Status Ridiculosus

I always loved role-playing games that had lots and lots of stats (or what some people called attributes). The more the merrier, and if there weren't enough stats in the game to please, then by gum I'd add them. Looking back on it, I think this is because I really loved the process of generating characters, and lots of stats makes for a fiddly, interesting generation process. I would hazard the guess that in the end, my "system" had fourteen or fifteen stats, not including the major and minor motivations that I pilfered from TWILIGHT: 2000.

And as I evolved toward this state of gross excessiveness, certain things never sank in. It never bothered me that most of my stats were never used in the game - just having a rating for situational awareness was reward unto itself; there was no need to actually use it. The sick look in the eyes of my players never meant anything to me either. As far as I knew, their uneasy trepidation wasn't caused by exposure to a system of almost baroque complexity, but rather just gas produced by substandard hot dogs. Or maybe they were trying to remember if they'd left the water running back home.

This wasn't role-playing. This was dice-throwing. But since I liked throwing dice, it was good, right?

For years I've enjoyed tinkering with BOOT HILL (2nd edition in my case) and I'd always intended to rewrite the rules at some point. I had three main goals in mind when thinking about the rewrite. First, I wanted to use the physical systems of the excellent AH game GUNSLINGER in BOOT HILL, especially the maps. Second, I wanted to do something to improve the role-playing nature of the game by giving characters at least some hope, however small, of actually surviving a gunfight (my experience in BOOT HILL is that the survivors are those who run away; everyone else either dies on the spot or dies of great enfesterment later on. The only way out of this immediately fatal mess seemed to be something like a luck or fate stat). And third, I wanted more goddamned stats. Lots more. In my notes, I identified no less than thirteen stats, not including a short list of optional stats.

But then I read a review of third edition BOOT HILL that defended its use of only five stats, and the more I thought about it, the more my mind whirled. Why have an intelligence stat at all? Why not let the player use his own intelligence? Why have a social standing stat? Let the player's actions determine that. In other words, let the player actually role-play and only use stats that actually affect quantifiable game systems - strength to determine how hard you can hit someone, speed to segregate the gunslingers from the plowboys, and so forth.

Pretty soon this epiphany caused me to look at the list of stats that were in the hallowed 2nd edition rules, a list that I previously had dismissed as entirely inadequate. And the more I looked at the list, the smarter Blume and Gygax seemed.

I'm still going to rewrite the BOOT HILL rules, even though nobody will ever play it. But I'm not going to have fourteen stats, I can tell you that.

Tactical Armor

I went through a phase - 1975 to 1985 - when I believed that the only good wargame was a tactical armor wargame. And the "industry" (as we liked to call it) did not disappoint me; tactical armor games seemed to spawn faster than rabbits and the devotee was positively spoiled for choice. Among the tactical wargames I owned were PANZERBLITZ, PANZER LEADER, PANZER LEADER '40, TOBRUK, KAMPFPANZER, TANK!, DESERT WAR, MECHWAR '77, PANZER '44, PANZER, PANZER BATTLES, RED STAR/WHITE STAR, MECH WAR 2, OCTOBER WAR, TACFORCE, ROMMEL'S PANZERS, HELLTANK, OGRE, GEV, ARMOR, 88, SQUAD LEADER, CROSS OF IRON, CRESCENDO OF DOOM, ARAB-ISRAELI WARS, FIREFIGHT, CITYFIGHT, ASSAULT, MBT, COBRA, IDF...

One thing becomes obvious from this list: without the word panzer, we would have been in bad shape. Imagine a world were the French word char was more popular than the German word panzer. We'd have CHARBLITZ, ROMMEL'S CHARS, CHAR BATTLES...

My favorite, in terms of system, was OCTOBER WAR. The one I played the most FTF ("face to face") was PANZERBLITZ. But when it came to solitaire play, MECHWAR '77 and ARAB-ISRAELI WARS were my favorites, and I played the former to a frazzle of its former self (in the end I lost so many M60A1 platoons that I almost couldn't play it any more).

Yet despite my interest in such tankie nonsense, almost none of the gaming cliques I ran with were into what Donald Sutherland called "ahmah". My gaming cliques were strictly interested in DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, which was okay, because I loved that too, but I always found it a little odd that I'd play D&D all weekend and solitaire monster scenarios of ARAB-ISRAELI WARS all week.

Life seemed easier back then...

Caution: RPGs Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

Readers of this blog may or may not know that I recently completed a six-month course of chemotherapy to treat a very advanced case of Hodgkin's Lymphoma. It appears that the chemo was successful, but in the meantime it weakened me considerably. I suspect what really happens that chemo makes you so tired you don't feel like doing anything, and sitting on the sofa staring at the TV for six months is what really weakens you.

But anyway, I had a plastic tote box out in the garage that contained all of my RPG materials, books and geedunk, games as diverse as Dragonquest, The Morrow Project, Traveler, Traveler TNE and Twilight: 2000. The only RPG stuff that wasn't out there was the mass of AD&D stuff, which was in a drawer in the entertainment center.

But anyway, I reorganized my closet and decided to move this tote box of stuff into said closet, so my perhaps irreplaceable RPG source materials won't suffer any more damage from heat, dust and bugs than they already have (they were all sealed in clear plastic garbage bags, but the endless heat was starting to break down the bags).

