Thinking Critically

 Like a lot of gamers and gaming fans, I've been watching the Critical Role animated series The Legend of Vox Machina (or as I like to call it "The Knights Who Say F*ck!"). Unlike a number of you, I didn't start out as a fan of the Critical Role Actual Play show. I've actually never listened to an episode. Mostly because these young whippersnappers need to get off my lawn.

The first 3 episodes that were released for it almost made me not want to keep watching. The first 2 episode story arc felt weak. While the introductory tavern brawl sequence is very traditional in concept, the execution of it was so over the top that it stopped being funny. It would be fine if this was a Looney Tunes cartoon and that was the whole of the work, but they had to go somewhere from there and the transition was not smooth in the slightest.

Because in spite of the earth-shattering kabooms that they used in the tavern brawl, they're actually just a bunch of down-on-their-luck adventurers looking to score some gold. And when the characters are stunned by the devastation that the dragon has wrought, I can't help but think "Didn't you guys do the same thing 10 minutes ago? Why was that funny and this isn't? Or vice versa? And why is fighting a dragon so daunting if you can destroy a tavern and the neighborhood it was in and laugh it off?"

(More on the dragon fight later)

The third episode, however, was simply atrocious. Mostly because it felt like a type of RPG session that I deeply dislike. The sort of session where the players are supposed to get up to dumb nonsense because the GM has carefully constructed the scenario such that either A) your dumb nonsense is siloed off from anything that matters or B) your dumb nonsense is required to set off some piece of plot. This was clearly a Type B situation, with the shenanigans calculated to offend the vampiric nobles in attendance.

Once the season's main arc got started, I managed to enjoy it by not thinking about it as Actual Play, but a normally scripted fantasy comedy/action show.

Then I realized that the dragon fight that closed out season 2 made an interesting bookend to the one that opened season 1.

Because those 2 opening episodes were written specifically for the show, as an introduction to the characters and the world before the story proper begins. So the dragon fight from season 1 was written as a scripted narrative, while the dragon fight from season 2 was a result of Actual Play.

Scripted fights typically rely on what I'm going to call the "master stroke." If there's an actual term for this, I'd be interested in learning it. The master stroke is the move or action that shifts the balance of the fight in the hero's favor. If the villain has revealed a weakness, the master stroke is when the hero is poised to exploit it. If there's a lesson that a mentor has been teaching the hero, the master stroke is when he finally internalizes the lesson and uses it to defeat the villain.

In the case of the season 1 dragon fight, the master stroke is when Vax identifies and targets the blue dragon's weak point just as it's about to breathe lightning.

In the season 2 dragon fight, we don't see those sorts of master strokes. Because in a D&D Actual Play fight, the villain falls when they've run out of hit points. And since a dragon is a huge and powerful monster, it's got tons of hit points, which makes the fight feel really long. And it also means that there are things that feel like they should be master strokes (like the bit where they go inside the dragon) that ultimately aren't because they don't do enough damage to take away all of the dragon's hit points.

Ultimately, I think the second season dragon fight went a bit too long and felt anticlimactic as all the things that felt like master strokes didn't really land and the actual master stroke was simply the attack that took away the last of the creatures hit points.

 A slightly more personal post this time around.

Probably the biggest thing to happen for me is that I finally attended my first Super Bowl party.

I was never much for sports in my youth. I did a couple of years of Little League baseball, but was generally nonathletic. The one time they let me pitch during a game, I couldn't get the ball over the plate and was replaced in mid-inning by a girl. She was one of our regular pitchers and really quite good.

And sports on TV was a sign that my beloved Saturday morning cartoons were over. That or the westerns that my dad liked to watch. So no real love there.

The only time I particularly cared about sports was when I worked at a pizza joint. Sports, especially football, were strongly correlated with pizza. Learning the home teams and the big games helped me prepare for what business would be like on those days. Super Bowl Sunday, of course, was a madhouse. The Black Friday of the pizza business.

When I left that job over 3 years ago, I was determined to blissfully ignore the Super Bowl. I did try out a season of Fantasy Football, just because of all of the jokes about how fantasy football is like D&D for sports people. (For the record, it's very different. There's a minimum of agency once you've picked your team and you have to wait for the results of each player's performance over the week.)

