Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice

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This month, Roger and Mike go back to the roots of role-playing. We also have an interview with Michael Mornard, also known as Old Geezer, who brings us recollections of the early days of what would become Dungeons and Dragons.

This handy guide to D+D versions may be helpful if you don't know your Mentzer from your Moldvay - and it links to most of the major retroclone sites.

You may also be interested in Dungeon Crawl Classics, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and Dungeon World. There's also the Famous Last Words list. Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.

Some corrections: Greyhawk was Gygax's game, and Blackmoor was Arneson's. Also, in Dungeon World, replacement PCs can duplicate the class of an existing party member.

Transcript (thanks to Valued Listener Shimmin Beg):

Michael Cule: Hello. This is Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice, the third in a series in which we talk about roleplaying games of various genres and types, and offer our collective wisdom to the universe out there. Has the universe been in touch with us yet?

Roger BW: Some of it has

Michael Cule: Well, let me know what they're saying, we may need more matter. Well, after our initial forays into the weirdness of modern horror and the even weirder stuff of the transhuman future, we're going back to basics this week, in fact, back to the very beginnings of roleplaying games. It's still for over 80% of the roleplaying hobby, and it was certainly true when we started, that you start by playing a game in which you go down a hole in the ground which is filled with monsters who have lots of stuff that you want to take, and you smite them by sword and by spell, and you come back up and get better as you go along. And it all dates back to the early 1970s, when a bunch of wargamers in Wisconsin decided that they were going to try something new; a game in which you're not a general, but in which you are a single warrior or something like that, in a fantasy world, going down into the aforementioned hole in the ground — the first one being Greyhawk Castle, run by Dave Arneson.

Roger BW: One should point out, perhaps, that these were miniatures games. You couldn't get miniatures for dragons and orcs and stuff like that; they just didn't exist.

Michael Cule: They had the rules, and Chainmail, which they then adapted to what would in other circumstances be a squad-level one figure equals one person gaming event. But you were a team of people, and rather than having rifles and radios, you had swords and spells, and you went down a hole in the ground, and you did a common effort to smite the things which were a) evil and b) had lots of treasure. And this worked! It still works, to a great degree, and people are still very fond of this way of roleplaying. And we're going to examine some of the reasons why, and some of the ways that people are using modern resources to play a very old-fashioned sort of a game.

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Roger BW: I think one should consider that at least for gamers like us, who are old enough to have experienced this the first time round, there is nostalgia involved. One should not underrate nostalgia.

Michael Cule: I think we should mentioned in the light of nostalgia, the fact that people are publishing a lot of games which are essentially copies of the bit of D&D they remember and enjoyed.

Roger BW: Yep, and we'll go into those in a little more detail a little later on. People who weren't around the first time are maybe wondering what all the fuss was about. Computer games of course were very much built on the early concepts of D&D, as in, basically you're going out and fighting things and getting tougher as a result of fighting them.

Michael Cule: Yeah, instead of getting dead or old or permanently injured as would happen in a rational universe, that which does not destroy us makes us stronger.

Roger BW: Except oxygen deprivation

Michael Cule: That makes us dumber.

Roger BW: But the computer games took this idea and then went off largely on their own thing, and now some of that's coming back in. You've got something like World of Warcraft, say, where people are getting at least some of the fun of interacting with other players, but what they don't get is a human GM who can say "Hmm, you did something unexpected, but that's a good idea — let's see if it works." As opposed to a computer which just goes "No idea what that is, oh well. Doesn't work."

Michael Cule: FAILURE NOISE. You attempt to punch that thing and nothing happens. It's very frustrating.

Roger BW: I think part of the appeal also is simplicity of the rules. I mean, yes, there are completely free-form games, but if you don't want to go that far, these are pretty basic rulesets. Basic D&D was 64 pages, I think?

Michael Cule: I'm going to disagree here. My problem, and I haven't played D&D for a long time, was that it was simple but it wasn't simple enough. It had some strange assumptions behind it. Monsters and people were separate things. They were built in different ways, they had different rules for them, and I remember the joy and gladness I found when I first looked at Runequest and realised "that dragon over there has Strength the way I have Strength, it has Intelligence the way I have Intelligence, it has To Hit chance the way I have To Hit Chance, it has a lot more of them than I have, but we're built in the same sort of way. We're creatures of the same universe."

Roger BW: I think it would be fair to say that particularly the early D&D rules weren't so much explicitly designed as accreted. You start off with a core system of hitting things and doing them damage, but then things like strong people doing things that needs strength is one subsystem that is completely unlike everything else; thieves picking locks is another subsystem that's completely unlike anything else. There are lots of special case rules, so looking at it in terms of modern games, it comes out a lot more complicated than the page count would account for.

Michael Cule: Yeah, and for some reason if you were a fighter, you couldn't pick up the lockpicks and give it a try when the thief was lying dead on the floor, and I never really understood that. I left D&D in 1979 and the last thing I purchased, I think, was the AD&D GM's guide. I read it and I never got to use it because I was moving on to other things. But people did; people had wonderful experiences with these games, and we should probably in the last section ask why, exactly.

Roger BW: Some of this, I think, is simplicity of setting. There's a line from Goodman Games called Dungeon Crawl Classics, which are unabashed adventures of this type. Their blurb is "We don't waste your time with long-winded speeches, weird campaign settings, or NPCs who aren't meant to be killed." You know what you're getting. You're not going to have to worry too much about complicated things. Maybe you've had a hard day at work, and you want a nice simple game where you go down a hole in the ground and kill stuff.

Michael Cule: Yeah. The thing is, both from a player's point of view and a GM's point of view, the dungeon crawl is a godsend because it's focused. Players have a limited set of options — corridors they can go down, stairs they can go up and down, doors they can kick open. And the GM has a set of tools which allows them to challenge the players. He has everything pre-set-up, and he can pretty much be certain what they players are going to face within a limited set of choices that they've got. And the players have a set of tasks which are thrown at them, hopefully fast enough by the GM to make it exciting and give it a sense of tension. They know who their friends are, mostly, and who's on what side, and they don't have to worry about too many complicated things.

Roger BW: I'd say that it's quite a lot easier on the GM than, oh, let's say a campaign in a world that actually has a functioning society, and there are people who are going to care about what the PCs do and react differently to them because of what they've done. It's a dungeon. Everything that's in there hates PCs.

Michael Cule: Even if back in civilisation, or what passes for it, back in the town you've come from, there is a society — out here you're outside, beyond the borders, you're outside the civilised rules and people can do things a simple way and violence is always an option.

Roger BW: Usually the best option.

Michael Cule: Usually the only option, to be honest. There were never any complicated social interactions. You cannot imagine D&D: Social Engineering as a supplement [note: a reference to the GURPS Social Engineering supplement].

Roger BW: One of the things that appeals about a simple system, I think, is that if you don't have rules for, say, personalities, you can just run whatever personality you like. You don't have to worry about whether you're going to get more points for being manic depressive or you're going to get fewer points for being very brace; you can just be that.

Michael Cule: I'm running a campaign of Runequest 3 at the moment. Runequest, though it's a step beyond D&D in that it has a social system built into the core rules — the cults and the gods and all that — nonetheless, the personality of the player character isn't described in the rules, isn't dictated in the rules.

Roger BW: He has stats and skills, basically.

