marvel heroic – illustrated example of play

Here you can see why I have no future in the fine arts!  Also, I will teach you how to cheat at this game!  Plus random Steve Ditko art!

(I’m using bold text for the GM (a/k/a the Watcher).)  Okay, so let’s cut to a new scene.  Spider-Man, you’re on top of the Fisk Building.  Since you stopped to threaten the Kingpin a second ago, I’m going to say that the Vulture’s had a few minutes to take to the air.  I’m plunking down Asset: Far Away, and I figure the Vulture flies fairly fast but not supersonic, so it’s rated with a d8.  (I’m allowed to do this to set up the scene; later it might cost me from the doom pool.)  The Vulture looks over his shoulder at you and snarls, “You’ll never catch the Vulture, wall-crawler!”  What now?

(I’m using regular text for Spider-Man’s player.)  Well, I guess I could try to web him up.  But I’m running low on plot points.  You know what?  Screw it.  I’m activating the limit on my Web-Slinging power set.  I’m out of webs!

Really?

Yeah, I mean, I really wanted to ruin the Kingpin’s upholstery back there.  You should see the place.  Webs everywhere.  I guess I shouldn’t have been so wasteful.  Anyway, I’m shutting down those powers, and you have to pay me with a plot point.  Thanks.  Spider-Man thinks to himself (makes thought-bubble gesture) “Without my web-fluid, he may be right!”

Okay, so you’ve shut that group of powers down, but what about for your action?

There’s probably heavy industrial stuff on this rooftop, right?  Like A/C units, satellite dish, water tower, that kind of thing?  I’m gonna rip up a big chunk of roofing machinery and chuck it at the Vulture.  That’s my Solo d8 + Superhuman Strength d10 + Wisecracker d8.

Man, don’t spam the Wisecracker trait.  You gotta give me something.

Fine.  “Hate to wreck property, but I gotta keep the HVAC unions in over-time!”  I notice you don’t force the Black Widow act out her Dangerous Liaisons trait. Anyway, that’s a . . . roll of 8 on the d10, and 6 and 3 on the pair of d8′s.  I’m going to keep the 8 and 6 as my total, for 14.  That leaves me with a d8 for my effect die.  What have you got?

There’s nobody to oppose you, so you’re rolling against the doom pool which stands at 3d6 + 1d8.  Rolling that, I get 6, 6, 4, 2.  My reaction is 6 + 6 = 12.  You beat me, and rip up the AC unit.  Now what?

Let’s use my d8 effect die to create an Asset: Torn-Up AC Unit d8.  What’s the Vulture doing?

Um, getting away but I’m honestly not sure.  The rules don’t say precisely how to increment assets like Far Away or Raging Wildfire.  Let’s try this: the Vulture’s gonna roll against the doom pool too.  If he wins, and his effect die is greater than d8 (so, a d10 or d12), then his Far Away asset takes on that value.  If he wins but his effect die is a d8 or smaller, the asset’s value bumps up by one.

Sounds okay.  That’s like the stress system, isn’t it?

Yeah, I guess so.  There’s a lot of self-similar stuff in this game, which is kind of confusing, but also, once you learn one trick, you can apply it elsewhere.  I still don’t know how I feel about that.  Anyway: Vulture’s got Solo d10 + Cowardly d8 + Feathery Flight d8.  He’s also trying to coax a little more performance out of his flying harness, so that’s probably +1d8 for his Tech Expert specialty.  Dang, this game uses a lot of d8′s–let’s pretend this Tens dice is a d8 and I’ll re-roll a 90 or 00.  I roll 7, 5, 5, 1, for a total of 12 with a d8 for my effect die.

Here, I’m rolling the doom pool: 3d6 + 1d8 . . . 8, 6, 3, 3.  The reaction is 14, beating your 12, so you lose.  Maybe the Vulture has gotten a little overconfident and still hoping to stay within gloating range?

Sure.  So my Asset: Far Away stays at d8.  And I rolled a 1, that’s an opportunity.  Do you want to buy it for one plot point?  It will let you bump up any push or stunt on your next action.

