Tom Van Winkle's Return to Gaming

Last time, I wrote about the beginnings of slot-based encumbrance, keeping track of your character's equipment in terms of "items carried" rather than calculating weight and adding it up. It turns out I was close but not close enough. JC's useful comments pointed out that the beginning of slot-based encumbrance was in the second edition of RuneQuest, from 1979. This time I'm probing for the origins of the now-ubiquitous d66. That is when you roll two six-sided dice and treat one as the tens place and the other as the ones, giving you a range of 36 possible results. Among the rules-light indie game designers of today, d66 is a favorite procedure for generating stuff from tables. Let me cut to the chase and say that the earliest instance of d66 that I have found is from the innovative role-playing game of 1984, Toon: The Cartoon Role-Playing Game , by Greg Costikyan, developed by Warren Spector, published by Steve Jackson Games. ( Toon was one of the early games I ...

Slot-based or item-counting encumbrance is popular these days, and for good reason. It's easy, requires no calculations, and it works. Basically, instead of tallying up the weight of a bunch of individual objects, players just keep a list of how many items they are carrying. Cross your maximum threshold and you are encumbered. Items carried are assumed to average out in weight and bulk. The number you can carry may be fixed for all characters, or may be modified by a Strength stat or the like, or by the carrying conveyances your character has. Don't count your amulet or your spoon. Tiny stuff doesn't get counted. Big stuff counts as two items or more. Carrying ability becomes a transparent limited resource. Resource management is popular among players who hearken after the feeling of early RPGs (even though most players in the old days scarcely bothered with encumbrance, in my experience), but tallying numbers is not popular. This method suits both preferences. Arguably, t...

Today marks one year since I began this blog. It has served the purpose that I wanted it to serve for me. This last year of thinking and reading about role-playing games again, and playing them regularly again, compelled me to collect my thoughts and recollections in words, to put together the fragmented archives of my memory, to rummage through old boxes of the games I had not sold or given away, and to write about some of what I found. I also have been taking a look at what's new out there, with mixed feelings about it. A novice with social media, I never expected more than a few glances by readers, but instead there have been tens of thousands. Many left comments of encouragement and interesting reflection. Many filled me in on interesting things I never knew. A few dear souls let me know that they did not like what I had to say. I am grateful for all your remarks. Each one taught me something. As I said in the first post, "When I run out of things to say, I’m going to stop...

This entry is about the the influence that a player's experience of entry into the hobby of role-playing games has on subsequent preferences. It ends with questions for you , the reader. UPDATE: I hope that younger players will leave a response, too. I do like to hear from the other guys who are 45-55 years old, but not just them! All players, please respond. Even a brief answer will be interesting. *** Each one of us begins playing role-playing games somewhere, somehow, with some rules (or lack of rules), and with some other people. That last factor--our fellow gamers at the start--may be the most formative, because others contribute to our experience with different expectations, preferences, and prior experiences of their own. Different player groups produce different styles of play. I think the people we play with at the start condition some of our preferences for a long time to come. Reading other gamers' blogs and talking to friends about these games, I am struck by how di...

There is a lot of advice on the technique of running role-playing games out there. Referees think a lot about how to make fun games for their players, usually their friends. Thinking about the next game and scenario and optimal rule design becomes a hobby within the hobby. I'd bet that Referees spend a lot more time thinking about and planning for the next game than they do playing. In light of that, Referees will trade tips as part of their meta-hobby. We learn from each other and we get to enjoy that hobby within the hobby by talking to other Referees. How to run a game that is fun for others depends, however, on what it is we think we are doing. And the debate about what the role-playing game is, and what it is supposed to be, is as old as the game itself. Long-standing disagreements continue, as witnessed by Jon Peterson's new book, The Elusive Shift (my review here ). *** People thinking about RPGs have parsed players into types representing different needs. Already in 19...

DM David has an interesting new entry on judgment calls the Referee makes when players want to try the same action over again after the dice already said the outcome was failure. You should read that smart discussion to make full sense of this discussion, but the issue is one that every experienced Referee will recognize: under what circumstances do you let players re-roll to succeed after their character fails through a dice roll? How do you keep rerolls from depleting excitement and raising a degree of boredom? I'm with DM David on this. First, don't make players roll for something when failure would cause the game to stop in its tracks. If the object of the quest is behind a portal that they can't open because of a failed die roll, that's not fun. Second, the dice rolls mean little if your solution to their failure is merely to penalize them in time spent. (DM David cites a D&D third edition rule, which I had not heard of, that failure can mean it takes 20 times...