The Lost Level

Wow. Reading this in the local newspaper this weekend was a bit of a shock:

KENTWOOD — Friends of a comic-book store owner shot in an apparent robbery said they can’t understand why the shop would be a target.

David Pirkola is in critical but stable condition in a local hospital, said Stephen Jahner, who owns Apparitions Comics and Books with Pirkola.

“People open comic stores because they love comics and are lucky if they can make a living,” Jahner said. “It’s not like we ever have a lot of cash in the store. It’s just unbelievable.”

Kentwood police said a man entered the store at 2757 Ridgemoor Drive SE around 7 p.m. and demanded money, shot Pirkola and fled.

Jahner said Saturday he has known Pirkola for decades.

“He’s just a sweet guy, one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet,” he said. “He’s the kind of guy you want watching your back.”

I don’t know Dave personally, and I’m not a super-regular customer of his comic store, but I stop by to browse around Apparitions every other month or so. Dave has always seemed like a really nice guy, always asking if I need any help finding something, and not minding that I tend to sit for hours thumbing through his collection of used RPGs.

I can’t imagine why a comic book store, of all places, would stand out as a tempting target for a robbery. And how horrible that such a stupid crime was made even worse when an innocent person got shot.

I hope Dave pulls through. Some of his friends have put together a donation page where you can contribute to help out with his medical costs. From the donation page:

…David is in the hospital and stable, but still severely injured. As you can imagine, no matter how speedy the recovery, getting back to running his business will be challenging. Even normally, running an independent comic book store is an incredibly difficult job, and many retailers often operate with limited or no personal health insurance. Given that retailers are such an important part of our industry, we want to help out as much as possible.

Hang in there, Dave!

Well, it looks like I’m definitely going to Gencon this year. I’m excited! My one previous visit to Gencon was back in (I think) 2003, and I had a great time. It was, among other things, my first exposure to convention RPG games, in all their beauty and (in at least one case) horror. (The horror occurred during a game of All Flesh Must Be Eaten—and I’m not talking about the sort of horror you’re supposed to experience during a zombie RPG. But that’s a tale for another day.)

I hope to play in more events this time around than I did in 2003, when I spent too much of my time wandering the dealer hall spending money…. So I’ll be there again, armed with my D&D 4th edition books, my copy of World in Flames, and (if I get them painted in time) my Battletech miniatures!

My recent installation of Ultima 7 put me in a serious Ultima mood, so I decided to poke around a bit to see whatever happened to Ultima Online. (Turns out it’s still around and doing fine.) And in the process of doing that, I came across this gem:

Ultima 6: the MMORPG.

That’s right—somebody took Ultima 6 (circa 1990) and has reworked it to function as an online RPG. The website shows that only one person is online at the time of this post, so I don’t think it’s going to bite too deeply into Ultima Online profits. But still.

That’s… crazy and awesome at the same time. Documentation on the site is scarce, so I’m not sure exactly what it all entails. Is this the full U6 game, but with the added ability to play through it with others? I think I’m just going to have to try this for myself.

The Gygax story is starting to fade from the headlines by now, but if you can stand to read just a bit more about the Man and his Legacy, here are two items worth checking out:

First up is D&D 0: a fun look at the very earliest incarnations of what would become Dungeons and Dragons. This observation about the rules of proto-D&D struck me as interesting:

The rules themselves were barely there. You had to make it all up. This put so much responsibility on the GM. He had to be entertaining, imaginative, fair, rational. In many ways the steady march away from original D&D has been a sustained effort to remove the effects of a bad GM on the game. The more game elements are objectively determined, written down in books, the less you have to rely on the GM. The less you need a really good GM to run the game. And yes, the more of a science it becomes, and less of an art. Running this game was an art form and only a few people could do it really well. There’s something magical about that. Newer versions become more systematized and therefore more people can play. Mediocre GMs can run good games. But, if I’m being honest with myself, something of the magic is lost. That feeling that most of this game lived in your mind. Because of that, I think, it was more real. As more and more of the game lived in the rules and on character sheets, it became a game instead of a world in your head.

I think that’s definitely something to that. I like the more systematized, rules-complete modern versions of D&D myself. But I’ll also admit that by refining and revising the game over the years, we’ve lost some of the “I can do anything I can imagine!” magic that was present in the very earliest editions. And looking at the vast array of nostalgic early-D&D recreations popping up these days, a lot of people agree.