Michael Cule: In my current campaign I have a very ugly, very stupid warrior, a Humakti worshipper of the god of death, who is the party's chief combat wombat and charges towards the front. And the player is playing him from the stats and descriptions as a big stupid violent person who rushes to the front bravely. And this is all very well and good as long as the players are well and good and have a focus on what they think the personality of their character is. You don't need the support if the players are going to do it anyway. But sometimes, I suspect — I've never had the sort of abusive players you've heard about, for very long. The ones who take advantage of there not being any rules to take advantage of the other players and of the GM. But I do suspect they happen in D&D.

Roger BW: Describe your character's personality in one word. "Ambidextrous".

Michael Cule: (laughter)

Roger BW: Certainly looking at something like classic D&D before the major world supplements came out, and even to some extent after that, the worlds are generally pretty skeletal. I think part of the appeal there is that they are. You don't have to read a huge atlas of which nation is where and what they're like. You can say "right, my fighter is a hairy barbarian from the north".

Michael Cule: It's interesting to note that the second major product of TSR was Empire of the Petal Throne, which is way, way the opposite.

Roger BW: To the point where I seem to remember it's recommended that new players start as

Michael Cule: as hairy barbarians from the south, yeah, I remember

Roger BW: who know nothing about the social systems, and they can learn it as the players do.

TRANSITION

Interview with Old Geezer 10:47

Michael Cule: So, in our efforts to discover the roots of the dungeon delving revival, we decided to go back to the origins of the hobby and to sound out one of the survivors from the earliest group to experience what was to become Dungeons and Dragons. We're very pleased to welcome to our little podcast Mike Mornard, also known in various places on the net as Old Geezer. Mike, hello.

Old Geezer: Hi, and for those of you who are on ODD74 boards, I'm know there as Groanan of Cimmeria.

Michael Cule: I'm not going to ask.

Old Geezer: We may get there.

Michael Cule: Okay.

Old Geezer: Thanks for asking for the interview.

Michael Cule: Mike, welcome to Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice. You were one of the very first people to experience Dave Arneson's great new idea. Can you tell us how that came about?

Old Geezer: Well, I was living in Lake Geneva at the time. I was part of the Lake Geneva wargaming society, and it would have been sometime late summer of 72, after a miniatures game. We were staying outside of Don Kaye's garage. Rob Kuntz, Don Kaye, and me, and Rob said, "Gary's got this great new Greyhawk. You're a bunch of guys exploring an old abandoned castle full of monsters and treasures and stuff." and that was the lead-in, and then a couple years later when I went up to Minneapolis for college, I wound up playing in Dave's group of his original Blackmoor players, he was still early enough to the beginning that-

Michael Cule: Long before anybody saw the three little booklets.

Old Geezer: Yeah, I hit Minneapolis just before publication of the three little booklets.

Michael Cule: So there was Chainmail had been published, and that was the basis for going on to creating Dungeons and Dragons.

Old Geezer: More or less. I mean if you've read about the accounts of Dave Wesley's Braunstein games, Chainmail was one of the influences; you know, at some point, somewhere in an article, and god alone knows where at some point, Dave Arneson said he was tired of straight medieval miniatures battles, so he grabbed a Godzilla model from someplace and put it on the table and said it's a dragon. And things just sort of growed from there, as the saying goes. We were all wargamers; wargaming was still a small hobby. You could go to GenCon and you could know all 250 people who were there, and if you hadn't met them in person you'd read their column, their column or letter in the General magazine from Avalon Hill, or you corresponded with them in the International Federation of Wargamers, all 200 of them, and at that time at least, it was also a very do-it-yourself hobby. You know, Dave Arneson wrote at least a couple different Napoleonics land battle games. Chainmail got published because it was a good enough set of rules that enough people liked it that it's like, hey, we can actually pay for our printing costs, which was about how you did things. Okay, we have, like, 20 guaranteed sales at $2.50 dollars which is about $50, how many copies will the printer print for $50 — that's our print run.

Michael Cule: It still is a bit like that.

Old Geezer: It's sort of gone back that way.

Michael Cule: Because people are publishing their small games and taking what profit they can.

Old Geezer: If the internet and the web had been around in 1969, Chainmail would be a PDF on the Lake Genera Tactical Studies Association website, and the world would be a vastly different place.

Michael Cule: So, you got started — how old were at that time? You said pre-college.

Old Geezer: Yeah, 16 when I started in miniatures gaming, and about — either just before or just after I turned 17 I started playing Greyhawk, as we called it at the time.

Michael Cule: How old was the average of the group?

Old Geezer: Let's see. Three of us were in high school, you know, 15, 16, 17. A lot of mid-20s, and Gary and Don Kaye were in their mid-30s. So predominantly the group clustered in the mid-late 20s.

Michael Cule: What was the thing that grabbed you from the start?

Old Geezer: Well, I'd been playing miniatures wargames and I went for that first adventure in Greyhawk Castle, and it was like... it was sort of like a miniatures wargame, but sort of not, and sort of like — I'd been reading Fafhrd and the Mouser, and Conan, and Lord of the Rings, and sort of like, you're in that story except you get to do what you want, but sort of not, and I wasn't a hundred percent sure what it was we were actually doing, but it sure was neat.

Michael Cule: Mmhmm. What's the thing you remember most about the very first adventure?

Old Geezer: Sadly very little. You know, that was 40 years ago now, and we were just a bunch of people playing games. And the other thing, simultaneously we were playing Chainmail battles, we were playing Tractics battles in WW2, you know, Don't Give Up the Ship, Napoleonic Sail, Civil War Land Battles, Dungeons and Dragons, Boot Hill, Terry Kuntz had a Robin Hood game he was testing, so you know, D&D was one of a wide selection of games — or Greyhawk as we called it — it was just another game. What I do remember actually, that's really significant, is that the first session I ever played there was a woman playing.

Michael Cule: Bravo applause. Was she a girlfriend, or a gamer, or both?

Old Geezer: Both. She got started as — she was the sister of the friend of mine who introduced me to miniatures gaming, and she was, her boyfriend was also a member of the association, but by the time — she really hooked into playing Greyhawk, you know, in that first session, I remember she was playing an elf, and she may already have been up to Hero Warlock, which was as high... I don't know if she had gotten her elf all that distance, but had obviously played more than once. Cos the elf was already a fairly useful and well-experienced character.

Michael Cule: I get the feeling reading the rules and some of the early accounts that it was very much a game in which you were a squad of people working together. The early rules mention the caller, or sometimes the party leader, who is — you go around the table, say "what is everybody doing?" and then you report to the GM, rather than individual players sticking their oar in.

Old Geezer: Right, and there were a couple reasons for that. First of all, it was a hidden map game. The referee had the map, and you were exploring, and only one person can have their pencil on the map at one time if you're gonna do anything useful. So when you come to an intersection, there's a certain logic in, you know, the person who's drawing the map makes the guiding decisions, and that's not to say that — you know, the rest of us are watching, because there's nothing like having your character's life on the line to focus your attention on the map. And you would be quick sotto voce suggestions or comments, you know, "there's a nest of giant spiders over there", or "nobody's been in this direction before". But there's also an element of simulation, in that if you sat at the table and started having a rhubarb over which way you were gonna go, Gary assumed that your characters are standing down in the dungeon in the middle of a four-way intersection, having this loud-

Michael Cule: A perfectly reasonable point of view.

