D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 7

Favorite Edition

Excellent question! And no potential for controversy at all!

In general, I think the best edition of any game is the edition you’re playing and having fun with at any given time. Original AD&D was the D&D I started with, and it was exactly what I wanted it to be while I was playing it. I skipped 2nd Edition AD&D (for reasons having nothing to do with its quality; I think it’s a great revision in its own right), and when I picked up 3rd Edition, it was exactly what I wanted it to be while I was playing it. I worked on a lot of 4th Edition D&D and loved its focus and mechanics. I’ve worked in some way or another on pretty much every official release so far for D&D 5th Edition, and I can attest that it’s as great a game as everyone else is saying it is.

But stacking all the editions up against each other, my favorite would be D&D 3rd Edition. Because 3e was a game that I thought captured the feel of the best AD&D rules in ways that made narrative sense, and I’m a big fan of things making narrative sense. AD&D said, “Your magic-user can’t wear armor and your thief can’t use a shield; that’s just the way it is, suck it up.” 3rd Edition said, “Your wizard can wear full plate and your thief can use a heavy steel shield if you really want them to; but you really don’t want them to, because the following penalties will weigh you down.”

I personally loved that approach, just as I loved the way the 3rd Edition mechanics extended so naturally from AD&D — even when the mechanics were turned upside down, as with the conversion from combat tables and THAC0 to ascending AC. I loved that 3rd Edition saving throws were technically very different than in AD&D but that they felt the same. I loved that the magic items of 3e were the same as those in AD&D, except now there were properly codified rules for how they worked and how they were made. I loved that  even as 3e took the game along very different paths than AD&D trod (and I’m the first to admit that some of those directions were ultimately more complex than they needed to be), the gaming journey felt the same as the journey I’d taken all those years ago.

(I also loved the Open Gaming License, with a passion that knows no bounds. After a long hiatus from gaming, it was actually the OGL that got me interested in D&D again — and specifically, the sense that came with the OGL of what sorts of creative possibilities existed within such a license. That sense of open-ended creativity jump-started my interest in the new edition, and ultimately led to me working on it. That’s kind of a side issue, though.)

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 6

Favorite Deity

I’m going to waffle on the response to this one, because my favorite deities in D&D are the imaginary ones. As a general rule, I don’t like games in which the gods are real, extant, accessible beings with a vested interest in worldly affairs and a bad habit of messing with that world and its people. When I’m gaming, I’m into the idea that real people should be the greatest agents for change in the world, and that deciding to answer the call to heroism should be the ultimate personal choice. But in a world in which the gods are calling the shots and demanding, forcing, or tricking mortals into doing their bidding, the value of heroism and the choice to follow a heroic path becomes muddied for me.

That’s not to say that don’t like or don’t play in campaigns and settings that feature strongly “real” deities, because I do, and I’ve enjoyed many such games and campaigns. I just have a bit of an antipathy towards games and game worlds that put the machinations of the gods above the importance of the player characters as mortal agents of morality and change. (I’m looking at you, Krynn…)

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 5

Your Favorite Set of Dice

I’m stealing this response from the #RPGaDay challenge from last summer, because the answer is the same: My favorite dice are my dice. My first dice. My only dice.

In the early spring of 1981, I bought my first dice at a store in Vancouver called Dragon’s Lair (Broadway near Cambie; if anyone else but me remembers the place, I’d love to hear about it). These were the days when sets of dice didn’t exist (at least I never saw them); you bought them exclusively as singles. My first set of dice were an old-style d20/d10 (0–9 twice), a d12, a d6, and a d4, all in transparent emerald green (what were called “ice dice” back in the day). My first d8 was purple transparent, just because they didn’t have the green in stock to complete the set. In subsequent trips to Dragon’s Lair, I picked up the green d8 and eventually added a new-style d20 and a new-style d10.

I don’t know the manufacturer, but these are the same style and hard-edged, unpainted goodness of the Gamescience dice you can still buy these days. I used to fill in the numbers with crayon for long ages, then finally got around to painting in the numbers a few years ago. When the paint starts to flake, I paint them again. The only distinguishing feature on them is one weird thing about the d4 — one of the “1” marks along the bottom is an “A” for some reason.