(That said, I for one am happy we now have games where Elf is not a character class, the GM has a bit of help from the rules, and thieves are not the only type of character that can attempt to be sneaky.)

The second item is The Seven Stages of Gygax over at Chris Pramas’ blog. I’ve definitely been through most of those. Funny stuff.

Well, I’ve finally gone and done it. After years of being pestered nagged lovingly encouraged by a friend to play through the Greatest Computer RPG of All Time, I finally broke down. Using Exult to get it working properly on my non-DOS operating system, I finally installed and started playing Ultima 7: The Black Gate.

U7 is widely regarded as one of the high points in computer RPG history. (My personal pick for best computer RPG is Planescape: Torment—we’ll see if that opinion changes after getting through U7.) I can’t speak yet about U7’s quality as a game, but I will testify that I have long considered it to have the coolest game box cover of all time:

According to rumor, Ultimas 8 and 9 were originally intended to have matching covers in red and blue. Would that they had. Clean, simple, classy: this box art told the sophisticated gamer of 1992 that he was dealing with an RPG considerably classier than the luridly-illustrated competition:

I might also note that U7’s cover was significantly classier than at least one previous Ultima cover, which was sufficiently demonic-looking to cause my parents to refuse to purchase it for me (and the mention of “astrological influences” on the back cover of the game box didn’t help):

But I digress. What of U7? I’ve only put a few hours into it, but thus far it’s quite good. The graphics and interface are extremely clunky, but it’s amazing how quickly you get used to that when the game itself is really good—try playing the original Doom sometime and you’ll see what I mean. For the first ten minutes you’ll be marveling at the crude graphics; by the fifteen-minute mark you’re as hooked as you were back in 1993 when you first played it.

If there was a point to this post beyond aimless jabbering, I’ve lost sight of it. Excuse me; I’ve got Ultima 7 to fire up.

This is a response to an excellent post over at the ThinkChristian blog (where I post as well) about D&D and the Christian response to it in the 1980s. As a Christian who struggled, back in the day, with whether or not my favorite hobby was satanic, this topic is one that really interests me. Here are a few semi-random thoughts in response to the post.

Great post, Chris. Hsu’s post has a lot of good insights.

This is a subject that’s near and dear to me, since I played D&D and similar games a lot when I was younger (I still play them, actually, as Peter and KDC note) and heard/read a lot from well-intentioned Christians who thought it was satanic.

Looking back at the Christian response to D&D, it strikes me as a good example of how not to respond to a questionable piece of culture. A few random observations about how Christians mishandled the D&D thing:

• If you were a D&D player reading a typical Christian critique of the game in the 80s, it was clear to you that most of the Christians condemning the game had only a marginal understanding of it, and had apparently done no research beyond skimming a rulebook looking for occult-sounding terms. Many of the more extreme concerns (that D&D caused suicide, that it was an occult recruitment tool) would have been put to rest by spending 3 hours sitting in on an actual D&D game, but you rarely got the sense that the Christian critics had even done that minimal level of research. Obviously you don’t have to know every nuance of something to critique it, but it didn’t seem like Christians were trying very hard to understand the game before condemning it. Also, despite the fact that there were (and are) Christians working in the game hobby, nobody thought to seek them out and ask for their perspective.

• As Hsu points out very eloquently in his post, this was a classic case of Christians condemning something without offering any better alternative. Nor did Christians spend much time asking why the game appealed so much to kids. Here was a whole new social/relational activity that was meeting a genuine need in the lives of kids like myself, and the only thing Christians had to say about it was to tell people they shouldn’t do it. Instead of helping people to pursue the roleplaying hobby (which was certainly not evil, even if you thought D&D was) in a way consistent with their faith, Christians just indulged in a knee-jerk rejection of it all, baby and bathwater alike.
• As PCG points out, those few Christians who tried to offer up alternatives mostly just ended up aping D&D in the same way that some types of CCM just ape mainstream music. I don’t mean to trash all Christian attempts at making Christian RPGs, because some of them were interesting; but a lot of them could be summed up as “Like D&D, but less fun.” And even these attempts were condemned by some Christians.

The result of all this was essentially to drive away people who might otherwise have listened to a Christian perspective. Christians sabotaged any chance of participating meaningfully in this particular discussion by failing to approach D&D, D&D players, and the whole issue of roleplaying in a respectful and intelligent manner. Ridiculous stories about D&D being an occult recruitment tool may have scared a few nervous Christian teenagers into giving up the game, but most gamers I know (Christian and otherwise) just decided that Christians had absolutely nothing useful to say about gaming, and ignored them. The “it’s satanic!” reaction just made D&D more popular by turning it into a Forbidden Fruit, and it’s now quite entrenched in popular culture, even if you don’t hear about it as much these days. So even if you believe Christians were right to condemn the game, the way they went about doing so must be seen as a complete failure, because it had the opposite of its intended effect.

