Make up as you go along

Last night I was going through a binder with my WEG Star Wars materials in it. This was the last game I played with my group before we all began adventuring in our often exciting adult lives. That would have been 1991 the year I began my university fine art education.

What I noticed was that I had paper clipped together a number of loose leaf sheets that contained a mash up of a title, simple maps, NPC drawings, sparse notes on encounters and even scrawl made during combat resolution. Looking at these I was reminded that these single page notes had been the fountainhead of the best sessions we ever played in that game. A cover sheet for these pages reads "M.U.A.Y.G.A." Make Up As You Go Along.

Recently I've been putting together a collection of notes about my original D&D campaign, the hope being to recreate some of the best adventures I ever ran for my group back in 1982-83. Those adventures also had a made up on the fly element to them, the original maps had notes written right on them and most encounter details were written in the rooms themselves.


Why were these adventures so popular with my players? Partly I think it was because they were tailor made for the characters in the moment. If the players looked bored it was time to imagine something really exciting, and that related directly to their character. This was especially true in the Star Wars games. But what I really think they liked was the fast pace and not knowing what to expect. Anything could happen and because it was a stream of consciousness thing happening on my part the most absurd things did. In D&D (1983) I remember them really liking being chased around dungeon corridors by a steel wall with spikes trap. It would pop up randomly and characters would have to save vs. death. In Star Wars (1990) the characters were pursuing an NPC over a series of heavily grassed asteroids with an atmosphere,  jumping from one to another (kind of sounds like Super Mario Galaxy).


What made it fun for them was the fast paced fear. Not horror. That's something different. What my players liked was Dungeon Panic.

New Header

Put a new header up until I get around to drawing something myself.

The Medium of Roleplaying Games

My interest over the past few years has been to examine the medium of the roleplaying game. I've read much about how RPGs are games and shouldn't be taken too seriously and most of what I've read in this vein has certainly been informed from experience. Simply put games are supposed to be fun and as soon as you make it serious then its no longer fun so why play.


I don't exactly agree with this concept but do see how that would be the conclusion for many. My take is that RPGs are a medium, like painting, film or music. All of these can be fun, serious, moving, exciting or any combination of the above among many other ways that one experiences the arts. Are RPGs art? If so are they worthy of being called high art or are they simply low or folk art. Since World War One the line between what we would consider high or low art has been eroding at an ever increasing rate. The Dadaists rebelled against the institutions of art and helped bring about a comedy of the absurd witch was how they observed the post war world. This eventually morphed into the Surrealist movement that focused on the subconscious and dreams, and dreams were needed to build a new post war world. Marcel Duchamp created what he called the Readymade, art objects selected from the everyday environment that were given the status of high art simply through the act of the artists choosing, such as Duchamp's Fountain, a urinal laid horizontally and signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt. Duchamp is considered by many, including myself, to be to the history and development of art what Einstein is to the the history and development of science. This jump toward the conceptual is what has been eroding the divide between what is considered art and what is simply folk/hobby craft. Andy Warhol eventually dumbed this down for the average person by presenting us with our daily visual consumption of advertising and celebrity in the context of fine art as Pop Art.


As new media are created and become available to the artist there has always been some resistance and questioning as to if the medium can be considered in the Fine Art context. Originally photography was such a medium in its early years, as were video and the human body itself in the seventies and  eighties.


Today such things as comic books and video games are generally considered to be an acceptable medium for fine art. RPGs are simply another medium that needs to shed its folk status. They are a creative endeavour that is consumed (as the art form it is) through the act of play. In todays scan and go society few people have the attention span to look at a painting for more than a minute, and this could be a barrier toward RPG as art, but as we are blitzed by visual pollution such as advertising (that is in some cases as well considered hight art) perhaps a backlash will emerge that will see a greater audience willing to participate in a shared experience that takes place in the mind.

The OSR Compendium

It seems to me that what the OSR community needs to draw more attention to itself and to survive into posterity is some sort of rules compendium, a publication of the best additions the community has offered so far. 


Questions...
 Who would edit such a thing, and how would they organize it? In other words who would be the taste maker here and what would such a person's criteria be? 
I suspect it would be possible that more volumes would come out in response if the first was not what was wanted. 


Personally I'd like to see a selection of mostly universal mechanics that stated what system they were intended for. They would all have to be something a person would actually use. Already some of the OSR contests are making it clear that One Page Dungeons and Random Gaming Tables are popular. That makes sense because game masters are creative people and they don't want something that is campaign specific or too flavoured, they want cool, inspiring and easy to incorporate where needed to add some additional detail or excitement.


Then again hot elf chick drawings may be all the online OSR community is ever remembered for.

Save vs Fear Fumble Results Table

In the event that a Character or NPC has to make a save vs. fear and rolls a 1 (fumble) the following chart can be applied.


1. Character defecates, urinates and screams with a loud fearful wail that creates a fear effect vs allies as if a cause fear spell had been cast by the wailing character, before becoming paralysed.
2. Character defecates and urinates before becoming paralyzed for the duration of the fear effect.
3. Character defecates before becoming paralyzed for the duration of the fear effect.
4. Character urinates before becoming paralyzed for the duration of the fear effect.
5. Character defecates before cowering with no armour bonus for the duration of the fear effect. Will only attack if provoked.
6. Character urinates before cowering with no armour bonus for the duration of the fear effect. Will only attack if provoked.
7. Character defecates and urinates before fleeing.
8. Character defecates before fleeing.
9. Character urinates before fleeing.
10. Character drops all weapons and gear before fleeing.
11. Character drops all weapons before fleeing.
12. Flight turns into fight and character attacks foe with no armour bonuses for the duration of the fear effect.

A notch or more

I was reading about character death in the CKG and there was a part on WW1 flying aces and counting kills. This was given as an example of what not to do with your player's characters as a CK (DM/GM/Referee). But as I thought about this I find that its the perfect thing to do to your GM screen. I proposing putting a red dot (although I might print skulls) on the player side of the screen for every character that dies. This is great especially for d20 where balance has taken the danger out of adventuring. The more dots you have on the screen the more the players feel they have to get serious about what they are doing. 

Geomorphs - the City

I've been thinking of a set of geomorphs over the last couple of days, and here is why. Even though I like the fly by the seat of your pants way I've been handling urban encounters in my Legends of Early Greyhawk campaign I noticed that my players have been seeking out a lot of different shops and taverns ect. which is to be expected. So a started to think that I could have a little map for each one of these kinds of places ready to go in my binder for when it is needed. The problem is that they really go to town when they go to town, and it would start getting weird if every type of place looked the same. The answer, geomorphs. Although there may be similarities at least each location would be different in size, layout and possibly number of floors. I could get a couple of 5"x 5" and a pair of 3 x 5" tiles on a letter sized sheet of card. At 5ft. per inch I think I have the basis for a really interesting set of urban geomorphs.