RPGaDay #9 Favorite Die/Dice Set

This is my favorite dice set. It's the dice set I've managed to keep together the longest. I actually bought it back at DunDraCon back in 2009. Most of the time, I never expect my dice sets to stay together. Eventually, you drop one somewhere and never get it back. There are always other dice, but now the set is incomplete. Not this one. It's held together for over 5 years now.

I call it my "Emerald City" set. It's got green marbled coloring with gold numbers, so Emerald City seemed like a good name for it. And just in case I needed a backup, I've looked in the Chessex booth at DDC every year, but they never seem to have the right kind of marbling. Green and gold, yes. But just not quite right.

They're currently held, and displayed, in a dice vault which was given to me by my brother this last Christmas. He also got one for my wife. My family is awesome.

I also have a d30 hiding around somewhere that I seem to recall as the first gaming die I ever bought. I had just discovered The Last Grenadier game store in Burbank. Even though I had less than a dollar to my name at the time, I wanted to buy something to compensate for all the time I had spent in there that day. So I glanced over the loose dice and saw a really cool-looking one with 30 sides. I didn't know what it was used for. To be honest, I didn't know what any of them were used for. But it looked cool and it as less than a dollar, so I bought it.

RPGaDay #8: Favorite Character

I'm guessing that this one is asking about my favorite character to have created and played, rather than setting NPCs and background characters.

With all the time I've spent as a GM over the years, the number of characters I've played is rather small. The ones I've been able to play for any length of time is an even smaller list.

Let's start with Konrad. He was the first D&D character I played, back when Third Edition came out. He was a barbarian. The fact that he came out with the name "Konrad the Barbarian" was completely unintentional.

The DM let every character start with a minor magic item, randomly determined. Konrad got a +1 undead bane warhammer. I decided this was a family heirloom and his barbarian tribe was totally into smashing zombies and such.

Then the DM decided to run us through the classic module Ravenloft. One of the features of this module was a fortune telling scene in the beginning that had a number of effects on the events to come. One of these was predicting that one of the party members had the Sunsword needed to kill the powerful vampire lord at the heart of Castle Ravenloft. It turns out that this was Konrad. But since Konrad didn't have a sword, it turns out his warhammer was able to become the prophesied weapon. Just pull this flange and turn that knob and suddenly it's a blazing sword!

Konrad's response to this? "Stupid broken hammer! You made it not hammer anymore!"

And then there was Ted. A friend of mine wanted to try out this megadungeon that he had written, so we got a group together. After my first character in that campaign had died (whose story I will recount later this month), I made Ted, Avenger of Kord.

My initial threat was that my replacement character was going to be a paladin with the Vow of Poverty feat from the Book of Exalted Deeds. Some of the other players are more into optimizing than I am, so there was some discussion about how overpowered the feat was. It actually is pretty powerful, mostly because it requires you to give up on ever getting magic armor and weapons that are pretty much essential for survival at higher levels. But it was suggested that a paladin would be able to get away with it, because paladins, like most fighter classes, are more dependent upon weapons and armor than other classes. So that's when I made my decision.

Though when it finally happened and it was time to roll him up, the rest of the players were unsure if they wanted lawful goodness in the party. So I turned to my back issues of Dragon Magazine and found a variant paladin called an Avenger that was required to be chaotic good rather than lawful good.

I decided on the patron deity of Kord because my previous character, who was a cleric of another deity, had made fun of a small temple of Kord we had discovered in the dungeon. Kord was technically a god of strength and athleticism, but my previous character instead decided that Kord was the god of carnival games. And I chose the name Ted for the character because of the superhero Blue Beetle, who's real name was Ted Kord. I knew the DM was a comic book nerd, and figured I'd try to score some points while I was at it.

Since paladins need a lot of scores high (Strength for hitting, Wisdom for spell-casting, Charisma for healing and turning. Consitution for hit points), I actually had to make some tough calls. One of them was dump-statting Strength. Even though I just said it was pretty core, something had to give. And since the Vow of Poverty feat gave stat bumps among the many other abilities, I figured that would be a kind of cool "character arc." Watching the weakling turn buff as he progressed along the path of Kord.

