I came across this 120-player game of D&D on LinkedIn. Unfortunately the post was whisked away from me before I could note the name of the valorous GM, so apologies for not crediting him here. It reminded me of when my friends Nick Henfrey (co-founder of Flat Earths) and Steve Foster (creator of Mortal Combat) and I turned up at our university D&D society just after Freshers' Week. Dozens of new members had signed up, so we found ourselves crammed into a tiny room (five metres square at the most) with a couple of dozen eager first-timers.
"You can't run a game for a party this size," I pointed out to the GM as we all put down figurines in the traditional ten-foot-wide corridor.
"Course we can," he insisted, announcing that the two people at the front could just make out an ochre jelly or whatever it was.
We played on for half an hour, with most people there watching in bafflement as the experienced players leading the party rolled lots and lots of dice. It didn't look like many of these newbies would be coming back next weekend. Nick whispered in my ear. "Let's liven things up."
We were in the middle of the party, so we started blasting spells and swinging swords in both directions, slaughtering folks on both sides until the experienced D&D players waded back and killed us. Outside in the corridor, one of the first-year players whose characters we'd killed asked, "So what are we going to do now?" I didn't know then, but he was Mark Smith.
Maybe life is full of those "Turn Left" moments. I met my wife because of another, but although that's obviously of paramount importance to me personally there's no gaming dimension so I won't recount the story here. What about you? Are there people or games that have changed your whole life which would have gone entirely unnoticed if you'd made just one different choice?
Dear Mr Morris, In 1985 I came across the first three of your Dragon Warrior books in a bookstore called the Book Worm, in Sandton City, in Johannesburg. I thought it was so strange that they were in digest sized paperback form - and were so different from AD&D hardbacks or box sets like Star Frontiers. However, I started reading them in the bookstore and fell in love! I purchased them there and then and have never looked back. Later on in life, I tracked down the others. My world of gaming was forever changed. To this day, I would say that your series of books, including Blood Sword, were the most influential role-playing games in my life. If I had passed them over in the bookstore, my interest in role-playing games would be much diminished. So thank you very much, Sir.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Stan. Hearing something like that and realizing that I have managed to touch people's lives, even if just in a small way, is the best reward a writer could hope for.
DeleteI was just thinking about it now but it is almost forty years ago that I came across your works! All four of my adult sons enjoy role-playing games - so that is another generation that you have influenced!
ReplyDeleteI'm beginning to feel like one of the Founding Fathers! Somebody told me recently that his son and friends (around 11-12 years old) had got fed up with the anything-goes fantasy of D&D and had decided to try Dragon Warriors instead. I never expected when I wrote those scenarios that they would be enjoyed by players well into the 21st century.
DeleteIn 2003, my long time gaming group that had survived us all going to university, abruptly scattered to the four winds for work and marriage. I thought that was the end of my roleplaying career, to the point of letting my parents throw out all my RPG books a few years later when they were clearing out my old room.
ReplyDeleteIn 2017, I was out on a church walk, when I got chatting to a chap who had just joined, talking medieval history. He mentioned that he was keen on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and was a bit surprised when I mentioned that I used to play it in the 80s. Anyway, we soon started a one-on-one campaign of the Enemy Within, which is still going seven years later!
That led to another moment that reshaped my RPG life. In late 2019, my daughter was curious about this roleplaying game I played in, and wanted to give it a try. WFRP wasn't a great choice for a ten year old, so I duly bought the D&D Essentials Kit, and we started playing. It only lasted about six months: by the time we cleared lockdown, she wanted to DM for me, and then wanted to play with her friends rather than her old dad. Still, during that time, a chance remark by my daughter would kick off a renaissance in my RPG gaming.
In February 2020, we were down at our local board games club, and got playing Fireball Island with a couple of chaps we had never gamed with beore. One mentioned offhand at some point that there had been a D&D module of the game, at which point my daughter declared "Oh, we play D&D!".
Conversation turned to roleplaying games, and a few weeks later he loaned me his copy of Blades in the Dark. Then lockdown hit, and I couldn't get it back to him, so I suggested that we try a game online using Discord. Four and a bit years later, our group has grown to five regulars and three irregulars, and is still gaming online every week, with quarterly in-person game days.
More than that, once we had got Discord working, I mooted to my old gaming group (that disbanded in 2003) that we give it a go, and four years later we're still playing fortnightly. Granted, we get about 60 minutes of actual gaming done in a session, so it's a slow burn, but it works well for us.
All that from a chance comment at a board games club about D&D!
I bet there are a lot of campaigns that got restarted over lockdown, Ray, when everyone realized that distance was no obstacle. Jamie and I went in the other direction; after a few great campaigns, we independently decided that we only really like roleplaying when it's around a table in person, and now that nobody else wants to travel long distances every fortnight that means I've pretty much given up roleplaying apart from an excellent game in Oxford -- but that only happens four or five times a year, *sigh*.
DeleteMr Morris, I think I also need to mention Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf as well. These too were highly influential. I think that those of us from the old colonies (South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) were introduced to role-playing because of these game books. Almost everyone I have met met in the role-playing hobby has said the same thing.