Old Geezer: Which if I were Phil Foglio, I would draw a cartoon of this big hairy arm coming over your shoulder, pointing at the map, and going "No, no, the Gorge of Eternal Death is right there, ten feet behind where you're standing now." So that was the other reason for having a caller, and when a combat situation evolved, most of us were experienced miniatures gamers, so we knew what we were going to do and we gave our instructions one by one, but very brief, terse — "the four fighters in plate armour are going to anchor our flanks here to protect the wizard," and then us four fighters are done and it's down to the wizard to say what he's going to do. It's very much, we are a close-order infantry squad, we have practised and rehearsed this.

Michael Cule: And you treated it like a military problem.

Old Geezer: Well, we were all wargames.

Michael Cule: Well, that answers that.

Old Geezer: We looked at it as a somewhat different form of wargame, but still a wargame. Tactics were the same sort of tactics that we used on the tabletop.

Michael Cule: It was like Squad Leader?

Old Geezer: If you're thinking of the Avalon Hill game, Squad Leader.

Michael Cule: You're fighting the individual members of a squad one by one and trying to survive. Was it as deadly in practice as the rules seem to imply?

Old Geezer: Well, by the time I started playing, there were already some fourth and fifth-level characters in the group. Rob Kuntz was one of the first, and considering how canny he is, probably not. But we weren't deferring to Rob, we weren't afraid to say "This is nuts, we're going to die if we go in there." He who fights and runs away, gets a dozen friends another day.

Michael Cule: Yeah. Speaking of which, that is nicely my next question, which is — was the classic party just the PCs, PCs plus henchmen, or a single PC plus henchmen, because we've heard it described all three ways. Were you going in there with the characters of just however many people were around the table, or was there backup normally?

Old Geezer: When we played, usually there would be 3-5 players and the group size would be 7-9, so yes, there would always be henchmen.

Michael Cule: Ah, right, so.

Old Geezer: I shouldn't say always. There would usually be henchmen. My main character was a fighter, but I also started a magic-user just to see if I liked it, and he had exceptionally bad luck, and after the fifth or sixth expedition where I'd hire a bunch of men-at-arms and nobody came back but me, I couldn't hire a man-at-arms for love nor money. Word had gotten around, you know, "This guy? Forget it!" And this is a flip to those who say first level magic-users are no fun. I went down and somehow, my first-level magic-user had discovered an entry to the third level of Greyhawk dungeon. I went down there with my magic-user alone, with a torch, a dagger, three hit points and a charm person spell. And through a combination of luck, and care, and very cautious playing, came out just shy of third level. Because, you know, I got trapped in a dead-end corridor, and a wandering monster came along, and it was a fifth-level fighter, and I happened to have a charm person spell.

Michael Cule: That's what it's there for.

Old Geezer: I remember vividly, I spent something like twenty minutes of real time trying to decide do I take charm person or do I take sleep? Because I've got one first-level spell and that's it. And I finally decided, since it was the third level, the odds of running into orcs or goblins was a little less. And I consider that a good thing. I enjoyed that sort of strategic planning, and the fact that the choice was that important.

Michael Cule: Yes. Role gaming is all about choices. About the choices you make. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. That's what makes it fun. You've said that the very looseness of the rules made it easy to introduce new elements, I mean, you said Dave Arneson picked up a Godzilla and said "That's a dragon". Apart from that, can you think of any examples where things were just brought in ad-hoc because it seemed like a good idea at the time?

Old Geezer: Well, we didn't see a printed copy of the rules for something like the first year and a half. Gary was the only person who had the rules, so we have no way of telling what- now because I know Gary and because I know the way we played with him, he would write up the stats on something before he brought it in, but he was introducing new stuff all the time. First time we ran into an invisible stalker. All we know is that suddenly something is hitting us and we can't see anything, and we're flailing around madly at a -4, trying to hit something we can't see while avoiding hitting our mates, and a couple of us actually hit it three or four times, and then, you know, we heard it shuffle off into the darkness. And then we're all standing around going "What the holy hell was that?" So, you know, we didn't have the rules, so everything was new. The first time we found out that there is such a thing as a bag of devouring, it did not end well.

Michael Cule: (laughter)

Old Geezer: I'm actually going to be writing that up, the whole story, for my Kickstarter. My older brother still refers to it, all these years later, as "The night we fed Ernie to the monster."

Michael Cule: If I can give you a free commercial, you're writing an account of the early days and hoping to get it financed on Kickstarter, I understand.

Old Geezer: Right. When I was living in New York, I ran a game for, among other people, Tavis from Autarch Games, and he also blogs — the Mule Abides is the name of his blog. And Autarch has done a couple of Kickstarters, and he has experience that I don't, and we're still figuring things out. Part of it is, I want the manuscript, not necessarily the illustrations and the layout, but at least the raw PDF, to be pretty much done before I start the Kickstarter, because even if I don't have the full product ready to deliver, if I at least have the PDF version more or less ready, people feel like they're getting something. You know, Kickstarter, you're taking a chance, but I'd like to mitigate that at least a little.

Michael Cule: Well, let me know when you're starting to kick it; we will spread the good word as much as we can.

Old Geezer: I certainly will. You'll know when it's out there, and the title of it is "We made up some shit we thought would be fun".

Michael Cule: Moving on, in the early days, how much — this is about the roleplaying part — how much characterisation was there? How much did a player create a character for his piece in the world, if you like?

Old Geezer: We might have a sentence or two, but it didn't really affect play much. I mention my character's name was Groanan of Cimmeria, which is an obvious parody. And the thing in, when Gary had characters named "Yrag" and "Zagyg" and henchmen named "Sigby Digbyson" and "Rigby Bigbyson", and Rob Kuntz had a sage named "Herb"...

Michael Cule: All right. Deep seriousness, we're not talking here.

Old Geezer: Again, this is an old wargame tradition, where you might be refighting the battle of Trafalgar, and you're playing to the best of your skill, you're doing as well as you can, but the French are commanded by Le Comte d'Escargot and the British are commanded by Commodore General Sir Hugh Jarse. But you're still playing as hard as you can. Theoretically, my character was a barbarian. What did that mean? That meant that if I wanted to, I would say "By Crom!", and that's about as far as it went. We did roleplay more in the sense of, okay, now negotiate. I remember one incident where, again, trapped in a dead-end corridor by a chimera. And Ernie, his character was neutral, so he spoke Law, Neutral and Chaos, and in the Chaotic tongue, Ernie says, "Good day to you, your evilness". And Gary says "Huh, what do you mean, good? Do I look good to you? Grr." and Ernie goes, "Bad day to you, your evilness." "That's better. I mean, that's worse." On the one hand it's kind of silly, but on the other hand, try having a conversation some time where all the value words are reversed. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Michael Cule: No, it's not.

Old Geezer: So we did a lot of very impromptu, very ad-hoc roleplaying, but it was the player. You know, in keeping with the notion of you're testing player skill not character skill, it's the player doing the negotiating.

Michael Cule: Yeah, because there weren't any mechanics for "Roll your diplomacy skill" or anything like that.

Old Geezer: Yeah.

Michael Cule: Dave Arneson, from the accounts of Braunstein that I've read, seems to have been very cunning as a roleplayer, very willing to take advantage of that sort of thing. What about the endgame? When you've reached tenth level, when you're as powerful as the game is going to get — did that actually get played out? When you're going to become a lord and move into that castle over there?

