Chateau Lloyd

For the first time in a long time, I'm involved in a tabletop game of Dungeons and Dragons.  We're using the 5th edition rules, but I'm running an old "Basic" era dungeon.  It works surprisingly well, and I'm sure the similarities are not accidental.

This is not the first time I've done retro-D&D gaming.  I did the same in the 1990s, and it was a hoot.

So when it was time to start a new campaign, our group talked about what worked and what didn't.  One thing I wanted to try out was playing without a map or figures.

This was how we did it "back in the day."  The miniatures industry was not as fully developed, pre-painted figures were unknown, most terrain was modified from model railroading, so it was a something of a challenge.  The rule books mentioned it, but my group just mapped the dungeon as we went along (mostly to avoid getting lost) and when it came to a battle, the DM described it and we went around the room giving our actions.

There were to advantages to this approach.  The first was that rules disputes about terrain, movement, line-of-sight and so forth were almost non-existent.  If a player could give a good account of what he wanted to do, the DM would allow it, or ask for a roll and players accepted it.   I should note that we rotated DMs, so the party-killing ego-maniac DM was something I had to wait until I was an adult to deal with.

The second advantage is speed.  Combats go very quickly when you cut own the measuring, calculating and min-maxing of movement and facings.  The game is less tactical, but much more immersive as people have to explain what they are doing rather than moving a figure so everyone can see where they are.  It's basically competitive storytelling.

Some might wonder how the rules work in such an environment, and the answer is that some do, some don't and we just work things out as they come up.  

Another simplification is initiative, when always seems to bog down a game.  Even with a small group of players, everyone has to roll, the results have to be compiled, and then people work out their moves, often waiting to see what someone else does or arguing about who should do what.

We've reverted to the old system where there are only two rolls: the party and the monsters.  Whoever has the initiative just moves all at once and as before, the discussion is interactive.  So yes, people can hold their actions, declare if/then situations and coordinate their actions, but it feels less like a wargame.

I obviously like wargaming quite a bit, but there's a limit to what it can do in a role-playing environment.  There's also the tendency for rule-mongering and exploits, and for the encounters to take on a competitive rather than collaborative experience.

A practical advantage is that setup and cleanup is much, much faster.  If you have a dedicated space and leave things set up, it's not much of an issue, but for us, keeping the clutter to a minimum is nice.

I may go back to maps and minis and some point, but right now, I'm not missing them.

Amazon Prime's desecration of J.R.R. Tolkien's work continues with the release of the second season of The Rings of Power.

A stunning (but at the same time predictable) development is the decision to "humanize" the orcs.  Tolkien's villains were cruel, cowardly, cannibalistic monsters who lived a debased existence.  They were a twisted mockery of elves created by Morgoth to serve as the foot soldiers for his war against the Valar.

These creatures immediately struck a nerve in the popular culture and were part of the original elements of Dungeons and Dragons and are now a staple of fantasy environments.

Alas, in our decadence, people have decided that what was once obviously evil must now be seen as good, so just as sodomy is the highest form of sex, so orcs are just misunderstood and must be rehabilitated into yet another People of Color oppressed by white bigoted imperialists.

I've dealt with the whole question of whether they are supposed to be an allegory for actual people, and the short version is "yes and no."  Yes, they represent human vices and were written with bloodthirsty and battle-crazed soldiers of World War I in mind.  No, they are not a racial caricature of anyone.

As the old saying goes: if you hear a "dog whistle," you're the dog.  Anyone who looks at misshapen, homicidal, cannibals who delight in cruelty and says:  "You know who this reminds me of..." is the bigot, not the guy who made them up.

It is yet another milestone on our civilization's downward path, and their utter rejection gives me comfort and hope for the future.

Last week the trailer for a new installment of the Assassins Creed franchise came out.  I'm familiar with the game, though I've never played it.  Anyhow, my understanding is that it uses the Knight Templars as some sort of ancient conspiracy against their arch-enemies and assassins are good, Templars bad, or whatever.   I'm quite the fan of Umberto Eco's Templar conspiracy tour-de-force, Focault's Pendulum, which I'm sure was at least some of the inspiration for the franchise.

Anyway, the new release is set in Japan, a first for the series, and people were naturally looking forward to actual samurai and ninjas duking it out.  Instead, the titular character is an African samurai, which has a lot of people scratching their heads.