Nah–I have something else in mind.  Okay, so I’m going to throw the AC Unit one-handed at the Vulture and break those smelly wings.  “Vulture, if you’re flying south for the winter, you’ll need air-conditioning!”  Solo d8 + Wisecracker d8 + Superhuman Strength d10 + Asset: Torn-Up AC Unit d8.  Hmm, you do need to buy more dice!  I hate this stupid Tens dice thing you do.  Anyway, that’s an 8 on the d10, and 5, 4, 2 on the 3d8.  I’m gonna make my total 13, and use 1d8 for my effect die.  And maybe something else… but let’s see how you roll.

Vulture’s reaction is Solo d10 + Feathery Flight d8 + Acrobatic Expert d8 + Asset: Far Away d8.  I can’t think of a distinction that applies.  So that’s 8, 5, 5, and 2.  My reaction is 13, equal but not greater than yours, so you hit the Vulture.  You’re going for d8 physical stress with your effect die?

Yes, but I’m also spending that plot point, which lets me use a second, unused die on my roll for an effect as well.  So in addition to d8 physical stress with my first (free) effect die, I’m going to damage his Feathery Flight trait with my second effect die, a d8.  Try getting away now!

Hmm!  Let me mark off the stress.  The Vulture’s Feathery Flight is rated at d8, so you’ve demolished that power completely!  The Vulture groans in pain and plummets from the sky!  Okay, for his action he’s going to try to recover. I’m going to take that d8 out of the doom pool and use it to reestablish my flying trait.

Wait, I thought you can only try to heal yourself during a transition scene?  In an action scene someone else can try to heal you, but if you’re doing it all on your own you need to wait until things quiet down.  Unless you’ve got healing powers like Wolverine.

Huh!  Let me see, I thought I could do that.  (Checks rule book.)  Looks like you’re right.  Okay, well, let’s just say he’s falling toward a building helplessly–thinking maybe he had a spare power pack somewhere and realized he forgot it at home.  What do you do now?

I’m going to eliminate the distance asset.  That’s Swingline d8 + Solo d8 + Acrobatic Master d10–eh, you know, I’m going to split that d10 down to 2d8.  And can I fold in the Vulture’s d8 stress because he’s still hoping to get away?  Yes?  Okay, that’s me rolling 5d8 . . . 8, 8, 4, 3, 1.  Do you want to buy that 1 off me?  My total is 16, with a d8 for my effect die.

Sure.  Here’s a plot point, and I add 1d6 to the doom pool, which is now 4d6 + 1d8.  And for his reaction, the Vulture rolls Solo d10 + Acrobatics Expert d8 + Asset: Far Away d8.  I’m going to include my Cowardly distinction at a d4, because that lets me step up the lowest die in the doom pool, making it 3d6 + 2d8. 

Come on, man, how are you cowardly?

The Vulture’s screaming out, “My wings, my wings!”  He’s unsure whether to be more scared of Spider-Man or hitting the rooftop, and so isn’t able to prepare well against either.  Hmm, that’s 4, 4, 4, 4.  My reaction is 8, you beat me.  In fact, you beat me by more than 5, so your d8 effect die steps up to d10.  What were you hoping to do, again?

Eliminate your Asset: Far Away d8.  I’m closing in on my web-line.  Thwip!  Thwip!

Okay.  And–hey, wait a minute!  Weren’t you out of web-fluid?  You didn’t reactivate your Web-Slinging power.  I think your dice pool was wrong!

I, um, forgot.  Yeah, forgot.  Say, you know what’s interesting about the Vulture?  He’s like Spider-Man’s evil grand-dad or something.  They’re both gadget-guys, they’re both acrobats, but Peter Parker is a nice kid and the Vulture’s this mean old ex-con.

Oh man, don’t get me started.  There’s this whole anxiety about fathers in the Silver Age Spidey stories.  Jameson exploiting his astronaut son, Robbie worried about his kid’s politics, Harry freaking out on drugs and becoming the Goblin.  Captain Stacy.  It’s frequent and really sustained.  What’s kind of cool about the Vulture is that he’s got that same thing going on with his super villain career, but in reverse: passing the costume on to the younger Blackie Drago who has no respect for his elders.  A hero with no father and a villain with no heir.  Vulture and Spider-Man really deserve each other.