So I grabbed the tote box and gave it a hearty yank, and the withered muscles of my back and thighs went "Oh, I don't think so, no." It turns out that a tote box full of RPG books weighs a damned ton. I eventually managed to fight it into my closet, making full use of ninth-level curses, but now I'm too tired and banged up to look through the box.

RPGs have hurt me, and now I'm going to bed.

D20 System

I got a starter kit for the 4th Edition D&D rules for Father's Day. It's the D20 system, and I'd sort of vowed to never dabble with such things. Real D&D geeks play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, with its sans serif font and goofy preoccupation with polearms! Or so I believed. But now that I've had a chance to look at the D20 system as manifested in the 4th Edition rules, I think maybe I was a little over-hasty.

The truth is that it might be okay. The rules are pretty well written and pretty well organized, which is a pretty welcome break with past D&D tradition, where impenetrable rules were pretty much the order of the day. They have a high level of graphical sophistication and they're nicely printed on good paper, which doesn't hurt either. But mostly I see in the generalized D20 mechanic a tidy and efficient way of abstracting out a lot of the complexity that bedeviled AD&D, and I'm strongly tempted to officially adopt D20 as my preferred D&D system. It kind of reminds me of Dragonquest in the sense that the same basic mechanic applies to practically every situation, but with the bonus that rolling a 20-sided dice produces a linear probability plot instead of the wretched bell curves produced by rolling multiple 6-sided dice, and I like my probability plots linear.

So. 4th Edition D&D, D20... Good so far!

Black Prince

I got my copy of The Black Prince the other day, and it was exactly as described, so I'm happy. That wraps up the Great Medieval Battles collection.

So what's next? How about the whole GBoH (Great Battles of History) series, with particular emphasis on SPQR? Sounds like fun to me. Expensive fun, but fun nevertheless.

Actually, reasonably good copies of SPQR will be around for years; I'm more worried about aging copies of PRESTAGS, which I think should be in my collection.

The first real wargame I ever bought (as opposed to played) was STARSOLDIER, a stab at a game of tactical man-to-man combat in The Future, what with fusion powerpacks and flying armor suits and lasers and positron bombs and whatnot. The picture is a blow-up of part of the STARSOLDIER countersheet, and considering that this was my first game, and it formed a powerful impression on me, I guess you can understand that I come by my preference for matte-finish half-inch counters bearing images of laser-armed amoebae honestly.

STARSOLDIER was not a great game. I found it difficult to find players, because my friends would read the rules and exclaim "Yikes! Math! No way!" The simultaneous movement system also required that all movement and combat be plotted in advance, and to this day I remember the way my friends would groan when they saw those green-and-cream SPI si-move plotting pads. The game was not particularly fun solitaire - after three or four tries the dinkblog scenario just flat runs out of replay value - but I still tried.

But it's still a sentimental favorite of mine, even if it does have si-move pads and laser-armed amoebae.

By Way of Introduction

Permit me to make a few comments regarding what this blog is, and isn't, about.

I started wargaming in a serious way around 1974, and finally left wargaming behind around 1988 or so. My cultural wargaming milieu consists mainly of companies like SPI and GDW. I subscribed to S&T, Ares, and Moves. Though I didn't subscribe to them, I slavishly bought every copy of The General, Fire & Movement and The Space Gamer that appeared at any of my local game stores.

I liked SPI games. I liked realism at the expense of playability or balance. I liked half-inch matte-finish counters and paper maps. I liked monster games. I bought CAMPAIGN FOR NORTH AFRICA and WAR IN THE PACIFIC. I actually played games like THE NEXT WAR and DRANG NACH OSTEN. I had TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD set up in a spare bedroom for about six months.

But I never really recovered from the shock of SPI being taken over by TSR. Actually, I think it was the shock of finding out that TSR had no intention of honoring my freshly-renewed S&T subscription that really did me in. Somehow the end of SPI and the dissolution of GDW seemed to be as good a marker of the end of an era as anything else, and I have to say I haven't really liked most of the "modern" wargames I've bought over the last decade. Desktop publishing has brought whole new vistas of graphical polish to moderm games, but I'm not convinced that the games are better in any systematic sense.

But I wasn't a hex-and-counter snob. I got into role-playing games with equal fervor, and starting at approximately the same time. I was a huge DUNGEONS & DRAGONS geek, though I do have to confess that I never bought any D&D rules after ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. But unlike a lot of D&D players, I wasn't married to D&D. A partial list of role-playing games I've played over the years includes D&D, TWILIGHT: 2000, TRAVELER, TUNNELS & TROLLS, THE MORROW PROJECT, GAMMA WORLD, BOOT HILL, DRAGONQUEST, UNIVERSE... There are more, but you get the idea.

Curiously, one thing I've never really gotten into in the so-called "Euro-Game", things like CARCASSONE or SETTLERS OF CATAN. Hex-and-counter wargames? Count me in! Role-playing games? The more the better! Wooden playing pieces representing pigs? Hmm. Maybe not so much.

So what is this blog about? It's about the games I played in the Salad Days of Wargaming. Things like PGG, TOBRUK, STARSOLDIER and NEXT WAR. Things like D&D, TRAVELER and ARDUIN. Companies like SPI, GDW, Metagaming, Avalon Hill and Task Force Games.

Them were the days!