Apparently, there is a mention of an African man reaching Japan during the tumultuous 16th Century.  The actual person was the servant of a Jesuit missionary and a Japanese warlord took an interest in him, taking him into his service as a page or manservant.

To put it another way, he wasn't an actual samurai.  

But facts mean nothing to modern social justice motivated scholars, and so the game publishers are digging in on the "authenticity" of their game.  Some are citing African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan as the authoritative source.  The book has hugely positive ratings, but that's meaningless in terms of whether or not it is actual history.

Long-time friends of this blog will know that when I dug into the Spanish Civil War, I found plenty of "respected" sources that spouted provable lies.  Antony Beevor is - for some strange reason - considered a respectable historian despite his blatant bigotry and complete disregard of the facts.

That tissue of lies has a very positive rating despite being filled with hot garbage, and I noticed that critical reviews of that Yasuke book echo my own audit of Beevor.

To put it another way, there is zero proof that this Yasuke was a samurai, but bigoted Western authors have decided that he was one, and that's that.

At the start of this dispute, both Encyclopedia Britannic and Wikipedia were skeptical of the samurai claims, but once the signal was given both sources rewrote their entries to conform to the new narrative.  They both went full George Orwell.  Never go full George Orwell.

The core problem with this transparent re-writing of history is that it convinces no one.  Skeptics will become more skeptical while fence-sitters will be turned off by the sudden about-face.  The true believers will parrot whatever is given them, which further strengthens the skeptical arguments.

Put simply, it is self-defeating, destroying the authority of once-respected institutions in return for ephemeral short-term gains.  This seems to be the hallmark of our age.

What makes this all so pathetic is that all this revisionism is being done in the service of a video game, one that has already generated overwhelmingly negative responses.  The various authorities that whored themselves out for this endeavor will see zero return on their investment.  Their best-case scenario is for some tech mogul to get a little bit more wealthy for a little while.

Meanwhile, the prestige of Western scholarship will suffer irreparable damage.  

At this point, I'm good with that.  Modern academics are nothing more than credentialed imbeciles.  Indeed, when challenged, they always resort to asserting their authority rather than providing actual evidence.  The faster this corruption is exposed and destroyed, the better for everyone.

I recently purchase a copy of the Bolt Action World War II miniatures rules.  This is published by Warlord Games, which is affiliated with Osprey, one of my favorite publishing houses.

The story behind Bolt Action is kind of interesting.  The game designers started their careers working for Games Workshop, and were involved in the design of Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Fantasy Battles and other stuff.  For many years they were quite happy with their gig, in part because they had a good amount of creative freedom and the company was growing by leaps and bounds.  From the 80s to through the 90s, there was continuous improvement in both the quality of design and physical appearance of their products.  I am not alone in considering it the Golden Age at GW.

However, by the late 1990s, the management had become more profit-oriented, and this resulted in friction between the designers, who wanted the best possible game design, and the management, that was more concerned with sales than the quality of the rules.

Since the bulk of GW's money came from miniatures sales, it was no longer enough to simply build a good wargaming system and  marketing it, the system itself became a vehicle to boost miniatures sales.  In practical terms, this meant that the rules of their games were altered to make players need to buy more figures either by increasing the scope of the game (requiring more models to play) or changing the rules for various units, requiring new models to remain "current."

As one might expect among creative types, they eventually got tired of this and left, staring various alternative companies.

Warlord Games is one of those successor companies, and the design of Bolt Action is essentially the final form of the earlier 40k system.  It therefore is familiar to me, intuitive, but much simplified and streamlined since it got more playtesting and the designers were freed from the constraints of managers pushing new editions every 3-5 years.

This places me in the unique position of having never played a game, but having a good idea how the game will play because it is so similar. 

The timing for this seems to be just right, as I am taking some time off over Christmas. 

There's something fun and exciting about starting a new game system, and that's definitely in play, even though I've seen much of it before.  I actually have a fair amount of figures already painted up due to my decision many years ago to use historical models for my 40k armies whenever possible.

At the same time, there is also scope for additional collecting (I'm looking at building a Soviet force to fight my existing Germans), which is always enjoyable.

Apparently Warhammer 40,000 is celebrating its tenth edition this year.  I quite during the third edition, which makes me seven editions out of date.

In practical terms, this has saved me hundreds of dollars in what would now be useless rule books.

