 2E was well worth it.

Blowing the Dust off of Second Edition AD&D

In the days before Perception was a skill

So my two sessions so far of the creeping AD&D 1st edition game have been fun, but the lengthy period of time between games is a real killer for the sort of plotline/sandbox thing I originally set out to do. By session two trying to keep track of who had what plot, who was interested in which potential quest or point of exploration and so forth was a muddy pit of confusion, as too many older gamers with poor memories equals disaster when it comes to consistency (I kid! Mostly it was my own lack of focus thanks to too much going on between games to even think about game scenarios or plots). So the game was retooled on the spot to focus on a core plot instead and migrated everyone in classic fashion through what I call AD&D's archetypal Roadtrip from Hell event (aka wilderness journey), involving boat rides, an owlbear and a large array of goblins using a giant stag beetle as a heavy assault beast. It ended with the discovery of a lost temple entrance, and enough suspicion pointing toward its doors as the solution to their problems.

Playing with 1st edition is a reminder to me of many, many things. Not least of these is that its reminding me that I used a lot of houserules, borrowed liberally when in doubt from B/X D&D, and that I don't think I ever applied the surprise, initiative and general combat rules as written in the DMG, relying instead on the outline of combat in Basic D&D and jumping to the DMG for the charts (and eventually using the Armor Class Wheel published in Dragon magazine).

It has also reminded me of just how quaint and amusing (and infuriating when running the game) the obscure wargame inches & rulers measurement system is. There are a huge number of little annoying bits like this that riddle the system (ascertaining encumbrance last session was another momentary headache). It's easy to see why Classic Original D&D tends to get the most love in the OSR community; it really is a simpler, more intuitive approach to the same basic game, and B/X D&D clearly owed much to the Holmes remastering from which they later were adapted (as best I can tell; keep in mind I got into the hobby October 1980, and I was nine years old, so some of the publication history of the game is something I learned about later on).

In any case, one thing has become clear: every moment with 1E that has been annoying me, or led to rules confusion or clarification, or otherwise caused a head-scratching moment is also an element which would be crystal-clear to me if I was running 2nd edition. 2E is, for me, the edition which I know best, the one where I still remember which page to flip through for whatever specific rule it is I need to reference....it's the edition that sits smack dab in my "comfort zone" of old games.

I plan to let everyone know next session (which won't at this rate be until December 8th) that I'll be bringing my 2nd edition books along, as it took about two games of AD&D 1E to remind me of why I stopped running it around 1985 (switching to T&T, Runequest and Palladium) and didn't come back until the game had been formally revised; and even then only because my college group  begged me to consider AD&D 2nd edition after I'd subjected them to several months of Dragonquest and Runequest. Hah!

That first game I ran of AD&D 2nd edition, using the heinously bad idea that was the Monstrous Compendium folio along with the new DMG and PHB was glorious. It involved an old farmstead that was abandoned, giant rats, some angry kobolds, a friendly and obnoxious pixie named Percy and an amassing horde of orcs and hobgoblins that the players realized was a threat to the local town. It cascaded rapidly into one of the coolest campaigns I'd ever run in AD&D.

Meat snacks!

While many players of 1st edition were decrying AD&D 2E for its changes, I was part of a crowd that had been lost to 1st edition, who associated that specific edition with the unpleasant Middle School years, and so 2nd edition was the opposite for me...it was like the game had cleaned up, matured a bit, and at last was trying to make sense of itself. It was the edition which I could embrace.

But I've complained about this before! I have lots of fond memories of AD&D 1st edition....but I just can't go back, it turns out. Hopefully my mess of players will understand. It's either that, or I find a copy of B/X D&D and try running AD&D 1E the way I actually did back in the day, as a hybrid mess of the two.

In any case, those 2nd edition reprint listings that popped up on Amazon are a good sign to me that WotC knows people like me are out there, those who were part of the crowd which embraced 2nd edition AD&D, and that we are all more than happy to shell a bit out on some shiny new copies of our favorite edition. I certainly hope that's how it works out...