Old Geezer: Right. I moved from Lake Geneva to Minneapolis just after my character hit 9th level, I played a few ti,es with Dave, but then I joined the university gaming club, and that character sort of got set aside. But, for instance, Rob Kuntz, Robalar hit fourteenth level. And he had a castle, and it was, he had retainers, and he controlled a major section of the land. He had a place on the Council of Eight in the City of Greyhawk. So that, at least. And Dave Arneson did the same thing. You know, Greg Svensson's character Swennie the Great, King of All Good, he became the king, so... there was definitely, when you got to that level, you got your stronghold, you became one of the powerrs of the world.

Michael Cule: Was that retirement, or was it playing on a different level?

Old Geezer: It was playing on a different level. Gary, Dave, Rob, a bunch of the other players, had all been in the Castles and Crusades Society, and Greyhawk and Blackmoor were both placed on the map originally of the Great Kingdom of the Castle and Crusades society, so... castles are meant to be sieged, so you've just moved into a different aspect of the game, is all.

Michael Cule: You still play D&D, if I have the reports right. You still play, indeed, with the original rules. You're not interested in the games that game after, you've tried them and been unimpressed, or is it sticking with what you know?

Old Geezer: Couple different things going on. As I mentioned, I was a member of the university gaming club, University of Minnesota, from about 1973 to about 85 or 86, and for most of that time it probably had 40-50 active members, so somebody tried just about anything. One, I did try a lot of different things, maybe not some of the more modern games, but that leads me to number 2. Since about 1976 or 1977, I've been, and still am, a proponent of the notion that the actual game system is about the least important thing in the mix. That if it's an interesting setting and a bunch of players, including the refereee, who have more or less the same vision, you're going to have a good game. Once in a while you hit something out on one or other end of the bell curve. Like, one of my friends is really big on comic book superheroes, and in the late 70s there were some appalling bad superhero games out there.

Michael Cule: I still recall some of them, yeah.

Old Geezer: There's even one of them, we read it and went "There's no game here!" So, you know, big salute for Hero Games in 1981 or 82 when Champions came out. That is one of the cases where the system is a brilliant expression of exactly what Silver Age, Four Colour, bright spandex leotard superheroes are all about. Greg Stafford, Pendragon, is a piece of art. Not only the traits and Passions, but even the very combat system, how usually two knights will just whale away on each other for hours, but every once in a while there's going to be a chance that somebody gets a lucky critical and ends the fight, which perfectly matches what Mallory describes. So for once in a while, for good or for ill, the system is amazing. But most of the time, you're in the big centre part where the system doesn't really matter much. I could run the game I'm running in Fantasy Trip, I could run it in Fantasy Hero, if I learned on the newer incarnations of the rules, you know, I could run it in that. The rules don't really matter.

Michael Cule: Well, taking up from that, you said that if the GM and the players have a linked vision and are agreed on what it's about, the system doesn't matter. The thing I envy you most of is, forgive me for saying this, is not the early involvement with D&D, but the fact you got to play for so many years with Professor Barker in the Empire of the Petal Throne in his regular Tekumel game. And I'm sure ther are people across the world who are deeply envious of you for that. And Professor Barker, as I understand it, continued to use either something like D&D or not many rules at all to run his games.

Old Geezer: We never actually pressed the point on him, but except for combat, and even sometimes for combat, you know, it was mostly like, Phil rolls the dice and decides on how he wants things to go. Which, I mean, that is very much the spirit that the original D&D rules were written in. I mentioend earlier that Gary was the only one with the set of rules. They are designed simply as a minimalistic framework for the referee. "I have this world I've created, I want to let people explore it. What are the things I want to remember, cos I don't want to have to adjudicate every combat, even though I could. So we'll do this little combat system just so I don't have to remember how combat works, sort of thing.

Michael Cule: Yeah.

Old Geezer: I think possibly the most fun I think I ever had on Tekumel was the night, we'd actually ended a previous session on a fairly, we were in town or something, and we hopped into one of the tubeway cars — the round underground carriages — went over to the destination dial, gave it a spin, closed our eyes, and pushed the button. And, okay Phi, we're going to play tourist! And if you've ever read the book Flamesong, when the Soo catch one of the tubeway cars with a net, that happened to us.

Michael Cule: You were asking for it, weren't you?

Old Geezer: Yeah, and we knew. There was a chance, you know, at least once, where the thing suddenly stops and the viewscreen shows us a collapsed tunnel. And Phil said, plainly, "You understand there is a chance that the failsafes might now work." And it's like, "Yeah... we're heroes." I think that's a holdover from a wargamer's attitude also. And I'm not pretending that being a wargamer makes you manly or macho, because you're a bunch of middle-aged guys pushing around little plastic tanks, you know, that's about as far from manly as you can get and still have a Y chromosome. But when you're a wargamer, you learn you're gonna lose units. You can't win without exposing your troops to danger, and if you exposure your troops to danger you're going to lose some.

Michael Cule: That is indeed a wargamer's attitude.

Old Geezer: And back to game systems, when it takes you five minutes to generate a new character, I think it's a lot easier to swallow. Champions works well because in Silver Age spandex superheroes, nobody ever dies.

Michael Cule: Except when you need to boost the sales.

Old Geezer: Spiderman's not going to die, Batman's not going to die, etcetera. You may get pounded into a pulp, but you don't have to go through the lengthy Champions character generation system again.

Michael Cule: Well, one last thing if I may, and thank you for all that you've said here today. Have you noticed what's called the retroclone movement? The people who are keeping in print, and bringing out versions of all the various stages of D&D's development, except the one that's currently being published by Wizards of the Coast. How does that strike you as a phenomenon?

Old Geezer: Well, like everything, it has its pluses and minuses, and that's how I met Tavis, because the Adventurer, Conqueror, King folks have a big interest in that, and part of that was Tavis saying "We had figured this part out pretty accurately, this part we had no clue." For the most part I think it's great. Nothing wrong with it. There's room enough for every kind of game. I think it's nice that at least some people are realising later editions of Dungeons and Dragons are different, but that doesn't mean they're better. Other people like them better but that's a matter of taste, not absolute quality. But sometimes, with all respect to these guys, I think they're overthinking some of the stuff. I mean that's one reason I'm calling the Kickstarter "We made up some shit we thought would be fun". I saw this long discussion about where did the cleric come from in D&D.

Michael Cule: Alright, I'll bite.

Old Geezer: One of Dave's player's was a vampire, and he was rolling over everything, and he said, well, there should be something — one of the rules of old-time wargame design is that for every feature there's got to be a counter.

Michael Cule: For every tactic, there has to be an anti. For every weapon, there has to be a defence.

Old Geezer: So it's like, what do we do with this vampire? And I mean, he was straight out of the Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee movies, opera cape and all. None of this deep exploration of the — no, Christopher Lee in an opera cape. Well, the obvious answer is the Peter Cushing. So they started with the vampire hunter character, but then, well, you know, some healing abilities would be nice, too, and there's the priest, and they decided after a while to change the name from "priest" to "cleric", and hey presto, we made up some shit we thought would be fun.

Michael Cule: Mike Mornard, Old Geezer, thank you very much.

Old Geezer: You're quite welcome.

TRANSITION

Roger BW: Okay, well the obvious approach if you want to have a game like this, well, what about actual D&D? For my taste — and it's hugely successful, so this is not a majority viewpoint that I'm going to espouse here — but for me it's terribly complicated. AD&D when it came out had three books — player's handbook, dungeon master's guide, and the monster manual, and that was 482 pages. D&D fourth edition, same three books, is 834 pages, and the players' handbook is two and a half times as long. Yes, it's very slick game design, but it feels to me awfully mechanised. Everything has a game mechanic effect. Everything happens on the combat grid. You have powers that — I understand this is to some extent taken from computers games, which is fair enough — you have a power that's simply described as "You can force one of your foes to attack a particular person in your party" as opposed to the one he wanted to attack. Now I can think of various justifications for why that might happen in game, but there isn't an in-game justification, just "You can make this happen". You've got the effect, you've got no flavour to it.