The game had its debut as Rogue Trader back in 1989, and the first major revision was in 1993.  This is the 2nd edition, which I still play.  The 3rd edition was release in the fall of 1998, and made significant changes.  I stuck with it for a while, but eventually quit, and later picked up 2nd where I left off.

I bring this up because as a game designer, I strive to create a definitive and clear rules set.  The more a system is played, the more problems are identified and subsequently corrected.  What Games Workshop has done is create a situation where the game sees significant revisions every three years.  These are not about correcting mistakes; they sometimes appear to be random design decisions to highlight new tactics or draw attention to new models or factions.

GW can do this because of a near-monopoly position in tabletop gaming, particularly in Europe.  I don't sense anyone else could ever be in that position, and as yet, GW has managed to stay afloat despite these changes.  Apparently, it works for them, though I can't help but wonder how long this will continue.

Gaming companies are uniquely susceptible to sudden failure.  SPI, Avalon Hill, TSR - all of these were industry leaders and are now defunct.  Some years back, I thought GW was close behind them, but so far, I've been wrong.  So maybe they've found the secret sauce.

Over the weekend I was cajoled into watching Dungeons & Dragons: No Honor Among Thieves. 

I did not enjoy it.

The problem was that I wasn't sure if I was watching a satire or a serious adventure film.  There were plenty of obvious laugh lines aimed at D&D players, and yet the pacing and general structure of the film indicated that I was also supposed to take it seriously.

This was impossible, because as the film itself demonstrated magic and do almost anything, and no sooner would this assertion be declared false than magic would in fact solve whatever problem was at hand.

This goes back to my repeated critiques of super-hero films and now Disney Star Wars, which is that if there is all this non-stop action, when am I supposed to find time to care about the characters?

The more wild and improbable (and unrelatable) the setting gets, the less invested I become in the outcome, because everything appears arbitrary and random.

At that point, if the good guys win, it won't feel like they earned it, they just happened to turn over the right card (or the game was fixed from the start).

This problem becomes doubly acute when the plot is built around a bank heist.  In the real world, I know that locks, walls of steel and massive doors covered by cameras present formidable obstacles.

But in the D&D world, there's probably a spell to circumvent all that - and then a spell to stop that spell, and a spell to the stop that spell, etc. 

As I said, arbitrary and random.

There's also the setting, which has no meaning to me.  Oh, I recognized some of the references from the game, but there's no overarching story of D&D World like there are of Narnia or Middle-Earth.

It's just a tale from the Land of the Knee-Walking Turkeys or something.  The Princess Bride felt far more grounded in that respect.  It make jokes about the genre, but not at the expense of destroying one's immersion in the story.  The fact that it was a story within a story actually amplified this effect - as Fred Savage became more invested, so did we.

Fans of the film have suggested that the digressions, asides and so on represent the course of the game, and in that case, I'd have loved to see a bunch of nerds sitting around the table arguing about what will come next.  Then we'd have to real tension because the story would finally be anchored in some sort of consistent reality.

Instead of being arbitrary and random.

The change in the weather heralds the arrival of gaming season, a major part of coping through Michigan's long, dark winters.

Over the years, I've noticed there tend to be two types of gamers.  The most common are those who collect to collect - that is to say, as long as they retain interest in their hobby, they never stop adding to their pile of games or figures or whatnot.

Such folks rarely "downsize" the collection, they operate on an all or nothing basis.  They collect right up until the moment they liquidate, and their collections very often include unopened kits.

But there is a second class, and that's the one to which I belong, which collects to a point and then stops.   We may also made a decision to cull the collection in order to focus it, or stick with the parts that we like best.

Another way to describe this is the difference between "getting" and "having."  Much of the joy of collecting comes from the anticipation of the next purchase, and there is always a next purchase.  I enjoy the having much more.  I may teak this item or that, but there's a quiet satisfaction to having a collection come to completion.

The first style is more prone to hoarding because of course there's no natural end point.  There's always something new to add, even if collection consists of a limited set of items, because if you have them all, you can always buy duplicates or variants.

Indeed, our consumerist society lives to support people like this, and companies like Games Workshop depend to a large extent on never finishing their game systems.  There are always more rules, books or miniatures to buy.

That's one of the reasons I went back to an out-of-print edition, because it is finite.  My collection is not yet complete, but it's getting there.  Certain factions are actually finished, and haven't seen new additions in years. 