Hopefully with a different cover!

"The Dangers of a Mutable System..." and other thoughts inspired by AD&D

"The Dangers of a Mutable System..." A telling quote from Gygax himself in the intro to the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide....the premise being, its possible to move too far in one direction, altering the game to suit to taste, only to find that the direction traveled was perhaps not ideal, and the game has been altered too much to sustain itself, leading to a short and possibly unpleasant campaign. If you look at later editions as being "official" extensions of this philosophy that 1st edition held, that each table was its own mutation of the system, then one can imagine why not all later versions sat well or lasted long!

So yes, I have the Premium AD&D books in my hands FINALLY AND AT LONG LAST!!!! 'Bout Damn Time! I thank Mandi at Active Imagination for being able to get me copies, and I thank my awesome gamer wife Jody for letting me get them (because she'd like to play some more 1st edition, y'see) although I did bribe her with a copy of Guild Wars 2, so yes, much money was spent today on entertainment of a most foul and suspect nature (the best kind, of course).

I played AD&D mainly from 1980-1984 or thereabouts, with some on and off stints after that, until about 1987 when I had more or less moved away from AD&D and was playing other games entirely (chiefly T&T, Palladium Fantasy, Runequest 2nd edition, GURPS 1st and Dragonquest). This lasted until 1989 when I was off to college and my first gaming group (most of whom I have since reconnected with through Facebook) after a campaign of Dragonquest talked me into checking out the new AD&D 2nd edition books. I had all but abandoned by AD&D 1st edition collection by then...it was something I associated with my younger gaming years at that point, basically, and so I dared to pick up the new AD&D 2E books and sure enough, that was what helped me to recapture the magic.

I didn't play AD&D 1st edition again until 2007 when my local group in Albuquerque went through a repurposing phase, and a new member (Jason) joined who was not only a diehard AD&D 1st edition grognard, but he hadn't even been involved in the hobby outside of that edition since the mid-80's. The rest of the group was like me: we were playing 3rd edition because it was current, but we all had fond memories of really getting into 2nd edition, or of it "bringing us back." So it was with the addition of Jason that we decided to abandon 3rd and went to a hybrid of 1st and 2nd edition....I sort of used a mashup of the various books, most of which I had to secure from Ebay once more (you see, I had a vast collection of books, once, but a fairly staggering amount of gambling debt from my second marriage--my ex had some issues--led me to sell most of it on ebay. Ah, the irony.)

That went on until 4E came out, which that particular group tried for a heroic tier campaign, and after deciding 4E was not going to work for them we cast about, trying some more AD&D, then C&C, and at last settling on Pathfinder when we gained some new players who were keen to try the latest edition of the ever-evolving D20 system.

So now I'm in a new zone once more. I'm keen to try more C&C and have managed some games recently, but Pathfinder dominates the crowd. However, with the premium AD&D books there's a newly emerging interest in the original AD&D system, and not just among those who have played it before. Myself, I am finding that there is a lot of meat in those books that I arbitrarily tended to dismiss back in my turbulent teens due to the fickle nature of youth; the AD&D DMG was like a bible to me from roughly age 10 to 14, and I remained enamoured with it even afterward, despite the fact that from roughly 1984 to 1990 I published a bi-monthly fanzine aimed at T&T and other non D&D RPGs, with a crowd of readers and contributors who were all very much on the "not D&D" side of the gaming fence. I wrote a lot for these other games, ran other games, and generally had fun....but I would usually go back to the AD&D books and ponder their arcane complexity and obscure minutiae with private interest, occasionally running games for them but never feeling I could indulge thanks to the peers I ran with. That's why it wasn't until I went to college that the floodgates opened and 2nd edition was able to blast its way in....by 1989, everyone I knew wanted to play AD&D, and not Dragonquest or Runequest (well, some did). So I managed to get weekly sessions of AD&D 2E in throughout college. Good times.