This failure was particularly unfortunate because there really were spiritual issues surrounding some popular RPGs (some of the games that followed D&D went much farther in depicting violence, occultism, and other unpleasant stuff than D&D ever did), but by that time, nobody was paying any attention to what Christians were saying about it.

Wow, this whole topic—D&D and the Satanic Panic—seems so silly in retrospect. But at the time, I (and other Christians) took it very seriously. That’s what 20 years of hindsight perspective will get you, I suppose.

Just my $.02, as a Christian who played D&D back in the day.

Many, many people have in the last few days written eloquent tributes to Gary Gygax, so I won’t try and compete with them—I’ll just say that if Gary Gygax had not created a little game called Dungeons & Dragons, my life would be radically different than it is.

How many hours did I spent in my youth poring over game rulebooks, plotting out adventures in my mind, rolling up dozens and dozens of characters just for the sheer imaginative thrill of it? My first roleplaying experience was Tomb of the Lizard King—not one of Gary’s modules, but it wasn’t long before I was soaking up every piece of Gygax writing I could find. My cousins and I had so much fun with Tomb of the Lizard King that we proceeded to hole up for three straight days doing nothing but playing D&D (much to the consternation of our parents, who didn’t know what the heck to make of our excited babbling about clerics and hit points and gelatinous cubes). None of us had even the slightest idea what we were doing (my cousins made me GM even though I had never before laid eyes on a rulebook), but we knew we had stumbled upon something incredible. I have vivid memories of hours spent intensely reading through my cousin’s copy of the 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide. After that it was Top Secret, Middle Earth Role Playing, Mechwarrior and many others… games written by others but which owed their existence to Gygax’s pioneering. Thank you, Gary Gygax, for sharing your creation with the rest of us, and for giving this awkward teenager an outlet for his imagination.

Tonight we participated in what some are calling “GaryCon”—a game of dungeon-crawling, kobold-killing, treasure-looting D&D in memory of Gary. I ran the players through a mostly improvised dungeon populated by skeletons, giant rats, and an owlbear, and remembering Gary’s DMG advice not to coddle players, I even managed to kill one of them with said owlbear. It was not the best game I’ve ever run, nor was it the worst: it was just a good game, and that seemed perfectly appropriate.

At the end of the game we each rolled a d20 in honor of Gary. I rolled a 19.

Rest in peace, Mr. Gygax.

A fun list of five memorable events in MMORPG history. I don’t know why it’s so fascinating to me, but I just love stories of players and events in MMORPGs heading off in crazy directions the game creators never anticipated.

Here’s a real blast from the past: the Dungeon Craft project, which aims to perfectly emulate the SSI “Gold Box” D&D games of the late 80s/early 90s. Judging by the screenshots, the graphics look a bit sharper but in general the look and feel is straight out of the original games.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s a cool project, and I always love to see people celebrating the great games of yesteryear. Many of those games are still as fun today as they were back then, despite outdated graphics. But I have to ask: are there really that many people interested in replaying the Gold Box games?

They were great RPGs back in the day—I spent a lot of time playing Pool of Radiance and Secret of the Silver Blades (and who could forget Curse of the Azure Bonds, with the memorably impractical chainmail armor depicted on its box cover?). But thinking back about those games, I’m really hard pressed to think of a way in which they were not completely surpassed, gameplay-wise, by later RPGs like Baldur’s Gate.

I recall the time last year that I sat down to replay, for the first time in well over a decade, the original Final Fantasy on the NES. That was my favorite game for the old Nintendo system and ever since encountering it in high school, I’ve kept it carefully placed on the pedestal of nostalgia as one of the greatest RPGs ever designed. But when I tried replaying it recently, I could scarcely go for five minutes before being overwhelmed by the tedium—endless, repetitive combats, over and over and over, just while traveling from one city to another. Somehow that was an acceptable part of the gaming experience when I was a kid, but these days… not so much. Revisiting classic games is most fun, I think, when the original game has never been built upon by succeeding generations of games—games in unusual genres or styles that were never replicated. But when a genre has been continually tweaked, evolved, and improved over the course of years, it’s sometimes rather painful to go back and try playing through the earliest iterations, no matter how nostalgic it feels.