This frees me up to enjoy and appreciate the things I have, rather than fixate on what I don't.  I think that's a pretty healthy way to approach life.

As part of my continued review of the films of my youth, I picked up a copy of Excalibur.  I remembered it as being ahistorical, cheesy and that the Grail Quest plot line was really boring, and all of that was correct.

What I forgot was how many future A-list actors were slumming their way through it.  Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart all got prominent roles.

As to the film, it's a guilty pleasure, almost a parody of itself.  The super-shiny Renaissance armor is completely out of place, as are the apparently neon Celtic crosses.  It's all a giant goof, but a useful time-waster and certainly suitable for mockery in a group setting.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about it is that it wasn't an American production - the Brits produced this dreck, and one has to wonder if the producers were unconsciously imitating Monty Python's Holy Grail spoof. 

Excalibur borrowed heavily from existing classical music, which made a profound impression on me.  My first CD was Carl Orff's Carmena Burana, because I love the Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi tune.  Later on, I bought some of Wagner's 'greatest hits' so I could hear Siegfried's funeral music.

So at least the film has that going for it.

The 80s saw a bunch of fantasy movies, perhaps trying to capitalize on the Dungeons and Dragons craze.  Most were terrible, though they were bad in different ways.  Few turned a profit.  I think the biggest winner was Conan the Barbarian, which was quite good and has a superb soundtrack.

Excalibur falls into the "so bad it's good" category.

Since my military retirement, I've been debating how to bring some of my wargame designs into publication.  Several of them are quite mature, and what I particularly like about them is the ease of setup and rapidity of play.  These were developed to be used to study a conflict area during the lunch break, and they worked very well.

I think they would hit the sweet spot between playing a standard card game and something a little more strategic and elaborate.

One issue is the topic: contemporary/future conflicts.  These were designed as teaching tools, and the general public may not groove to them.  However, yesterday I realized that I could probably adapt the core system into a more popular topic, say the various civil wars in England (obviously including the Wars of the Roses).

A big advantage of this approach is that it has huge growth potential.  I've already built multiple scenarios, which gives the game some "legs" in term of future expansions.

Now if only I could convince my old unit to let me use their plotter to make the maps...

The research for writing Long Live Death was quite challenging.  I quickly learned that there was lots of information on the Spanish Civil War, but much of it was false.  It is one thing to be biased, and portray various actions in the most negative way possible, but it another thing entirely to simply state things that are not true.

For example, Hugh Thomas has a clear bias in favor of the Republic, but his information is meticulously documented and generally reliable (though I did catch a couple of errors in his very complicated narrative).

Antony Beevor, on the other hand, is a total hack.  If he told me the sun was shining I would assume it wasn't until proven otherwise.  His bigotry and deception by omission renders everything else has written suspect.

The Romans recognized this the logic of this, enshrining the phrase: falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in everything) in the Western legal tradition. 

I'm sad to say that when working on Walls of Men, this same principle destroyed my trust in a web site I had visited and enjoyed for years: strategypage.com.

I'm not entirely sure of who posts there now, but back in the day it was product of the longstanding collaboration of Jim Dunnigan and Austin Bay, two old-school wargamers who had collaborated in the best-selling A Quick and Dirty Guide to War.

During the Global War on Terror, the site had been very useful in providing updates on Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots typically ignored by the mainstream media.  However, over time I noticed that the site was often irrationally optimistic about American operations. 

To be fair, it was possible that their sources were simply lying to them.  After all, we know that a great deal of internal communication within the US military was fabricated to justify ongoing operations and conceal the magnitude of failure from the American public.

However, when I began to dig into the inner workings of the Chinese military, the errors were too glaring to ignore.  The breaking point for me was a post which described the Peoples' Liberation Army as being "all-volunteer" since the 1980s.  This is absolutely not true.  (I can't find the specific post because the site's organization is abysmal.)

Multiple published sources (which I used in my book) confirm this, and reputable web sites also state that conscription still happens, though no one is sure exactly what percentage of the PLA is recruited using it.  Either way, it's just plain wrong, and that kind of error casts doubt over everything on the site.  I now have to wonder how much else they go wrong, and while there may be some value to determining whether it was due to bias or ignorance, the inescapable fact is that they simply cannot be trusted.