One of my Favorite Modules. The province of Eor'nin, Hyrkania in the Middle Kingdoms of Lingusia is where I placed this module (thus the city of Eor).

Anyway, it's a lot of fun revisiting these books, more than I expected it would be. I remember going on a picnic in the Chiricahua Mountains with my family in 1985 or thereabouts, with my AD&D books tucked along, so while everyone else was barbequeing and picnicking I was at the fold-out table rolling up random dungeons to put my adventurers through (it was sometimes hard to get regular games in the Ass End of Nowhere, Cochise County, Arizona). I remember running a crazy dungeon with Yeenoghu as the top villain for my sister and a mutual friend who I think in retrospect might have been a bit freaked out by our shared sibling intensity at playing the game. I even remember going to cons circa 1986-1988, and talking the DM into letting me play my vicious warlord princess Lakuna Helbyrn, a halberd-wielding fighter who was professionally neutral evil.

It might just be the nostalgic buzz and the general satisfaction of reading the books again, but hopefully not. I think I'm going to construct and run a new campaign, probably centered in my Warlords of Lingusia setting, since that was the game world that sprang forth from my introduction to the hobby in 1980 and which has evolved continuously for thelast 32+ years now. I've already ordered the Fiend Folio from someone on ebay (because back then the FF was the fourth most iconic and important book to all my old campaigns, and is the reason grell and hooked horrors factor into any and all editions I have ever run). I'm also snagging a copy (hopefully not falling apart) of Arcana Unearthed, because by the time it was released back then I was not running AD&D, and so missed its integration into play. I recall reading it and questioning the value of the book overall, although I think ironically AU contained within it the seed of virtually all that was to come in D&D's future development.

I actually think the Fiend Folio has more iconics than the Monster Manual, at least for me...

Welcome Flyer to the Second Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Game

Stumbled across this flyer for AD&D 2nd edition in a random sig (already lost the source damnit, but thanks, whomever you are), a rather fun little artifact from a bygone era that I never knew of. When I got into AD&D it was late in 1989 during the fall at Eastern Arizona College. I'd been bouncing between using Runequest Basic (the Avalon hill Blue Box edition) and Dragonquest (the particular version of which was TSR's 3rd edition revision that had recently come out), but my group ultimately convinced me to pick up AD&D 2nd edition and give it a try. I ordered the books from a local book shop that was able to secure them for me and a week or two later we were rolling up characters and investigating the mystery of an amassing army of monsters near the capitol of Hyrkania. Good times! To this day that campaign remains one of my favorites, and was a defining time for my interest in the hobby. I stuck religiously with 2nd edition AD&D right up until the day 3rd edition came out (relying only on Runequest for a non-AD&D fantasy alternate); it was the edition that hit the sweet spot, and which provides the greatest nostalgia factor for me. I also periodically revisit it, and have recently been doing a 2nd edition game with Ravenloft.

One thing I have to say about the nineties, it was nice to have to only worry about one game system for fantasy gaming. Sure, there were other game systems, but you played them to get a decidedly different flavor and experience (Runequest was my top dog for non-D&D fantasy, but I played Dragonquest and GURPS Fantasy on occasion, and other games such as Dangerous Journeys existed). Today, I look on my shelf and I am faced with Swords & Wizardry, D&D 4E, Pathfinder, Castles & Crusades, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, OSRIC, D&D 3rd edition...and the thing that is so head-scratching is both how much the market has fragmented, and how little of what I look at is in any meaningful way different. Sure, I can still grab Runequest II/Legend for an alt-D&D experience, or maybe something like Shadow, Sword & Spell or Dragon Age RPG and have some non-D&D fantasy fun, but I really do miss the old days where D&D was defined by AD&D 2nd edition (for me) and not by five or ten amorphous spin-offs and variant rulesets all competing for attention while offering essentially the same overall experience, just trussed up in slightly different dresses.

Game system polygamy is a sickness that must be stopped!