Not too much to report.

I tried getting in touch with the players from my one-shot, but nobody responded, I've still got the notes for everything, so I could very easily either pick up with those players if they come to the next meetup next week, or just run it again for new players.

I'm trying to keep myself busy by building up a space sector for Stars Without Number. It lets me start with random results that let my analytical brain to do its job since my creative brain doesn't come out too often. While one of the things I love about the OSR is that ability to lean on random results, I've never been a strong fantasy buff. So a sci-fi game that comes with random tools for setting and scenario generation is a great thing. I'd still like to do Star Trek at some point, but SWN and Traveller-style games might be what I get.

 Well, it was a little bit of good news. The local RPG group I belong to had their monthly meeting and I offered to run an OSRIC one-shot which managed to get a couple of players. But even though I chose the simplest module that I could locate in my collection, we weren't able to finish it. It also didn't help that a couple of the players were sleep deprived and had a hard time concentrating. That's when someone suggested that we pick it up again later.

On the one hand, that meant that they were having enough fun that even if now was a bad time, later might be better. On the other hand, it would mean making a commitment to another session. This is what I've been wanting, but at my current level of anxiety, it feels almost overwhelming. Needless to say, I have not made an announcement of the follow-up session. Maybe getting this of my chest on this blog will help.

Overthinking my Underthinking

 I've been doing my writing group every week, but I haven't always been carving out time to blog.

I'm sure I've mentioned my idea of doing a blank map/sandbox/hexcrawl campaign. The reason for the "blank map" part of the idea is simply because I don't enjoy mapping out all of the details of a fantasy setting, so my plan was to have the setting mapped and detailed as it's explored by the characters.

The problem is that I got so dedicated to underthinking (putting everything into the hands of the players and their characters) that I wound up overthinking (trying to find or create systems for this to happen). Just something like a setting building questionnaire or session of Microscope might be all it takes.

Taking a step back, I think I should take a moment to reassess my goals. A big part of it is treating the OSR as a storygame. By which I mean using the incentives and structures of Old School D&D and letting the story come from that, instead of trying to impose a story structure onto it.

GP=XP: This is to be the main driver of game play. If you want to level up, you do it by chasing gold. Monsters are minor to moderate sources of XP, but the big one is treasure.

Resource management: One of the things that sets Old School D&D apart from later editions is how tight the resource management is. A magic-user with 1 spell per day. Handfuls of hit points. Encumbrance determining how much you can bring into the dungeon. Necessity is the mother of invention and the goal here is to create those necessities.

Reaction rolls and Morale: These rules will keep every encounter from being a simply slugfest to the death.

Procedural generation: This is something that I realized that I really liked as I was working on other games. First of all, since I'm terrible at coming up with ideas, elements from a random table can be a big spur to my creativity. Secondly, by not having a strong attachment to the outcome of an event or encounter. since it's not part of my big, deep plot, I let myself be surprised by the players' responses, which makes me something of a player at the table as well, even if I'm the GM.

The big thing that I'm not completely decided on is the history of the world. While I don't intend to generate a big elaborate timeline, So what I'm trying to decide is whether the world is new (as it was in my initial "blank map" concept) or if it had a history that I just haven't detailed, but might be created as details are filled in.

As I did game prep for my "zero-history" version of this, I wound up trying to roll up certain details, such as background elements for an intelligent NPC and rejecting a lot of results because they assumed that the world existed for longer than it had. So details that addressed the NPCs parents, for example, couldn't be used, because the world hadn't been around long enough for anyone to have children.

If I were to go with a world with history, it would be as simple as letting those sorts of historical details back in. Once enough events get nailed down, maybe they turn into a timeline and eventually, coupled with the actions of the PCs themselves, into a vast and interconnected history

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.