Gee, how about that!  So, um, what’s he doing on his round?

Trying not to splatter on the roof, I suppose.  He’s rolling Solo d10 + Acrobatics Expert d8 + Spry Geezer d8.  And I’m going to spend 2d6 out of the doom pool to add to my roll.  That’s 6, 6, 4, 4, 1, total of 12.  Want to buy that 1 off of me?

Sure.  Here’s a plot point, now I can push harder or stunt better on Spider-Man’s next turn.  The doom pool is now 1d6 + 2d8, right?  And also maybe the Vulture’s d8 stress.  Let’s roll: 5, 4, 3, 2.  Reaction of 9.  So I guess you don’t get splattered.

Okay, so let’s say you’re clambering onto the rooftop where the Vulture landed.  He’s all banged up and looks like he’s seen better days.  What now?

(play continues)

marvel heroic – musing hesitantly

Me, Tavis, and Tavis’s son played in the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying launch party at the Compleat Strategist, organized by the incomparable gaming mutant Jenskot.  We had fun!  Then Tavis and his kid had to leave and many new players came.  We had even more fun!  Then I went uptown and played it with some friends, and had fun too!  So: 3 for 3, but with some reservations.

the good social stuff you don’t care about

Here is how awesome my friend Jenskot is: he organized a launch party for free, developing elaborate cheat-sheets requiring hours of work, to promote the work of strangers, who couldn’t get their act together to ship their silly game on time.  It was a launch party to promote a book that doesn’t exist yet!  (You can buy the PDF on-line, though.)  But people still had fun!

"--?!?" is right

The really nice thing about playing these licensed games is that it gives you a chance to geek out with fellow nerds about your love of the source material.  “Wait, we’re fighting Razor-Fist?  Razor-I have prosthetic steak knives instead of hands-Fist?!?  The guy’s not a villain, he can’t even go to the bathroom!  But boy, Paul Gulacy man, what happened to him?  Nobody ripped off Jim Starlin’s style better.”  So that was fun too.

Also if a superheroic adventure begins with Iron Man pretending to get drunk, while Colossus gets wasted on vodka, and they fly around NYC together demolishing buildings in order to finally build the long-awaited Second Avenue Subway line, the game has already failed (in the eyes of a 10 year old comic fan) -

Pretend-Drunk Iron Man + Drunk Colossus + Unauthorized Urban Renewal = GAMING FAIL (for some people)

the good game stuff

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is a cleverly designed game that, in play, feels like a modern-day super hero comic book.  Lots of snazzy action, a dose of fan-favorite characterization, and (at least at this early stage of learning the game) very drawn out and “decompressed.”  The rules ship with a mini-module called “Breakout” based on the Bendis/Finch New Avengers arc of the same name, and a player commented, “You know, this felt exactly like those comics.”

The closest point of reference I can see is Dungeons & Dragons 4e, but only insofar as they’re both complex games designed to produce cool combat set-pieces by way of a cleverly designed economy.

The game operates by building a dice pool from various personality traits, super powers, and skills.  Your roll measures both your overall performance and the effect it has on the fictional circumstances; your opponent makes a similar roll to resist you.  As a player, you can heap inconvenience on your character–”Captain America is a man from the 1940′s, so I’ll say he has problems understanding how to deactivate the super-computer…”–to earn resources called plot points.  Plot points can be spent to activate special super power combos or to jazz up your dice pool in other ways.

(Indie Filth Alert!  This game expects you, as a player, to occasionally make things worse for your character in the hope of reaping a mechanical advantage.  A sizable segment of gamers don’t like that in any way, shape, or form.  If you’re one of them, you won’t like this game.)

Meanwhile the GM–called “the Watcher” in this game after Kirby’s version of the Man in the Moon–is on the look-out for any 1′s that you roll.  The Watcher buys them off you with plot points, and for every plot point he pays you, he adds +1d6 to the “doom pool,” which represents the general FUBAR nature of superhuman conflict.  When you’re trying to do something that has no NPC to resist you, you’ll roll against the doom pool.  The Watcher can also spend dice out of the doom pool to activate special super villainous powers or create plot twists.