ReplyDeleteA good point, Stan. I'd played solo adventures before Fighting Fantasy (eg Metagaming's Death Test booklets, and when Warlock of Firetop Mountain came out three or four years later I remember being surprised that you couldn't backtrack on your path through the adventure. But although FF was more simplistic than the US books, the big difference was that they were on sale in bookshops rather than hobby games shops. I immediately thought that if solo gamebooks could be sold in bookshops then RPGs could be too -- and for far less money than D&D cost in those days. And so the idea for Dragon Warriors was born, and I have Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (and their editor, Philippa Dickinson, who later on became DW's editor) to thank for that.
DeleteIt was a smart move, Dave - I think I've mentioned before that I discovered RPGs by picking up Dragon Warriors Book 1 in our local library after mistaking it for a gamebook. Another of those "Turn Left" moments! You didn't get any other RPGs in libraries!
DeleteSomebody was saying recently on Facebook that when they play gamebooks they don't roll dice, they just assume they always make the skill roll. I pointed out that sometimes failing a roll has just as interesting an outcome -- and your example there proves that's also true in real life, Ray!
DeleteA great example of failing a roll being the most fun outcome is getting enslaved in Uttaku. Anyone who avoided that really missed out.
DeleteOn the other hand there are some rolls were the outcome is just a bummer, but even this was used I think to good effect agin in Uttaku. There's a random encounter in the countryside where I think you loose a stat or something. The answer is, don't go to that location, there are alternate routes. Use them.
I think losing a stat point is harsh. maybe that could be made more interesting by scarring the character somehow, or otherwise giving them some distinguishing feature or experience that can have an effect later on.
"Ah, I see you bear the scars of Axilos fangs, nasty creatures. See these marks on my arm? Tell me the tale, brother!"
I've played a lot of RuneQuest but Apocalypse World does XP better, you mark XP on a miss not a success. Tell me what you learned!
I've been using that experience system in the Jewelspider RPG, though some players seem to find it counterintuitive. Yet it definitely tells a more interesting story than, "Yes, I'm a great swordsman because I'm always hitting things with a sword."
DeleteI like that idea, because it encourages characters to try things. Successes pay for themselves, and the cost of failure is usually sufficient to discourage players just doing any old thing to accumulate XP. A little bit like the Basic Roleplaying System, I guess - it's hard for a skilled swordsman to become a better swordsman; a novice will have to get better quickly, or come a cropper.
DeleteBut I agree, Simon - there were more than a few Fighting Fantasy books that didn't allow for interesting failures (maybe that changed later on? I sort of lost track of them after about Midnight Rogue). I guess it's difficult when you have to keep players on a critical path, and even if you don't instakill them, it's difficult to avoid them being nickled and dimed away without making the game lack challenge for those with weaker stats. The strength of the Fabled Lands series was precisely that there was no critical path to follow. You might end up not where you wanted to be, or you might need to back out and go spend money to heal up or replace equipment, or burn up a resurrection deal, but you were rarely out of the game completely, just somewhere different.
In Jewelspider your roll to attempt an action not only shows if you were successful or not, it also determines how successful. So when a task has a set difficulty that you must beat, it's possible to fail outright, get an unqualified success -- or fall in the grey area in-between, meaning you achieve part of what you were trying to do but with complications. Ideally I'd like that grey area to be what triggers a skill increase check, but I'm bothered that there's already enough to deal with in figuring out what an incomplete success means. Adding the palaver of skill increase there would be a distraction, so probably it'll be hard fails (in fact fumbles, a roll of double 6) that allow the character to improve.
DeleteMr Morris, I believe that I only cheated on one occasion whilst reading the Blood Sword series. And for one entry only! However, I felt so "dirty" about the whole affair that I stopped, went back to the beginning of the book and started all over again! Like you said: " ... [It's] also true in real life [.]"
ReplyDeleteNow I'm curious, Stan -- how far into the series were you when you cheated? (You did the right thing btw!)
DeleteMr Morris, it was the first book in the series.
ReplyDeleteIn 1985 I was 10 years old. Coming back from primary school, a cousin of mine show me a book he has borrowed from a friend of him. It was Dungeons of Dread, the first of the D&D Endless Quest gamebooks. Indeed, it was the spanish translation (I live at Spain).
ReplyDeleteI begged to take a look to the book, as the cover illustration was so great (a medieval warrior fighting a water serpent in a subterranean chamber!). But my cousin didn't let me. He put the book inside his backpack.
But he lived near to me and his mother stopped by my house to talk with my mother. My cousin was in the living room and had let his backpack in the kitchen.
As a halfling burglar, I crept to the kitchen, opened his backpack and took out the book. I only took a quick look at it, but the illustrations, the concept of turning from page to page based on your choices, and the list of monsters at the end of the book fascinated me.
That was the moment I was caught in the web of fantasy. First, gamebooks. Then, years later, role-playing games. The complete pack of mythology, fantasy and science fiction, from a quick look to a gamebook.
Years later, my cousin gave me that same book. His friend had given it to him when he got bored of it. I still have it at home, like an old treasure.
That's a great story, Carlos. I went and found the cover image on Demian's Gamebook Page and I can well understand how exciting that must have been when you were 10. It's pretty exciting now!
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