Michael Cule: It breaks down at the point where "I don't care about modelling the world, I just want cool stuff." and that was always a bit of a problem with D&D. There are people who still play first edition D&D, the three books and maybe Greyhawk and Blackmoor, and they won't go as far as admitting the existence of whatever it was called, Eldritch Wizardry. And they're perfectly happy with that. I find that a little strange, to be honest.

Roger BW: THUNDERSTORM

Roger BW: The next option, if you don't want a modern D&D, is, it would be nice to be able to try the old systems, but of course they're out of print. But there are retroclones.

Michael Cule: Because, peculiarly under copyright law, you can't copyright a system, just the words describing it, and there are a lot of words out there.

Roger BW: So if you're a reasonably competent author, you can recreate whatever edition of D&D you feel like by essentially rewriting it. We're going to put a link to the various D&D versions that these things come from, but there seem to be three camps that appeal. The very early three books that I think you were mentioning, the Gygax and Arneson. In the early 80s in the UK there was the Basic and Expert set that kicked off a lot of gaming in the UK, because I think they got into actual shops as opposed to just games shops. I got my copy of the Basic Set in John Lewis.

Michael Cule: Yeah, a lot of people who say "I was with D&D from the beginning" think of that boxed set. That's Moldvay?

Roger BW: Yes, and then there's AD&D, which came out a bit earlier but didn't really get outside games shops for a while.

Michael Cule: It was a big and, for the time, a very expensive investment, those three hardback books.

Roger BW: So those three seem to be the three editions that people seem to favour when they're writing retroclone systems. Some of them are able to impersonate any of these, some are focused on a specific one. They don't seem to talk about Unearthed Arcana and the Dungeoneers' Survival Guide and stuff, that made the games a bit more complicated. Presumably because if you want to go for the simple stuff, you just go for the original simple stuff. There's OSRIC, there's Labyrinth Lords, there are various other systems we'll put in the show notes. Most of them are free as PDF or at least cheap, and similarly cheap in print, so they're available. If that's what you want, they're very readily available. Why don't we want them?

Michael Cule: Well, as I say, I estimate a game system by two things. The amount of support for what I want to do that's built into it, and the ease with which I can make up a new rule that's consistent with what's already there. And D&D never did that for me. I never quite understood — I'm not much of a rules hacker myself, I'll never write my own system — good grief, that feels like I'm tempting fate.

Roger BW: I've already written one.

Michael Cule: Shush. But I want something which I can use as-is and add to easily, and that was never the case with any of the versions of D&D. I never understood how it all fitted together, which was why Runequest was such a revelation.

Roger BW: Well, I think to some extent it doesn't fit together. The approach to fitting in a new rule was "invent an entirely new mechanic".

Michael Cule: There was a bit on the back of, I think it was, Rolemaster, which advertised this supplement as "and 22 new character classes" and that's the point at which I put it back on the shelf and resolved never to have anything to do with the system again, because a system whose idea of fun is more complication does not necessarily appeal to me. More cool stuff, yes. More cool ideas, but complication, I have enough.

Roger BW: Most of the additional Rolemaster character classes ended up being "we will shuffle the skill costs around slightly and have some new cool spell lists". The new cool spell lists were quite fun, but it's more complication than one needs.

Michael Cule: I'll tell you what strikes me about the whole retroclone thing. You know, speaking as an aged gentleman, that there is a moment in the past which you think of as Your Music.

Roger BW: Just as the Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve.

Michael Cule: Yeah, and the Golden Age of Music is between fourteen and sixteen, I'd say. Where you hear the things that get your blood running first. People are imprinted to a certain extent on the first things that they really enjoyed about the hobby, and I will note that I'm not condemning people for this, because as I said, I'm currently running Runequest, and I'm going through all the old Runequest 3 and Runequest 2 material that I've got and trying to relive my youth. But it is a peculiar thing.

Roger BW: There do seem to be great arguments over whether a retroclone should just be an exact duplicate of the original game mechanic, or whether you should actually allow innovation. If it's the former, you can't do anything terribly original because somebody's done it already. For example, D&D armour class. The lower it is, the harder it is to hit you. There is no particularly good reason for this, so some systems invert it. And people argue that, "No, that's changing the game, it shouldn't be allowed!". Some of them even have skill systems. But to me, if you're going to have a skill system, if you're going to try to make it into a more modern style of game rather than rearrange the rulebook a little, let's learn some of the lessons of 30+ years of game development and have an actual modern game.

Michael Cule: Well, true. I hope we're not coming off as system snobs or anything in this, but I think my reaction to D&D once I absorbed it, and once I'd been doing it and trying out the early games, was "this is a wonderful idea and it isn't terribly well executed" and hence the history of modern gaming.

Roger BW: It's the version 1. It produced a bunch of original ideas and was labouring under the burden of having essentially been inventing these ideas. I still contend that roleplaying was actually invented accidentally.

Michael Cule: Because?

Roger BW: When the wargamers who were going through the dungeon started using funny voices for their characters. Before that, it was a wargame — you've got your resource, he's got this much strength, this much resistance to damage and so on. After that it's "actually I care about this particular guy", not just because of whether you're going to win or lose the game.

Michael Cule: There's a famous quote, and I can't remember who said it, that roleplaying started when somebody in a D&D game said "Well, I wouldn't do this, but my character would."

Roger BW: Yep.

Michael Cule: And once that started, oh, the trouble it starts.

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Roger BW: Okay, so if we are going to look at modern games, we've got two fairly different ones to look at. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, which is a number of PDF booklets from Steve Jackson Games, and Dungeon World

Michael Cule: Which is a clone — well, no, which is a hack, I think is the right world, of Apocalypse World, and is very different indeed, but quite fun. Let's start with Dungeon Fantasy, which tells you what it does in the title.

Roger BW: It's a series of supplements to GURPS. You do need the GURPS basic rules, but you don't end up using all of them. I'm think it's up to 15 booklets now, but you really only need the first two, which are the first one for defining your characters, and the second one for things that will happen to your characters — monsters, traps, treasure, that sort of thing. It's clearly informed by D&D, but not only by D&D, it does have some computer game influences as well. It has eleven — they're not strictly speaking character classes, but they work like that in the basic book.

Michael Cule: They're templates.

Roger BW: Yes, you can tweak them if you want to, but if you just want a character in a hurry, you can slap something together in five minutes.

Michael Cule: They're fairly powerful compared with the advised starting points of 150 points for heroic, it's 250 points.

Roger BW: They're 250 pointers, and since they're also fairly tightly focused, there's generally one thing that they are really pretty damn good at. In the case of the knight, for example, that is producing damage.

Michael Cule: And the wizards tend to be specialised by the spell classes that they're good at.

Roger BW: It's not a requirement. Everything is potentially flexible, but when you're starting the game, getting set up quickly so you can get on with playing, that's certainly the direction that you're channelled in.

Michael Cule: I think one of the strengths of it is that GURPS started out by modelling man-to-man combat — that was the first release, how to have fighters and have them fight each other. It goes back to The Fantasy Trip, which was the precursor to GURPS. That models solidly the realistic effects of two people with swords and shields and some armour whacking at each other. Everything else was built up on top of that.