Though I now own a whole lot more dice than these, these are the dice I’ve used for every single game of D&D I’ve ever played. For thirty-three years now, the old-style d20 is the only d20 I’ve ever rolled for any of my PCs. (I use the new-style d20 when I’m rolling as a DM.) When I’m rolling 10d6 lightning bolt damage in my current Pathfinder game, I roll my original d6 alongside whatever assortment of newer d6s are at hand. When I’m rolling the result of a cure spell, my original d8 is always in the mix. My magic missiles always include my original d4, which means I occasionally do A + 1 damage. I’m still not sure what that means.

(Addendum: Since first writing this, I have learned that the A on my d4 means it’s a first-gen Armory die! Thanks to Jon Peterson for geeking out about this stuff.)

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 4

Favorite Game World

As I expect is the case for many DMs, I will waffle to provide the default answer of “My world”, because having created a world is a real kick. But expanding beyond that to the real intent of the question, I have to waffle even further to say, “Pretty much all of them.”

I love Greyhawk because it was the first game world I was ever exposed to. I love the Forgotten Realms because Ed Greenwood made it feel ground-level real in a way that Greyhawk never did. I love Eberron because it pushed the boundaries of what heroic fantasy could do without turning it into something else (and also because I worked on an awful lot of it). I love the City State of the Invincible Overlord, and desperately wish I’d been exposed to it much earlier than I was. I love Planescape because Planescape. I love Aebrynis from Birthright, I love the Known World and how it morphed into Mystara, I love Pathfinder’s Golarian.

I read fantasy campaign setting books even when I know there’s no chance I will ever actually find the time to play or DM a game in that world. Because for me, a great campaign setting is like imbibing the best parts of a great novel and the best parts of a great real-world history all at once. A great game world should give you a sense of the all stories that might be told in that world, even as it  gives you the feeling that you’re a part of that world for just a little while.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 3

Favorite Playable Class

Wizard, hands down. I’ve played pretty much everything at one time or another, and I don’t actively dislike any character class except bard. (Don’t get me started.) But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and wizards have absolute power, and that’s some damn fine fodder for roleplaying.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 2

Favorite Playable Race

Human. I know this is the most vanilla white-bread answer possible to this question, but my fascination for human characters extends from what the game means to me, and the way I best love to play it. I think that any sense of character in D&D should largely extend from the decisions and choices that a player makes. And as such, I like the idea that the range of choices available to players and their characters should be as wide as possible.

However, in a lot of campaigns and default settings, the cooler the race, the more baggage it carries with it — and the more baggage, the more things a player is often obliged to do just because that’s part of what the race is about. Elves and dwarves have endless histories and enmities that always somehow manage to work their way into the backstory of every elf and dwarf character in the game. Halflings and gnomes are almost always defined culturally by how they fit into the societies of the “big folk.” Characters of the l33tkewl races like drow, dragonborn, and tieflings often have to actively fight to generate any momentum of character story beyond the baseline of “This is your place in the world and here’s why everybody else hates you and therefore you’re a rebel against existing convention desperate to prove your worth blah blah freaking blah” that their race imposes on them.

This notion isn’t an absolute one, to be sure, and if your campaign and your characters manage to do better than the baseline, kudos. Likewise, it’s definitely fun to play a character who’s an outsider, and outsider status built on the basis of race is a standard trope in gaming and all other forms of storytelling. But for me, the best part about playing D&D is being able to step into the guise of a character for which literally anything should be possible, and sometimes the most generic choice of race creates the widest range of options.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 1

I know this challenge has been around for a while (and I don’t actually know who started it; sorry). But I missed it when it was first out, and was massively busy the first time someone sent it to me, and so am jumping on it now.

How You Got Started

This one’s easy to tell, insofar as I’ve already told it. Long version here. Short version: My friend Kevin started playing, tried to explain the game and couldn’t, so showed me how to play. That was thirty-three years ago, and I’m still at it.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)