So the game works by steadily growing the doom pool, with you earning plot points along the way.  In theory, the game is balanced if you’re rolling a bunch of d6′s for the Wasp and I’m rolling a bunch of d12′s for Thor, because the Wasp is going to be earning plot points about twice as fast, though the doom pool will also be growing a lot faster as she gets in over her head.

Several people on RPGNet have complained that the game doesn’t have a character creation system, but that’s not true.  It doesn’t have a randomized or point-buy character creation system, but damn if I didn’t create Sonny Sumo last Kirbsday in less than 10 minutes.  Almost all of that time was conceptual.  The game doesn’t really sweat exactly how strong you are: Thor, the Hulk, the Thing, and Colossus are all equally strong, which as a neckbeard offends me greatly.  But figuring out your character’s personality, and fine-tuning some super power tricks, takes a little bit of insight, because that makes a much bigger difference in play.

(Indie Filth Alert: if you like discovering your tabula rasa character through play, this is not the game for you.  If you require randomized character creation, this is not the game for you.  If you require transparently point-bought balanced characters, this is not the game for you.)

The game is also pretty great at handling bizarre power stunts.  You know how, in Kirby’s Fourth World titles, the little super-iPad called Mother Box can do practically anything?  It’s a huge pain in the butt in Marvel Super Heroes, because you’d have to spend hundreds of points of Karma and get many spectacular rolls to pull off so many one-time-only stunts.  But with Marvel Heroic those weird never-see-it-again powers carry a low, low price of one plot point.  Which makes it handy for guys like Iron Man, Hawkeye, and Courageous Cat, who never seem to run out of nifty tricks.

the bad game stuff

Man alive, this game has stats for no-name bozo’s like Armor, Iron Fist, the Constrictor, and Tombstone–but no stats for the Hulk, Thor, Doctor Doom, or Magneto.  Inexplicable!

This book gives the 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide a run for its money for disorganization–or maybe, in this case, over-organization.  The rules for healing and recovery are spread over three chapters, written largely the same way but in each instance there’s a little rule added that appears nowhere else.  This book’s credits list six editors; you could not prove it by the way the book is organized.

There are a lot of things in this game that resemble one another, but have subtly different mechanical effects.  “Stress” is exactly like a “complication,” except that stress doesn’t go away at the end of a scene; instead it converts to “trauma” which is also exactly like stress (which is like a complication).  A “stunt” is like a “push” is like a “resource,” and all of them are like “assets,” except that an asset is created by rolling dice, and all four resemble “traits” except a trait is a permanent part of your character.  Basically, they came up with a really nice economy, and then are trying to tell you there’s a mechanical difference between Coke and Pepsi–and there is, but it’s hard to discern at first.  So far, it seems that no two people who have read rules agree on how a fictional circumstance should translate into the mechanics.

Although the game describes superhuman speed, subsonic flight, and teleportation, there aren’t any rules for movement in general, or spatial relationships of any kind.  A single villain trying to run away from a group of super-heroes with differing rates of speed requires a surprising amount of mental gymnastics.

(Indie Filth Alert: if you really like battle-grids, miniatures, and being able to unambiguously declare where your character is in space, this is not the game for you.  If you like saying, “My guy’s kind of over here, and your guy is kind of over there” and having the mechanics reflect that, this game might not be for you–it appears to be an open question.)

If you’re not careful, it’s easy to say, “Well, what you just declared is mechanically permitted even though it doesn’t make fictional sense.  Oh no, we broke the fiction!”  Example!  Spider-Man hurls an industrial air-conditioning unit at the Vulture.  He rolls to get an “effect die,” which can be traded in for any one of the following; he can spend a plot point to do another thing too…

1. Spidey could inflict physical injury on the Vulture (effect die becomes physical stress)
2. Spidey could break the Vulture’s flying suit (effect die cancels out flying super power)
3. Spidey could inflict a painful memory of past defeats on the Vulture (effect die becomes emotional stress)
4. Spidey could remove the distance between him and the Vulture (effect die cancels out the “I’m far away from you” asset)

The first three are at least arguable given the fictional circumstances.  But there’s almost no conceivable way that chucking an A/C unit at the Vulture will physically move Spider-Man and the Vulture closer together.  Yet the game’s economy isn’t going to stop you from saying stupid stuff like that.  It’s the table’s responsibility to police the interaction between the fiction and the mechanics.