The funny thing is, even with that terrible Strength score (I don't think he had gotten it above 10 by the time the campaign fell apart), he was an athletic powerhouse. Whenever I had to roll for him to do something physical, it nearly always succeeded.

At one point, we had encountered a spiked floor trap in the dungeon. If you stepped on the wrong tile, spikes would come out of the floor to impale you. But it turned out that the wrong tiles were pretty easy to avoid. So Ted decided that he was going to jump over the entire trapped section of floor in one go. He had no Jump skill, and a Strength penalty. With the distance that needed to be jumped and the distance of any possible running start, I needed to roll a 20 on the 20-sided die. Guess what I rolled?

Another time, Ted was called upon to compete in a triathlon in order to prove the power of his faith and his god. Again, no Strength and no skill, but the dice came to my aid and he won the entire triathlon, gaining a number of converts to his faith.

RPGaDay #7 Most "Intellectual" RPG Owned

This would probably be my GURPS collection. From the math intensive GURPS Vehicles to the thoroughly researched historical sourcebooks, GURPS is probably one of the most intellectual RPGs out there. I've got over 100 GURPS books on my shelf, both 3e and 4e.


One of the big strengths of GURPS sourcebooks is that they make up as little as possible. Rather than presenting a quasi-historical setting or a mostly historical setting (with added awesome) Steve Jackson Games spends most of the book giving you the straight history in an accessible and game-able way. Only once you've got the facts of the situation do they introduce tweaks to make it more fantastical or pulpy or whatever genre you like.

RPGaDay #6 Favorite RPG I Never Get To Play

Watch out, because this is a pretty long list. I've got a lot of games on my shelf and most of them have not been played. And since I am pretty much a career GM, I'm not going to complain about not being able to actually play in any of them.

Fate is probably my big one right now. I bought the Dresden Files RPG since I was a fan of the novels. Diaspora is a cool sci-fi implementation of Fate that feels detailed while still keeping things approachable. I picked up the Fate Core rulebook and the System Toolkit at DunDraCon as well as enough Fate dice to make sure my friends had some if they ever wanted to play.

Burning Wheel has been on my list for a long time, but I still haven't been able to give it a try. The rules feel very heavy and dense and flavorful and I want to see how they actually work one of these days.

Spaceship Zero also looks like it would be lots of fun. It's a pulp sci-fi setting with lots of Cthulhu and Mythos references. I'm not as big of a Mythos fan as some people, but I know some people who would probably get a kick out of it. Even without knowing all of that stuff, it's got a great 50's era B-movie feel that I like.

And those are just the games that I've never played. There are a number of games that I have played that I haven't played in far too long and that I recall being quite fun.

D20 Modern was fun. The only problem was that advancement was quite slow. Rather than dungeon crawls with monsters in every room, fights (the primary way to advance in d20) were more sparse and had to be worked into the plot. I think I only had one player make it to level 2, even though I ran that game for a couple of months.

I ran a number of Exalted games back in First edition. I have all but one of the books for that edition. I do have a copy of the Second edition, but I haven't given it a go. There is apparently a Third edition in the works. We'll see if I'm able to pick up on this again.

Another great first edition that seems to have moved on was Cartoon Action Hour. I ran a campaign of first edition using a homebrewed setting that was a lot of fun, as well as my "Transformers: Attack of the Retcons" convention adventure. I even did writeups of the Transformers characters that converted the stats from the back of the toy package into CAH stats. They did a CAH: Season 2, and now I believe they're up to Season 3 now. I'm getting behind on so much stuff!

Maybe I'll dust off my New World of Darkness books and give them a go one more time. Or give the Palladium system the old college try (even though I've never been to college).

RPGaDay #5: Most Old School RPG owned

I didn't start gaming until the 21st Century, so I don't have a lot of Old School material. There are some AD&D books on the shelf, but mostly Planescape and monster books. I believe they are my wife's contribution to the collection. She's also the one who wanted to pick up The Compleat Arduin two-volume set and every Talislanta book we can find. So we've got the 1st through 4th editions of that game, as well as a number of supplements.