Roger BW: I'm not quite in the usual run of these things. I quite like starting with a realistic system and then layering heroic stuff on top of that. You know, normal people take a sword to the gut and you're going to die, but you are heroes and you are not. As opposed to, well, everybody's got hit points.

Michael Cule: It's one of the strengths. It reintroduces the element of the combat team going down the dungeon very neatly, and it also layers on top of GURPS' wide-open nature the motifs it inherits from D&D. For example, it's got strong niche protection between the wizard and the cleric. The cleric can do healing. The wizard can't, which is not the case in base GURPS.

Roger BW: I think it's a thing we've said before, even on this podcast, that one of the problems with GURPS is there's all this stuff and there is the temptation to use all this stuff.

Michael Cule: And on the other hand if the GM needs to create stats for the barkeeper in the tavern, and the various minions of the town that they're currently terrorising, it's there and it's perfectly easy to do, and easy to fine-tune things if you want to, at the underlying GURPS level.

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Roger BW: So, what about Dungeon World? I think it takes a fairly different approach.

Michael Cule: Well, Dungeon World as with Apocalypse World starts with two basic definitions of how things work. The first is the character sheet. There are character classes, there were in Apocalypse World, and each one can only ever have one player. There's only ever one fighter — there may be a paladin, but there's only ever one fighter as such, there's only ever one wizard. In the background there are other people who may call themselves fighters and wizards, but in the realm of the player characters, there's only ever one each of the character classes at any one time. And the player character sheets come in the form of little booklets which guide you through both creating the character and defining him out of the options that the character class allows, and allows you to keep track of the advancements. How he advances is in levels and which, as in standard D&D, give you extra hit points and also extra moves. A Move is a thing that the character can do. There are some standard moves — hack and slash is a standard move, act under peril is a standard move — and a roll on two dice, you add modifier based on your stats, and the core mechanic is if you roll ten or more, you succeed brilliantly and without any penalty. If you roll between seven and nine, you succeed but there's going to be a cost. If you're hacking and slashing, the other guy probably gets a wound in on you as well.

Roger BW: Or you leap over the pit but some of your equipment falls off.

Michael Cule: Or you manage to stick your sword right through the other fellow, but unfortunately it's no longer in your hand. The GM is always allowed to improvise narrative effects. And if you rolled six or less you've failed miserably. You gain an experience point, but you're in trouble and the GM is allowed to screw your life up a little bit. Everything happens at the player's initiatives. The NPCs, the monsters, they have their own moves, but they always happen in reaction to what the player characters try. The idea is, and the core idea is, is that the story you're telling is told in a conversation, and the conversation should flow naturally, and only go to the rules when there's doubt and when there's a chance you're going to screw up or succeed brilliantly.

Roger BW: So in terms of the ethos of the game, it's probably quite a lot more modern.

Michael Cule: It's a game where improvisation on the part of the players and on the part of the GM is encouraged. The GM will probably start out with a set of introductory remarks and a mission briefing, with some idea of where it's going to go, but he's going to let the world and the truth behind it be discovered in the play. It's a big thing in the Apocalypse World line, that you discover the world by playing in it. In Apocalypse World you don't know what caused the fall of civilisation, you just know that you're there, and the players will discover by playing and the GM by making shit up, what the real truth is out there. It will gradually build up.

Roger BW: One of the reasons I must admit I've tended to avoid heavily improvisational games is that sometimes I'm tired. In a game that requires it, a player who's not improvising well or who's just laying back and letting the current take him a bit, is actually going to make the game worse for everybody.

Michael Cule: I don't know that that's true.

Roger BW: That's been my experience, anyway. As that player, usually.

Michael Cule: I don't think it's hostile to the player who just wants to get in amongst it with his sword and smite something evil and be magnificent at the end of the day. I think you'll have more fun if you're contributing and building up.

Roger BW: Well, that's inevitable.

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Michael Cule: One of the things that we meant to notice, and we didn't, is that the lack of rules in D&D led to a great deal of inspired setting creation and play. The fact that you could go anywhere, do anything, that the world was so ill-defined, meant that occasionally you got pieces of brilliant creation. I remember my very first dungeon, made by Dave Langford, had a ghostly icebreaker. I've told this story thousands of times, running around a ring of ice in the first level of the dungeon, and that was a brilliant image which has stayed with me. I only wish I was that creative every week.

Roger BW: I seem to remember somewhere deep in the crypts of Castle Greyhawk you can come out in a World War 2 bomber. Briefly.

Michael Cule: Though it was brilliant for that sort of thing, there also was no mechanical support for it. You were having to make up rules and tack them onto the peculiar structure of D&D, if they were needed.

Roger BW: I think one might argue that it actually encourages improvisation, because there is no mechanical system for learning, for building new rules. So you can make up any old thing and it'll fit on just as well.

Michael Cule: And the thing I'm going to say about Dungeon World is that it is designed to do that. Moves are easy to make up. You have a few basic stats which give you pluses and minuses. Monsters are defined by their moves and the things they can do back to the players. Creating a new move for new circumstances seems to me to be one of the easiest things about the game, and if you want to introduce the killer penguins at the South Pole, and you hadn't planned on it before the game started, then this is a game that will allow that.

Roger BW: I think what I'm getting at is that there is framework for that. You've got the system of moves, you already know roughly how well a move works and when it succeeds and doesn't succeed, you don't need to make up a new dice mechanic for it.

Michael Cule: You don't. Well, you can, but often, very often, you don't. The core tropes of the genre are built in, and there is the built-in niche protection of "you're the only thief, you're the only druid, you're the only bard in the group." And that, I think, helps.

Roger BW: I think I'd say the same sort of thing for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. If a player character wants to do something unexpected, chances are the answer is going to be "roll against a skill", at some bonus or penalty. You don't have to make up an entirely new system for it.

Michael Cule: True, and that's one of the things — I may be doing a Dungeon Fantasy crawl after my Runequest game, run by somebody else for a change, and I'm really looking forward to that.

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Roger BW: Okay, there clearly are these games that do the job reasonably well. The last dungeon crawl I ran was actually just before Dungeon Fantasy came out, but even basic GURPS does support it reasonably well. So what makes a good dungeon crawl? What is the essential characteristic of a) making the game sufficiently nostalgic, but b) making it sufficiently fun?

Michael Cule: Let me mention battle mats and figures, because I know we moved away from them, and I don't know if you — I doubt very much if Dungeon World would ever drag them out, but I still have a lot of figures. I may have done my back permanent injury in the days of lead figures before I moved on to Cardboard Heroes. And I still have my battle mat, and it does help focus the game and make it clear who's doing what and what's happening, and it makes the mind clear.

Roger BW: That's interesting, that's something I got away from relatively early and haven't really missed.

Michael Cule: Running a GURPS game — GURPS is a game which cares about exactly how many hexes you are from somebody. It cares about what side of your enemy you're coming at. I would have thought that would have helped.

Roger BW: It probably would help, but one can make some simplifying assumptions. You know, this enemy is fighting one player character, he's probably going to stay facing that player character. If two of them gang up on him, one of them's going to be able to flank him or stab him in the back.

Michael Cule: Yeah, but this leads to the syndrome which my players complain about, where everybody's always three combat rounds away when they surprise us. If I don't surprise myself with what I'm setting up, my combats will start to look the same and feel the same, and players won't have any fresh challenges.

