Lunch break, making a fruit cake: 200g flour, some salt, 60–70g butter, very little water → dough must be super dry; lay it out, a handful of ground almonds (traditionally: hazelnuts), about 500g of fruit, bake at 200°C for 15min, add a batter of 2 eggs and 1–2dl milk, bake for another 15min.
I continue to come back to that post about modules and role-playing games I wrote the other day, and the blog posts by Frotz about the things he dislikes in games these days.
It seems kind of silly, but I think that like many prevailing attitudes that are harmful to the development of our societies are so ingrained as to be invisible without a lot of introspection, games also have these harmful prevailing concepts or assumptions. – Dilemma
It’s not just “modules!” It’s some of the consequences of how the game ends up being played that I like to do differently at my table. For example, in that last post of mine I argued that both the need to sell “level appropriate” modules and “tournament” modules leads the need to “challenge ratings” in order to quantify danger so that you can design the encounters appropriately, which leads to the idea of appropriate power levels for characters, and the perceived need of appropriate gear for characters, and since the thing that is guaranteed in old games is that levels depend on experience points which depend on gold found, all of this leads to magic item shops: characters have level appropriate wealth that they invest in level appropriate magic items.
In order to break out of this, I just provide magic items as part of random treasure. It’s appropriately rare and difficult to obtain, and never for sale. If at all, magic items work as gifts in a feudal society where kings and wizards hand out magic items as rewards, i.e. adventures, or expect characters to quest for magic items, i.e. more adventures.
Combine this with the earlier idea that all the higher level non-player characters in the mini-setting are available at the beginning of play, that is to say including all the magic items they own, and that player characters that retire keep their magic gear, then learning where the magic items are, who has them, how to befriend them, or how to betray them, it all turns into campaign goals that drive play.
Another element Frotz dislikes, and I dislike it as well, is the apparent impunity with which player characters sometimes feel they deserve to act in society. Sure, it’s a game. Everybody wants to be free of consequences, not pay taxes, disregard authority, make a quick buck and not feel bad about it.
I’m not sure what to do about this, though. In my own games, this does not really come up because I have players that are nice people. Perhaps I should argue that if your players aren’t nice people, you should just find new players. Why spend so many evenings a year with them if they’re not nice? I suspect that when I was a kid, we were simply learning to be nice people, and didn’t always get it right. But we learned, eventually. Phew!
But perhaps this and similar problems happen because “the state” is simply inept and evil in the setting? I wrote previously that in my game all the things are tainted but not irredeemably so: there’s always a way to change things for the better. Sometimes these are simple problems, sometimes these are hard problems, but they should never be as impossible seeming as the big problems we are facing in the real world. Therefore, the key to having a corrupt state is to have helpful people everywhere. Sometimes I forget as well, but that’s what I try to do these days. Perhaps the toll master in the harbour is annoying because she wants 5% of the cash you are carrying, but perhaps she also needs the help of the party and can offer a different kind of reward, a boon of some sort. Perhaps the rulers in a town are wicked but the captain of the horse stables is a nice fellow who loves animals and always gives the party a break.
Let me return again to the problem of players being not cool. I’ve been mostly lucky, so far. The one idiot that drifted off into the far-right madness left as soon as I started noticing that something was off. The final breakdown eventually happened on social media. Blocked, and moving on.
Then again, social media… I think I’ve found my happy place on Mastodon, but there’s not a lot of talk about role-playing games I’m seeing. The blog titles I skim are on the RPG Planet. I don’t read a lot of them. Perhaps there’s negativity to be found there? I don’t know. The posts I end up reading and the podcasts I end up following don’t show any of that.
Perhaps I’m a bit of a loner like that. I don’t want to discover yet another scandal about famous people doing terrible things. Perhaps we can’t get people to stop being terrible, but I’ll try to do my part in not making people famous. I am somewhat removed from the mainstream, from Twitch and Twitter, from D&D and other brands, not because my heart burns for indie role-playing games but because I simply don’t have the bandwidth. I close my eyes, try not to see as much, not to buy as much, avoid the shiny and the ugly truth.
Recently, for example, I’ve been listening to a handful of interviews by MadJay Zero and liked them. I found the podcast because I was listening to the Actual Play podcast episodes of Stras Acimovic, Sean Nittner, Jenn Martin, Misha B, and Jahmal Brown, playing Stras Acimovic and John LeBoef-Little’s Band of Blades, which I also liked. And I found those because I was listening to the episodes of Sean Nittner and Judd Karlman playing Burning Wheel, which I also liked.
Sure, I’ve also read a lot of not so great blog posts, and I’ve heard a lot of not so great podcasts, and I’ve played in a lot of not so great games, and there’s always the undercurrent that somewhere else, people are really doing it all wrong, or just being all wrong… I don’t know. I guess the important part with respect to psycho-hygiene is to not think about that, to not go there, and to not have other people’s shitty words poured into your brains. Just say no to that, look the other way, and move on, if the inanity you’re seeing online is a problem. That’s how I deal with the hobby. There’s so much cool stuff and so many cool people out there, too.
#Old School #RPG