That’s how I feel about the thought of reliving the SSI Gold Box games. They were a lot of fun back in the day. But would I want to sit down and replay an exact, unimproved recreation of one of them today? What do they have to offer that their grandchildren Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights can’t handily beat?

But hey, obviously somebody enjoys this, enough that they’re using Dungeon Craft to design their own Gold Box-style dungeon crawls. More power to them. (And I enjoyed Devil Whiskey, a modern recreation of the old Bard’s Tale games, so I’m not really one to complain.) Game on, then, wherever nostalgia may take you.

I’ve been in a big-time Star Trek mood lately. I’ve discovered that an episode of Deep Space 9 is the perfect length to watch while feeding The Littlest Gamer at 4am in the morning, and thus have been progressing quickly through the series—I’m partway through season 4, and have recently upgraded my rating of the show from Not Bad to Pretty Awesome.

To complement my DS9 viewing, I’ve also been catching up on The Jefferies Tube podcast, which I neglected (along with all my other blog reading and podcast listening) during the Birth of The Littlest Gamer and the Flood of Family that followed. One of the recent podcast episodes focused on Star Trek RPGs, and I can’t resist adding some of my own thoughts.

I’ve owned each of the three Star Trek RPGs discussed in the podcast. (Well, almost: I owned FASA Trek and Decipher Trek, but the version of Prime Directive I owned was the first edition, not the (much better, going by the podcast’s description) GURPS version.) While I was not overly fond of Prime Directive, I like both the FASA and Decipher games—although I’ve played them a grand total of twice and once, respectively.

I like Star Trek. But despite enjoying the setting and finding the games themselves fairly interesting, I have never felt a strong desire to roleplay in the Star Trek universe. Judging by the fact that almost none of the numerous game publishers to acquire the Star Trek license has managed to keep the game alive for more than a few years, I suspect I’m not the only one who finds Trek a difficult gaming prospect. Why is this?

The podcast points out some of the big reasons that Trek is a tough setting to game in—it’s a setting where your character’s rank in Starfleet (or the equivalent alien organization) leads to the same difficulties that military-based games run into: somebody’s character is going to end up being the captain, and somebody else is going to have to play the ship’s counselor (or another sideline role). One of those is significantly more appealing to most gamers than the other. And the podcast notes that the massive amount of Star Trek canon material makes it hard for even the nerdiest gamemaster to run a game that can’t be sabotaged by a particularly knowledgeable Trekkie.

For me, the big problem is the very strict narrative structure that defines the Star Trek stories we love to watch on TV. In a typical Star Trek episode, the demands of the storyline define everything else about the show—the technology available to the characters, the outcomes of battles, who gets killed and who doesn’t, even the means by which the heroes eventually win in the end—it’s all tightly scripted to make sure the story works out in time (and usually with a nice moral lesson to boot). The high level of technology involved makes this especially important: in a Star Trek game, if Romulan Guard A gets lucky with a phaser shot in battle, a hero dies and the story comes to a screeching halt. In the TV show, by contrast, nobody dies unless it’s integral to the storyline. The heroes in a Star Trek TV episode often have their normal tools and skill rendered useless by narrative fiat (something that would infuriate most RPG players) to prepare the way for a clever technobabble solution at the very end, in just the nick of time. (And how to simulate that staple of Star Trek, the last-minute “I could try rerouting power through the polarized chronoton pulsator, which might give us just enough energy to return us to our own dimension!” solution?) That all makes for fun stories, but it’s hard to model in an RPG game, where players expect more freedom of activity and dislike any hint that the the gamemaster is manipulating everything to force them along a particular narrative channel.

I imagine this problem is not a complete game-killer, as plenty of people enjoy gaming in the Star Trek universe. But it bugs me enough that I’ve never tried to run a full Star Trek RPG campaign. I suspect that this might be the sort of situation that could be handled by certain indie roleplaying games that grant extra narrative power to the players and which are more like mutual storytelling sessions than traditional roleplaying games. But I’m an old-school dungeon-crawl gamer, and on top of that, I don’t think my wife would really want me heading off down yet another money-draining branch of this hobby.

So maybe Star Trek gaming just isn’t for me… although you can be sure that won’t stop me from plunking down my hard-earned cash for the next gorgeously-illustrated Star Trek roleplaying game that comes along. I love this hobby….