(Old Gaming Fart Alert!  If you doubt the good sense of the people you play with, this game is not for you.  If you believe that RPG’s should be hardwired to prevent you from creating logical paradoxes accidentally in play, this game is not for you.)

what do you think, middle-aged comics nerd?

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is an extremely nifty game that shows a lot of promise.  It is, however, extremely confusing even beyond the learning curve of a new game.  Aside from the crazy disorganization of the text itself and the almost-but-not-quite-the-same quality of many of the rules, the text veers toward a worrying (but manageable) one-night stand between cause and effect.  I played it three times in one day with three different groups, and we all had a great time!  You might too, but it’s not for everybody.

kirbsday: sonny sumo!

Last time: after Darkseid banished the Infinity Man, Desaad imprisoned the Forever People in the amusement park/concentration camp Happyland in a variety of cruel deathtraps, but their Mother Box escaped and sought help from a stranger named Sonny Sumo.

plot synopsis

Sonny Sumo is a Japanese guy hoping to make a name for himself in Jack Kirby’s version of pro-wrestling by fighting a giant, flame-throwing robot with swords for fingers.

Crazy Mother Box stunt of the week: healing Sonny’s third-degree burns.

Eager to prove himself against a real challenge, Sonny agrees to help Mother Box rescue the Forever People.  Which he does with astounding ease, making me wonder if that’s because Sonny Sumo is just that awesome, or the Forever People are just that inept.

Alternately, it could be that Desaad is an incompetent junkie, too busy getting high off his fear-siphon to prevent the escape.  “What can equal this for joy?  I find it strange that Darkseid would shun this!”

When Desaad’s guards show up en masse, Sonny Sumo mind-controls them . . . via the Anti-Life Equation!  Sonny Sumo’s the guy Darkseid has been searching for, lo these past five issues!

what’s the story with sonny sumo?

Kirby came up with Sonny Sumo when Marvel Comics letterer Morrie Kuramoto started giving him some good-natured grief about creating an Asian super hero, since Kirby and Lee had created the first mainstream African super hero with the Black Panther.

We know Sonny Sumo is comic book Asian because:

• He’s named Sonny Sumo
• He talks a lot about the samurai’s warrior code
• His skin is the color of fried chicken

(The coloring process in comic books at the time made it difficult to produce Asian skin tones.  This was a problem throughout Doug Moench’s and Paul Gulacy’s time on Master of Kung-Fu for example.)

That said, Sonny’s clearly the hero of this story, and he’s depicted in a way that’s both stoic and sarcastic, calling Big Bear “bushy-beard” and speaking in contractions in a time when a lot of Asians in comics were excessively formal.  He ain’t no Chop-Chop, is what I’m saying.

Kirby probably added Sumo to Forever People #5 for the same reason he added the Black Racer to New Gods #3: DC editorial had urged him to debut a lot of new characters.  The conceptual design is interesting.  The Black Racer is a mysterious, eerie, tragically vulnerable vigilante, signified by the armor, his so-weird-it’s-frightening mode of travel, his full-body cast, his eyes staring in horror.  And, maybe to white audiences in 1970, also his blackness.  (That said: Kirby has no problem depicting warm and relatable black characters, like the Black Racer’s sister or Gabe Jones over in Sergeant Fury.)

Sonny Sumo, in contrast, is a friendly, confident, pulp adventure character.  He’s an awesome fighter with great courage, but he’s pretty affable and low-key.  Plus it turns out that Sonny Sumo possesses the ultimate weapon, the Anti-Life Equation!  Even so, Kirby isn’t above exploiting Sumo’s Japanese heritage as a type of super power:

“Inside him, ancient centuries and even more ancient practices come alive!  Expand!  Take hold!–and to their work!”  As Sonny’s manager explains, “It’s a kind of oriental thing—like invoking a mystic power  in the mind!”

