I integrated my referee tips from the Swiss Referee Style Manual into my Halberds & Helmets *Referee Guide*. On Google+, Aaron McLin commented on my opening paragraph:
“This is not a Monty Haul campaign and not a stupid dungeon crawl.”
I always find statements critical of other games and play styles to be an immediate turn-off. Who has ever described their rewards as overly generous or a dungeon crawl they have created as “stupid?” While they don’t work for me, personally, a lot of people enjoy dungeon crawling, and sometimes, being all about the new cool gear is fun for people.
The statement strikes me as a cheap shot (and something of a straw man) designed to establish some “I’m smarter than some other gamers, so my game is better,” cred. But (and I feel that I’ve said this a million times) I’ve never met a salesperson who has sought to undermine their customer’s feelings of thoughtfulness and intelligence by attacking choices they may have made earlier - in other words, when you go to a Ford dealership, they don’t open by going on about how crappy Volkswagens are - after all, they might not know what you drove to the lot.
My reply at the time:
It seems to me that the statement made it really easy for you to know that you don’t want to play at my table. Works for me.
On a more self-critical note, I guess that in general, I’d agree with you. Putting other play style downs is lame. But here’s why I started out with those statements and links: when I tell some gamers that I’m using a version of D&D from the eighties, I have to also tell them that I’m not running the kind of game they are thinking of when they hear it. So I need a short hand for “no, not that kind of game”. After all, this is not a generic rule set, this is the document we use at my table, so I want to use the first page to tell potential players: this is what I like, this is what it is going to be about. It will not be about prestige classes, cool new gear or killing gods. Some people might enjoy that, but that’s not what they’ll find in my game. That’s why I feel justified in starting out with a value judgment. It also tells the reader: if you don’t share these values, you should read something else.
I’m still wondering about the choice of words. I have played and run sessions where the game is about moving from room to room, opening doors, finding traps and fighting monsters, but all activities happen on the simplest level where practically no thought is required.
Moving from room to room has a clear procedure:
1. write down walking order on a piece of paper
2. thief is checking for traps (rolls dice)
Opening doors has a clear procedure:
1. thief listens carefully (rolls dice)
2. thief checks whether it is locked
3. thief opens the lock if necessary (rolls dice)
4. alternatively, the fighter kicks in the door (rolls dice)
Finding traps is also a thoughtless process:
1. thief checks chest for traps (rolls dice)
Fighting monsters is also thoughtless:
1. roll for initiative (roll dice)
2. roll attack (roll dice)
3. roll damage (roll dice)
4. say your armor class when targeted
5. reduce hit-points when hit
The thoughtlessness is there because at one point we determined this to be our optimal procedure and we didn’t want to keep restating it, and there was no reason to change it. There were no trade-offs to make, no decisions to make, only the motions to go through. Thus, while I wouldn’t have called it “stupid” at the time, that’s how I see it now.
I hope that I managed to turn the game around whenever I realized that we were descending into this routine. What I’m trying to tell new players at my table is that *this is not how I want to play*, except I want to use a few words as possible.
Is “stupid” the right word?
#RPG #Old School #Halberds and Helmets