Roger BW: That's fair enough. I think the most memorable fight from the last dungeon I ran was in the dark, against a troll, in large part because the troll having a very high Health stat was running out of hit points but not going unconscious.

Michael Cule: That's annoying about GURPS.

Roger BW: It was quite annoying for the troll, who was in extreme pain but couldn't go unconscious and had to keep fighting.

Michael Cule: Don't they get regeneration?

Roger BW: Yes, but the PCs were bashing him up faster than regeneration would work.

Michael Cule: Oh dear. I feel sorry for the troll. Actually, I feel sorry for the players. They should have died.

Roger BW: They nearly did.

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Roger BW: Okay, I think we can fairly say, everybody should have something to do, especially in combat, but in general in context of the game, there shouldn't be anybody who's sitting around waiting for their turn to happen, waiting for their special thing to happen.

Michael Cule: Dungeon World gets rid of the turn mechanic in favour of the flow of the conversation, and often, in practical terms, GURPS does to, until it gets down to the nitty gritty.

Roger BW: There's a big thud where you go down into second-by-second combat time and come back out into narrative time. Looking at the D&D roles, it's basically infantry, artillery, medics, and scouts. Dungeon Fantasy you've got rather more classes, but they more or less fall into those categories. The only really strange one there is probably the bard, who's doing things to encourage other people rather than necessarily [acting himself].

Michael Cule: I never found the bard desperately convincing in any... I can believe an adventurer can also pick up a lute, but a lute player who is also an adventurer sort of boggles my mind a little bit.

Roger BW: As opposed to the lute player who tells everyone he's an adventurer. Yes, I first met the bard in AD&D, I think it was, where you had to gain a bunch of levels as a fighter, and then become a first-level thief and gain a bunch of levels there, and then switch to something else, and then you could finally start being a bard, and frankly by that point in the campaign everyone else is tenth and twelfth level and what's the point?

Michael Cule: Yes, the difficulty of people coming into the game at significantly lower levels than the main players is always going to be one, and I don't know how one fixes it. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy fixes it easily because you can build characters to any average point level your campaign may have reached. I suspect that Dungeon World would encourage you to start from the bottom and work your way up.

Roger BW: I know GMs of the era who felt that everybody should do that, you know, it doesn't matter that it's a tenth-level game; your character died, you start again with a first-level fighter. Rolemaster tried to fix that by saying "Well, yes, you should do that, but he gains experience much faster because he's hanging around with these much tougher types and they're killing big things, and if he survives he'll do very well."

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Roger BW: That rather leads into game balance. Classic D&D, high-level mages could do everything. Particularly with the add-on books which you probably didn't meet, but there was a stoneskin spell so they can be armoured at least as well as the fighter; there's a lockpick spell so they can pick locks at least as well as the thieves.

Michael Cule: D&D tended to disprove the old adage "it doesn't matter how powerful a wizard is, a knife between the shoulder blades will interrupt his concentration". This turns out not to be the case.

Roger BW: Particularly as more and more spells got layered in, and particularly with a high-level wizard who's got insane numbers of low-level spells.

Michael Cule: Come on, can you say that GURPS — not GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, but the main GURPS magic rules — don't throw in some ludicrously powerful things for the later wizard? Move Terrain, where you can pick up a small county and move it to the next county with enough energy sources.

Roger BW: Well, with enough energy sources, that's part of it. And the advantage or disadvantage of GURPS wizards is that they're generally running off either their own fatigue, or a powerstone of which they can effectively carry one most of the time. They may have more back at home. That does provide something of a limit, because he may have one ability to pick locks better than the thief, but the thief can do it all day.

Michael Cule: I find it difficult with really high-level characters. I find it difficult in all systems, to find ways to make their lives difficult and interesting. I'm not saying from my players' point of view, but sometimes from a GM's point of view, they go up against my big monster and they don't even break into a sweat. And it worries me that I cannot — I could use lessons in making their lives more difficult when they get to the ludicrously competent level.

Roger BW: Some of that may simply be that they've done a reasonable amount of advance planning and tactics.

Michael Cule: Yes, but I still ought to be able to screw them over. I should at least be able to give them the illusion of having to pay a terrible price for their triumph.

Roger BW: You could always steal ideas from Munchkin cards, you know. "And its mate".

Michael Cule: Okay, well, I don't think — there are games where you focus on one character class, on one group — alright, let's try and avoid the D&Dism — on one type of profession, but it depends what you're trying to simulate, I suppose, what genre. In swords and sorcery, the Conan always kills the evil sorcerer even though logically it should be the other way around.

Roger BW: How did he get to be an ancient evil sorcerer in the first place?

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Roger BW: Some of it I think is options. If you've got a system where wizards have spells, they're going to have more different spells available as they go up in level, and whatever the actual power of those spells, it means they have more things to think about, more things to do, more situations where they can be useful. One of the things that I like about Dungeon Fantasy — and I get the impression that Dungeon World does the same thing — is that is gives everybody more things to do. In Dungeon World it's the moves. In Dungeon Fantasy, it's getting skills and techniques up high enough that you can do things like dual-weapon attacks, or disarm people, or-

Michael Cule: -poke them through the eye-slits every single bloody time.

Roger BW: Well, if you have a rapier, you might as well.

Michael Cule: It's my signature move! Yes, I know.

Roger BW: That's why you've put points into Signature Move!

Michael Cule: One thing that occurs to me is that the reason you build up the world, you know, the complicated stuff back in civilisation and the deep background that the players don't want to read, is to deal with this when they get ludicrously powerful level, by introducing things like gods. Gods are wonderful play balance factors if they won't let the players get away with rewriting the universe.

Roger BW: As long as nobody gives the gods stats. That's one error from AD&D that I don't think anybody else has really repeated. If you give the gods stats, it's just another monster book. "Hey, we get Bast next time! I've been meaning to get even with her!" I've met a group that was working its way through the gods book in alphabetical order.

Michael Cule: Well, I think I've got this dialogue right. I was passing, many years ago, by one of the other tables at Wycombe Games Group, and the GM said to the players "Well, last week you killed Lucifer. What do you want to do now?" It is a problem. The gods — there should be things that the players can't touch, but which can touch the players.

Roger BW: The only game I've seen that really dealt with this explicitly was the later edition of Basic D&D where they got up to the mortal set, and the last of the five boxes essentially was "Okay, your character is a great hero, and he is getting to the point where he is going to be seriously ascending to godhood, and let us now do adventures and tell stories that are about that sort of process" and when he does so, that is the ultimate goal for your character. Yes, he's retired from actual playable status, but he's still out there in the world."

Michael Cule: The ultimate end of Heroquest, both as a concept and as a game, was to transcend and to become as gods. Buffy reference there.

Roger BW: Thinking of stuff that happens back in town, the inspiration for all of this of course is very much the Wild West. There is the out of town where you can do pretty much whatever you like, and there is the back in town where you sell your gold and buy your eggs and shovels.

Michael Cule: And there are interesting games to be run where out of town habits move into town, and back in town is where you become the — this was a big thing in original D&D — when you become sufficiently high level, you become a lord and get followers, and get your own castle, and you start becoming one of the movers and shakers.