Also from Bard Games, I've got the Arcanum fantasy roleplaying rules as well as the Bestiary. Unfortunately, we were unable to find the third book in that set, which is a setting book detailing the island of Atlantis. A friend of mine does have that book, but not the others. I think we are now waiting for the other to die or stop gaming so we can pick up the items we're missing to complete the set.

From the OSR, I've got a copy of OSRIC, as well as the Adventures Dark & Deep ruleset. I also have the Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeon, which led to a nice 3-year-long campaign.

RPGaDay #4 Most Recent RPG Purchase

Unfortunately, my money situation usually means that I do very little game buying over the year. Which is why I make a point of having a sizable "souvenir" budget every year at DunDraCon. So my most recent purchases have already been posted here.

Though my wife is a big Pathfinder fan and insisted that we subscribe to the hardcover rulebooks. She's probably prefer if we took every subscription they offered and got their entire output as it was released, but money is an issue. So we've got the Advanced Class Guide coming in the mail sometime this month.

#RPGaDay #1-3

The last few months have been kind of a doldrums for me, which is why I haven't been posting regularly. But hopefully, getting back to posting will help me get back to my old self and get some other things moving. So I decided to participate in the RPGaDay blogfest

I'm doing the first 3 posts as 1 today for a couple of reasons. First of all, I'm starting late. Secondly, events did not take place in an orderly fashion, so I think I'd rather present them in chronological order rather than blogfest order.

#3 First RPG purchased

The first RPG book I ever purchased would be GURPS Horror, First edition (Stapled binding, Brom art on the cover) back in 1998. A pretty girl (who later became my wife) had shown me her copy of GURPS Wild Cards and I wanted to get her something nice. When I saw a used copy of GURPS Horror at the local game shop for a price I could afford (3-4 dollars, I want to say), I thought it would make a good gift. They were both GURPS, right?

It wasn't until I presented her with the gift that she explained that she had the Wild Cards book because she was a fan of the novel series. The game book was a good reference to the series and she had no real idea or interest in the precise meaning of the game stats presented for the novel characters. (She did wind up loaning me some of the novels to read. Good stuff.)

I was kind of hooked, though. I had to solve the mystery of exactly what a Strength score was and exactly how this sort of game was played. Over the next year, with whatever I could save up, I wound up getting the GURPS Basic Set (so if this was supposed to be about my first core rulebook or basic set, there you go) and a few other books.

Which leads me to...

#1 First RPG played

Amusingly enough, it was Rolemaster. Looking up GURPS resources on the internet I found a website done by a guy who ran a GURPS game not far from where my girl and I were living back in 1999. He listed an email address, so I dropped him a note. It turns out he had just finished up a GURPS campaign and his players decided they wanted to give Rolemaster a try.

With no real knowledge, but a healthy dose of enthusiasm, I asked if I could join the campaign. He consented, but since I had no clue about the system, he wanted to generate my character before I got there. Apparently, the process of Rolemaster character creation is complex enough that a spreadsheet was used to streamline the process.

The GM decided to do a Rolemaster conversion of the Temple of Elemental Evil.

I seem to recall only a few sessions of that game coming to pass. I think I wound up dropping out because of transportation reasons. I either had to leave early to catch the bus or pay through the nose for a cab after each session.

And now...

#2 First RPG Gamemastered

Since the last 2 covered the years of 1998 and 1999, we now come to the year 2000. The first RPG I ever ran was D&D 3rd edition, which was new out that year.

I bought the books because they were well designed and well priced. I had been in the habit of picking up a $20 GURPS softcover supplement on my pay days, so $20 for a lovely hardcover book was a brilliant deal.

My first long-term campaign as a player was D&D 3e at about this time. But not all of my D&D-interested friends were playing in that campaign, and some people who were playing were also interested in doing another campaign. But since every campaign needs a DM, that had to be somebody. I think I had started picking up Dungeon Magazine by this time, so I figured I had the resources to DM if nobody else had a brilliant campaign idea.

It was clumsy and awkward and a learning experience for all involved. I've gotten better, but I don't think I'm up with the Greats yet.