This kind of thing was unfortunately par for the course with Asians in comics back then: you’re either an honor-obsessed madman, a devious Oriental mastermind, a superstitious peasant, a powerful mystic, or a Judo master.  Sonny Sumo doesn’t rise above those stereotypes, but it’s clear that Kirby meant to create a sympathetic, effective hero.

have we learned anything?

Yeah!  First of all, when the Forever People ran into a serious problem, Mother Box went straight to the one guy on Earth who has the Anti-Life Equation locked in his head.  Surely that’s not a coincidence: Mother Box knew this from the start, and is therefore more clever than Darkseid or Desaad.

What does it mean that Sonny Sumo has the Anti-Life Equation in his brain?  Hell if I know!  Earlier in the issue, Sonny demonstrated sufficient willpower to reject his own injuries.  His desire to test himself against adversity isn’t a compulsion to battle, like Orion’s case, but rather a deliberate decision to set aside his instinct for self-preservation in order to confront new challenges.  Maybe that selflessness and iron will give you command of the Equation?  Who knows?

Though Sumo’s role here is a little fuzzy to me, there’s some fun stuff about the Anti-Life Equation, free will, and destiny.

Check it out: there are “many other” all-powerful cosmic equations.

Also, the Forever People give a pretty good explanation of their mandate: they believe that everyone should do his or her own thing, and are fighting the Blue Meanies who won’t let people live how they choose.

What does Darkseid think about this?

Everybody’s got their own nature, and everything they do will express that nature.  Darkseid explains: “It’s the very core of our conflict!  To fulfill ourselves—we must kill them!”  I love that!  If you take the Forever People’s just-be-yourself motto to its fullest conclusion, you’re going to get a sociopath like Darkseid eventually.  Darkseid’s villainy is simply his karma in action, and while he may regret the circumstances, it is his nature to do anything for power and he won’t fight that urge.

sonny sumo, in marvel heroic

I’ve been thinking for the past week or so that Marvel Heroic Roleplaying might be a better fit for Kirby’s Fourth World saga than my beloved Marvel Super Heroes, in part because it handles laughably flexible (i.e., totally deus ex machina) power sets like Mother Box much better.  Sonny’s a character who would work very easily in Marvel Super Heroes, but I’ve got this other game on my mind right now.

Probably the SFX and Limits could be better designed.  Still getting a feel for this thing.

Affiliations

Solo d10, Buddy d8, Team d6

Distinctions

Honor Code, I’ve Handled Power All My Life, Underground Wrestler

Power Set: Mind Over Matter

Mind Control d10, Enhanced Reflexes d8, Enhanced Stamina d8, Enhanced Strength d8

• SFX: Anti-Life Broadcast.  For each additional Mind Control target, add +1d6 to your roll and keep +1 effect die.
• SFX: Chi Focus.  In a pool including a Mind Over Matter trait, replace two dice of equal steps with one die of +1 step.
• SFX: Second Wind.  Before making a roll involving a Mind Over Matter die, move your physical stress die to the doom pool, and step up your power trait die by +1.
• LIMIT: Exhaustion.  Shutdown any Mind Over Matter power to gain 1 plot point.  Recover this trait by activating an opportunity or during a Transition Scene

Specialties

Business Expert, Combat Expert

Milestone: Wielder of Anti-Life

• Gain 1 XP the first time you use Mind Control power trait in a scene.
• Gain 3 XP when you use Anti-Life to rescue yourself or others from the forces of Apokolips
• Gain 10 XP when you use Mind Control to harm someone for your selfish gain, or when you renounce Anti-Life forever

Milestone: Almost Famous

• Gain 1 XP when you introduce yourself to someone who hasn’t heard of you
• Gain 3XP When you gain stress from engaging in battle in public
• Gain 10XP When you defeat a tremendous adversary in public combat, or quit the fight game and become a derelict

ah hell, sonny sumo in marvel super heroes

Primary Abilities

• Fighting: Incredible (40)
• Agility: Excellent (20)
• Strength: Excellent (20)
• Endurance: Remarkable (30)
• Reason: Typical (6)
• Intuition: Good (10)
• Psyche: Incredible (40)