Roger BW: Yeah, I've never actually met anybody who played that phase of the game. It's very much there in AD&D in particular, and I've heard suggestions that this was pretty much what happened in the early games — the ones that Gary was still running himself. And indeed, that quite often a player would go off on what was effectively a solo adventure, just his PC, other players running his various henchmen and allies and things. But once they got to that level it wasn't really the party going to the dungeon any more. Whereas the players I know would say "well, we like going down these dungeons, and now we have ultra-zapping spells — let's keep doing this."

Michael Cule: I think there would be an interesting adventure in the really old adventurer who has done it all, seen it all, knows how to survive — oh dear, I'm reinventing Cohen the Barbarian. I was thinking of the Wild West gunslingers in the Magnificent Seven, whose time is past, who are no longer needed, and who are going on one last adventure but the farmers always win.

Roger BW: You've also got the whole Liberty Valence situation. In order to be the big tough defender, you render yourself unsuited to be a civilised person, and vice versa.

Michael Cule: The trouble is, remember the expression "murder-hobo"? That something about going outside the law creates the personality for the characters that they are allowed to do anything and can do anything.

Roger BW: Because on the front line, it really is just a matter of whether your sword is better than the other guy's sword.

Michael Cule: But is there going to be an inevitable tendency to break down the cohesion of the player character group, the party? Is there always going to be a tendency in that sort of setup to lead to backstabbing and treachery, and all the bad things that you hear about, and inter-player as opposed to inter-character conflict around the table?

Roger BW: I don't think it's inevitable, because I've been in groups that didn't do it.

Michael Cule: But it's a temptation.

Roger BW: Yes, if what you're going for is acquiring the neatest stuff, well, probably the guys you're going down the dungeon with have some pretty neat stuff.

Michael Cule: True. They don't need it all, or indeed any of it. Why did they ever let the thief into the group? I never understood that.

Roger BW: Because you've got to have a hobbit, I mean, halfling.

Michael Cule: You've got to have a burglar.

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Michael Cule: We're still having fun, I'm still having fun, going down dungeons and holes in the ground and discovering the exciting stuff. I think it's better if I know why it's there and how it got there, the back history. The players don't have to know, but I think it's nice for me to know.

Roger BW: I think if the GM knows then it's possible to be a bit more consistent about things. You know it was dug by this particular type of culture, so it will have symbols from this particular type of culture lying around; they don't mean anything, but they're interesting colour.

Michael Cule: Yeah, there is a thing I've got, which I've never actually used, which is called "How to host a dungeon", which is basically a sort of mini-game creating the history of these holes in the ground and the various civilisations which have dug in this place and left treasure-filled and monster-lined corridors down there.

Roger BW: Like the situation in Bristol a few years back, where a bit of road subsided into a cellar which turned out to be a Regency wine cellar, and below that they found something else when another floor caved in, and then another floor caved in and they were in a Roman something or other.

Michael Cule: You can't get that lucky every week.

Roger BW: The road was closed for months.

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Michael Cule: There's an adventure, a published adventure, for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, which I ought to mention, which is called

Roger BW: Mirror of the Fire Demon, I believe.

Michael Cule: You haven't read it either, have you?

Roger BW: No, I haven't.

Michael Cule: I was hoping to get a recommendation here.

Roger BW: I have the base books, but I haven't actually run Dungeon Fantasy, because I haven't run a dungeon since it was published.

Michael Cule: Are you going to?

Roger BW: Quite possibly. It's something that the groups I usually run for aren't particularly enthused by, but it's nice for a change of pace from time to time. And it's certainly nice for a change of pace for the GM, compared to a horribly-complex game in a modern setting.

Michael Cule: Yeah.

Roger BW: That's certainly one of the reasons it still appeals to me. I also have great fun looking through old issues of Dungeon magazine.

Michael Cule: Well, the thing about dungeon fantasy, in whatever system you play; there's an awful lot of stuff out there, and a lot of it was quite well done.

Roger BW: It is still, as you were saying, by far the majority of roleplaying. We who play other things as well may not necessarily like it that way, but it's there and one might as well enjoy it, because it's still fun.

Michael Cule: And a lot of it can be found second-hand.

Roger BW: Indeed. For that matter, there's a fair bit of free material, some of which is very good indeed.

Roger BW: Death

Michael Cule: Death. Alright.

Roger BW: This, I think, is something that's varied a lot from one campaign and one DM to another. If you play the Keep on the Borderlands strictly as written, you are going to be losing two or three PCs per fight.

Michael Cule: Ow.

Roger BW: You're going to have one fight, the wizard casts his spell, and then you retreat to the keep to heal up and reload, and come back a few days later.

Michael Cule: It's really a matter of personal choice and style. The thing is, in the basic system, unless you get the characters good enough, they're not going to face down the big bad at the end. But on the other hand, the threat of blood on the ground and a beloved player character dying does add a certain amount of charge to the game. I've spoken in favour of austerity before.

Roger BW: Now, D&D, at least in more recent editions, tries to make every fight a balanced fight that you can just barely win. The problem to me is, it's fine to do that, but once the players realise that's happening it takes tension out of it, because they know, "Well, yes, we should be using one of our once-per-fight powers, and three of our every-fight powers, and so on."

Michael Cule: There's a quote in the "famous last words" collection that keeps getting republished on the web, which says something like "Right, one Balrog, six players, we should do an average of 3.5 hit points per round, it should do this to us — right, we're ready to rock and roll!" And that's a famous last word. There are various qualities Dungeon World has built into it, when you hit zero hit points you get to face Death, and on a good roll, Death will let you come back, on an average roll he'll let you come back on conditions, which tend to be whimsical, and there is always the possibility of resurrection. I don't know. I feel that the threat of your character dying adds something to a game, but on the other hand, in the rules a possibility of resurrection is out there, and you can always complicate their lives by the price.

Roger BW: As I recall D&D resurrection, it was available but it was expensive, and at least for low-level characters it wasn't going to be affordable.

Michael Cule: I remember having a conversation on one of the forums about the basic cost of resurrection insurance.

Roger BW: Well, if you amortise your potential future earnings...

Michael Cule: Don't, don't! He did go into all that. What sort of percentage do you think that the clerics ought to ask?

Roger BW: Well, ten is traditional.

Michael Cule: There comes a point after sufficient resurrections — it's sort of like student debt, but worse

Roger BW: It does occur to me that one wants is to hit a happy medium with this. There has got to be the potential of death, which probably in practice means there has to be occasional death. It needs to happen often enough that people remember it's there, but rarely enough that it doesn't become commonplace and it's "oh well, I'll just roll up another fighter then."

Michael Cule: I still remember the death of a particularly well-loved Runequest character of mine, Laila the barbarian. She died, and I regret her death to this day, because I enjoyed her very much, and she was going to go off and marry a prince shortly after this.

Roger BW: Did he know?

Michael Cule: Oh yes, the wooing was going on and she had made her intentions perfectly plain. But her death was so appropriate that I couldn't argue, because she said "Well," she said to the mysterious veiled lady, "you might be anything underneath that veil. You might be a gorgon!" And that killed her. May every one of your player characters have as good and appropriate a death as Laila.

Roger BW: TRANSITION

Roger BW: I think that's a reasonable place to end. We will be back next month.

Michael Cule: We don't know what we're talking about next month. Send us topics!

Roger BW: Ah, we'll come up with something.

Michael Cule: We will.

Roger BW: And write to us at podcast@tekeli.li Tekeli-li

Michael Cule: Is there something coming out of the corners behind you?

Roger BW: Ah, it's just the tentacles, don't worry about it. They keep the draughts out.

CLOSING MUSIC