When a friend of mine invited me to his Super Bowl party this year, I was very interested. For one thing, I make a point of going to as many of his parties as I can. He's one of the first people to welcome me to San Diego when I moved here. Also I know he doesn't care that much about sports either, so this wasn't going to be about the game. Just an excuse to have a party. I also thought it would be an interesting opportunity to enjoy Super Bowl Sunday, rather than dreading or avoiding it.

Things went pretty well. I brought some of my famous Four Food Group Mac & Cheese. I say "Famous," but this was the first time I made it for someone other than my wife. It's still darn good and I think the people who tried it liked it. But it was competing with a lot of other things that other people had brought, so I wound up with plenty of leftovers. More for me!

Since I knew that there would only be a modicum of attention paid to the football game itself, I thought I would bring some other light games that people might want to play. The one that got some play is Zombie Dice from Steve Jackson Games. It doesn't require a lot of space to play and the rules are simple enough that you can teach it to drunk people. I actually played it with the host and he enjoyed it enough that he got his own set. Maybe next time, I'll get to throw down one of the Fluxx games.

Yet Another OGL 1.1 Post

 I know, everyone's talking about it. so I guess I have to talk about it, too. It's made all the more difficult by the fact that this whole thing has been moving rather quickly, while I do not. Much of this was written before WotC acknowledged and attempted to apologize for the situation, but I think there's still something here, so I'm going to let it ride.

There's a lot of hullabaloo going on about the leaked Open Gaming License 1.1 going on and a lot of it is very Chicken Little (The shy is falling! The sky is falling!)

I'm not that. That's not what I do. I'm more of a cynic. I have been ever since the OGL first began as an attempt by Ryan Dancey to offload the unprofitable bits of the D&D business onto the fan community (In case you doubted how cynical I am.)

In short, the Open Gaming License lets people access and refer to a pool of Open Gaming Content freely in published works. The most prominent piece of Open Gaming Content is called the System Reference Document, which describes the core mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons. As D&D has released multiple editions in this time, there have been multiple SRDs. Other creators can declare their content Open Gaming Content according to the terms of the license, but whether anyone actually does is very hit or miss.

Using the license has been fairly simple. Just include the text of the license in your product, declare what Open Gaming Content you're using and what bits of your original creation you're releasing as Open Gaming Content. No fees, no approvals, no worries. So easy, even your dog can do it (and believe me, especially in the early days, it felt like a lot of them did).

But now there's a (supposed) new game in town. There's a new revision of D&D coming called OneD&D and for the first time in over 2 decades, the OGL is getting revised. To be clear, this has not been officially released and all of this is based on something that is "leaked." However, there have been no denials and a few confirming details.

There are two major issues with the new OGL.

The first is that it's much more restrictive than the original. It's much more work to use, requiring the prospective user to notify WotC what they'll be publishing (at minimum). The more money you make, the more information you're expected to provide until finally, you start owing royalties.

My initial take on the royalties issue was overall meh. It only applies to publishers who make more than $750,000, which is more money than I'll ever see in my lifetime. If you're the Jeff Bezos of the gaming scene, I'm not worried about you.

But it's been pointed out that the royalty rate is designed to be throttling to a business of that size. They might make it as a million-dollar company, but they'll never make it to become a multi-million dollar company. They're trying to prevent another Paizo (more on that later), which on the one hand makes sense, but on the other hand is monopolistic and therefore anti-capitalist and unamerican.

The second issue is that the new OGL specifically revokes and supersedes the old one and there's a lot of panic about exactly what that means.

Specifically, what happens to the 20+ years worth of content that has been released under the original OGL? Does it have to abide by the new restrictions and requirements, or can it continue to exist and be sold as is?

This is my big concern because as time went on, the amount of Open Gaming Content that people could draw upon expanded immensely. While people think of it as a D&D/D20/Wizards of the Coast thing, a lot of publishers released Open Gaming Content. In a lot of cases, this was as simple as publishing a fantasy scenario where the quest objective was some new magic item and in order to get it, you had to defeat some new monster and both the magic item and the monster were declared to be Open Gaming Content. In other cases, entire rulesets were released as Open Gaming Content.

I think the interesting, and possibly revealing question would be: What happens to the D6 System? Originally the ruleset for the formative Star Wars RPG of the 80's and 90's, a new owner tried to make a comeback with the company and the system. When that didn't turn out as well as he needed it to, he released the system into the pool of OGC as a way to render it "abandonware." Should theses (or any) changes go through, would it still be abandonware? Or does it wind up back in the old owner's possession, seemingly like a haunted doll that keeps turning up when you finally think you're rid of it?