Secondary Abilities

• Health: 110
• Karma: 56
• Resources: 6
• Popularity: 20

Special Abilities

• Power: Anti-Life Equation.  This is Mind Control at Amazing rank.  It costs 10 Karma points to use this power.
• Power: Mind Ritual.  This is Regeneration (or, in the Advanced rules, Recovery) at Incredible rank.
• Talent: Wrestling
• Talent: Martial Arts
• Contact: the Forever People, super hero group
• Contact: Harry Sharp, boxing manager

 

 

mighty marvel reward systems

Last week we played some Marvel Super Heroes—the old FASERIP game, not the new one which I hope to talk about soon—and I decided to muck with the reward system a little bit.

In Marvel Super Heroes, your character doesn’t “level up” and seldom improves over time.  Instead, heroic behavior earns you Karma points, which you can then spend to alter dice rolls.  This represents peak performance, good luck, or the moral arc of the comic book universe, and helps to explain why a comparatively ordinary guy like Captain America can take on the Hulk on equal terms: Captain America may be weaker, but a lifetime of heroism lets him save the day.

Like hit points in D&D, Karma measures whether you’re a protagonist of the campaign.  If you’ve got a ton of Karma saved up, it’s because you’ve attended lots of sessions, you’ve overcome many villains, solved many crimes, or found time to manage the obligations of your secret identity.  And with great Karma comes great performance.

Yet Karma isn’t easy to acquire, especially in the advanced rules.  Most Karma awards are in the neighborhood of 10-30 points, and it’s pretty easy for the GM to place you in a Hobson’s choice: sure you arrested the cat burglar (+5) but you had to blow off Grandma’s birthday party without a good excuse (-20) for a net loss of 15 Karma points.*   And of course, if your super “hero” chooses to go on a one-man crime wave, that’s going to carry a heavy Karma cost as well.

There’s also the issue that Marvel Super Heroes doesn’t have strong ways to distinguish characters’ personalities.  There’s a +10 Karma award for good role-playing, but in my view this doesn’t always capture the luchador soap opera that is Marvel Comics.

Supers of Yesterday

At the top of my list of favorite fantasy games I really should get around to playing sits The Shadow of Yesterday, by Clinton R. Nixon.  Shadow of Yesterday uses a customizable XP system called Keys.  Each character chooses a few of these Keys, which read like this:

Key of Unrequited Love
Your character has a love for someone who does not return this love.  Gain 1 XP whenever your character has to make a decision that is influenced by them. Gain 2 XP every time your character attempts to win their affection.  Gain 5 XP every time your character puts herself in harm’s way or makes a sacrifice for them.  Buyoff: Abandon your pursuit of this person or win their love.

You get a few XP for something pretty minor and easy to arrange; you get additional XP for something that carries serious repercussions or is otherwise difficult to deal with.  The “buyoff” means that any time you betray the key, you have the option to permanently cash it in for 10 XP, which in Shadow of Yesterday is like leveling up twice, but you can never take this particular key again.  In other words, if you choose to lead your character toward a moment of cataclysmic personal growth, you can reap massive rewards.  (And no, I don’t know what’s up with the key metaphor, which seems hopelessly mixed.)  You can use some of those XP to buy a new key if you’re so inclined.

Method of emphasizing your character’s role as a protagonist in the story?  Method to reliably garner more Karma?  Method to off-set Karma losses for certain kinds of character-appropriate bad behavior?  Method to emphasize silly soap opera elements of super hero comics?  Yes to all four.  As an added bonus, if you’ve got a player who’s like, “Uh, who is ‘Wonder Man’?  What’s this guy like?” you can then point to the Key of Being a Douche.

Some Stuff From Our Game

I haven’t figured out how much it costs to purchase a new Key—I’m figuring 100 Karma, and you can only have three at a time, but that’s just provisional for now, since we’re in the process of testing it out.

Can you match these Keys to the respected ranks of the Avengers?

Key of the Bad Relationship.  Gain 10 Karma when you’re in a scene with this person.  Gain 20 Karma when you try to win this person’s respect or make him or her jealous.  Gain 50 Karma when you suffer or make a sacrifice because of this person.  Cash-Out: 100 Karma if you walk out or otherwise end the relationship.