While the OGL has technically been in existence consistently since the year 2000, there was a period when it wasn't supported. The OGL was released to accompany the 3rd edition of D&D, but when the time came for 4th edition, they decided not to release the 4e SRD into the pool of Open Gaming Content. The fan backlash was pretty strong and multiple companies tried to create new core products that would be released under the OGL that would let players continue to doing what they were doing.

The victor of this struggle was Paizo with their Pathfinder system derived from the D&D SRDs that WotC had released as OGC. It didn't hurt that they were started as a magazine company, so they were geared to produce regular support products of their own in the form of Adventure Paths.

In the years since Pathfinder was released, it and D&D have been neck in neck for the top 2 RPGs in the industry as a whole. Even after 5th edition and the return to the OGL this has been pretty consistent. Which puts Paizo in the distinct position of being the company most dependent upon the pool of Open Gaming Content.

Another problem with all of the Chicken Littles running around is that a lot of anger and worry creates some misconceptions.

There are a couple of things that are less worrying than some people make it out to be. For example, the OGL 1.1 leak states that it only applies to books, whether print or digital and not other forms of media. This created a number of declarations that WotC was coming for Critical Role, because the new OGL explicitly excluded game streams/webshows (Streams are actually covered under the WotC Fan Content Policy, and Critical Role is probably big enough that they've got WotC on speed dial if they need anything specific). But really, this is just a clarification. A lot of technological development has happened over the last 20 years since OGL 1.0 was released, so it makes sense to mention how the OGL might interact with new technologies. Some people are complaining that this is so WotC can monopolize OGL NFTs, but based on what I know of both, an OGL NFT makes zero sense. If someone can explain that to me, I'm listening.

The "license-back" provision caused a stir, but it has something of a reason to be there. Because this license would be more intrusive, there's a very high likelihood that anything you release under it would be to be seen by WotC design staff. The license-back therefore means that they're not necessarily liable if they wind up being influenced by something that they read. It does have a pretty blatant downside in that it really relies on how hard the WotC design staff is trying not to be influenced by anything that they might be called upon to review. In the hands of an ethically dubious company, this would be a big red flag reading "Plagiarism is okay!"

In the week since I started writing this, a lot has happened. A number of publishers have forsworn publishing anything that supports 5e, with some projects being canceled, others repurposed to other systems, and in some cases, announcements of new systems being designed to support other projects. Paizo has capitalized on WotC's latest misstep by announcing their own Open RPG Creative (ORC) License. All of these announcements are, of course, preliminary and it's hard to say exactly what will come of any of them in the fullness of time, but it will be interesting to see.

The other thing that's happened is that WotC has actually responded. And it's not great. They claim that the leak was only a "draft" that they were considering, even though the dates included in the leaked document were fairly concrete and very close. The day this statement was released was, in fact, the date that this whole thing was supposed to go live, and I don't think that's necessarily a coincidence.

It's not really an apology and comes off very defensive. Some might say that putting it on the D&D Beyond website was an attempt to "hide" it away from the WotC site so they can brush it off. But there's also the fact that one of the big outpouring of fan feelings came in the form of cancelling D&D Beyond subscriptions. So the idea might have been to put it on the front page of everyone who might be thinking about cancelling their subscription.

I have more thoughts, but this has been brewing long enough and will probably be even more out of date by the time anyone actually reads it.

I made it through all of the holidays and am looking forward to some semblance of regular life.As a pretty introverted person, I find that most social interaction has a cost. And over the last few weeks, I've been paying that cost to keep up with friends and family until I am in debt.

I think every introvert has some version of this. But what really sucks as a gaming introvert is that these interactions cost the reserves that I could be gaming with.

There's a thing going around called #dungeon23 which has people creating their own megadungeon, describing one room every day, with each month creating a level, until you have a 12 level megadungeon with 28-31 rooms on each level. It's a neat idea and it does tempt me. The downside is that I only have a small window of time each week to do my creative stuff. That's probably something that I should put more effort into changing this year. Those of you who are participating, I salute you!

Since a major project like that won't be taking up my time, I should probably put some of my limited effort into deciding what I will do.

I want to do a campaign, which means multiple sessions. So no Fiasco, since that's built around one-shot play.Fate's a maybe, now that I've gotten some actual practice with it. I still haven't done a Powered by the Apocalypse game and my collection does boast a number of them.

Something OSR is tempting, but I don't want to step on my own toes should I actually get my ambitious OSR campaign started. On the other hand, it would mean that I could do the #dungeon23 and have the campaign be running the players through that.

Or is this the year that I finally try to run D&D 5e? I've actually put some effort into acquiring the books. with a Players Handbook and a Dungeon Master's Guide in my possession. Maybe I'll finally manage to get caught up with the Joneses.

I'm also thinking maybe Starfinder. It's a game that I really want to like, but my first two experiences with it have not been good. I don't know that I could commit to one of the Adventure Paths, but their series of Free RPG Day one shots do have a continuity to them, so a sort of mini-campaign with them could be fun.

Lots of things to think about.

The Holidaze

 Here we are, in between two of the major holidays of the year.

I wound up getting a pretty good grip on my All Outta Candy Canes scenario, but the holiday has been draining enough that I don't know if I have the ability to squeeze it in this year. The good news is that I've got some pretty well developed notes, so it shouldn't take much to get things into shape when I look at them again next year.

Speaking of next year, it's about time to talk about New Year's Resolutions. In spite of what people say, I'm not interested in being a "new me" in the new year. I just want to be better at being the same old me.

My resolution right now is to run a campaign. I've got a really ambitious campaign in mind, that I've been working on for years, but I don't know when/if that will be ready. To make things more manageable, I'm going to say that in order to fulfill this New Year's Resolution, I must run at least 2 sessions of the same game with the same characters and setting.

I've gotten to the point that I'm okay doing one-shots at the monthly Meetups, typically using improvised scenarios (my big games are Fiasco and Fate Accelerated using the It's Not My Fault! cards). My next steps are doing something a bit more scripted/planned and/or something that goes for multiple sessions. The ideal is both.

Did You Miss Me?

The reason that I didn’t update my blog last week is that I’ve been having internet connection issues and I wasn’t able to access Blogger. I actually still can’t, but I’m writing this offline and will upload it when I get a chance.

It has made working remotely more difficult. For a couple of days, I wound up hanging out in coffee shops most of the day using their WiFi. I eventually figured out a workaround, which consists of disconnecting and reconnecting to the router until it finally decides to let me online. And then it works for a few hours until it decides not to again.

I’m pretty much done with my All Outta Candy Canes scenario. At least, I think I could run it if asked. I almost ran it last Saturday, which was when my Meetup group has its monthly meeting. When we’re done socializing, we see who brought a one-shot game to play. Normally I’m one of only a few who brought something, but this time, there were enough that I didn’t get any interest. Which was fine. I got to play a fun game called Spire. It’s a game of revolution in a fantasy mega-city and I had heard many good things about it from my much cooler nerd friends.

If I have a stumbling block with the project, it’s figuring out how to define characters. According to the rules I’m using, characters only have one stat and it’s more of a pacing mechanism than an expression of competence. But players like to know who their character is supposed to be and what they do, as well as suggestions for any funny voices and shenanigans to get up to while playing. I think that's where most of my time is going. this week.

New Month, New Challenge

 Unfortunately, I will not be continuing with Apothecaria. It was fun and a good writing exercise, but it took most of my writing time for the week. Actually, even a little bit more than that. It does suck that I only really take my writing club time to write. One of the downsides of working from home is that I spend my entire day in front of my computer, so it takes effort to park myself back in the chair to do any personal writing.

And I do have a project that I'd like to be working on. For years, I've wanted to do a Christmas themed adventure using the system "All Outta Bubblegum" switching out bubblegum for candy canes to fit the seasonal mood. I had toyed with a number of possible scenarios, but it wasn't until just after Christmas last year that the best inspiration ever struck.

One of the more interesting holiday traditions of modern times involves NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. While there are differing stories about how the whole thing started, NORAD has released reports of Santa's whereabouts since some time in the 1950's. Which brings up an interesting question: With all of the stories that involve Santa getting derailed on his deliveries, what would NORAD's response be if that blip that they're tracking all of Christmas Eve were to disappear?

So the short version of the pitch is "The Expendables Save Christmas." I hope that I'll be able to get enough notes together that I can run it this year.

And if you liked reading my playthrough of Apothecaria, let me know. I might be willing to revisit it on slow weeks, or if I can get my butt in my writing chair for more than 2 hours a week.