Key of the Bronco.  Gain 10 Karma for mouthin’ off to super-guys.  Gain 20 Karma when you show ‘em up by deeds.  Gain 50 Karma by saving the day through lone-wolf grandstanding.  Buy-Off: Gain 100 Karma by submitting to a wise leader.

Key of the Crying Android.  Gain 10 Karma for discovering a new question (supposedly philosophical, but almost always continuity-obsessive) while brooding over the mystery of your origins.  Gain 30 Karma for risking harm in search of an answer.  Cash-Out: Gain 100 Karma for answering the question.

Key of Hedonism.  Gain 10 Karma every time you indulge prodigiously in wine, women, and song.  Gain 30 Karma every time this upsets uptight people or overcomes your responsibilities.  Cash-Out: Gain 100 Karma points when you swear, this time you’re going to settle down and grow up.

Key of Homo superior.  Gain 10 Karma points when you defeat a human.  Gain 30 Karma when you defeat Sentinel robots, government super-agents, or assimilationist mutants.  Buy-Off: Gain 100 Karma by taking orders from a human.

Key of the Loser.  Gain 10 Karma points every time you mope over your shortcomings.  Gain 20 Karma every time you are defeated or give up.  Gain 50 Karma if that failing endangers innocent third-parties.  Buy-Off: Gain 100 Karma by thwarting a national or global conspiracy.

Great minds

Turns out that the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game has an XP system called milestones that resembles keys greatly.  Here’s an example of a milestone.

MUTANTS SANS FRONTIÈRES
Created by Warren Worthington III, this international relief agency offers mutants support they can’t get anywhere else. Will it inspire Beast?
1 XP when you use your Medical Expert to help a mutant recover stress.
3 XP when you choose not to engage in a confrontation in order to rescue or support noncombatant mutants.
10 XP when you either allow a mutant to die or give up your status or reputation to save them.

Note that the massive XP rewards combines the fulfillment of the key (sacrificing your professionalism to save a mutant) with as the option to betray it (letting a mutant die), which in Shadow of Yesterday would be broken out separately, with more points given if you choose to renounce your values.

My first impression of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game is cautious enthusiasm: it looks like a complex fighting game that handles “power stunts” a lot better than my old beloved Marvel Super Heroes did, but I’m a little suspicious that fights will begin to look the same after a while, and the scenario creation rules look . . . problematic.  But I look forward to getting experience with this thing pretty quickly.  Either way, I’m pleased that we hit on these reward systems independently: it’s a sign I’m on to something.

=====

* = Contrast: if you had allowed the thief to go free (-5) in order to make it to Grandma’s party (+10), you’d have a get gain of 5 Karma points.  Going to Grandma’s house is therefore more important than catching mere thieves, but less important than catching murderers–it’s about as important as catching an arsonist or mad bomber.  Obviously, after an exhausting day on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Judge Richard Posner puts on a strange costume and becomes . . .  Milton-Fried-Man, who is Pareto superior to ordinary mortals!

kirbsday: the closing jaws of death

Last time: super-escape artist Mister Miracle literally stepped into Doctor Bedlam’s latest trap–a fifty-story building filled with ordinary humans driven to murderous rage by the doctor’s paranoid pill–and was bound in chains, locked into a trunk, and thrown off the 45th floor!

Mister Miracle #4 takes up split seconds later.  Short version: Mister Miracle escapes.  But that’s not the memorable part of this story.

big bonus! big surprise! big barda!

A woman!  A woman in a Jack Kirby Fourth World title!  Who’s not “simple but worried secretary Claudia Shane!”  Who’s not a wallflower like Beautiful Dreamer, whom readers didn’t think could talk because she was so passive!  Who’s not a villainess like Granny Goodness!  Mister Miracle #4 debuts Barda, a friend of Scott Free’s and an officer in the Female Furies of Apokolips.

Barda’s here partially for sex appeal.  Kirby based her look off actress and singer Lainie Kazan, who had done a nude spread for Playboy in late 1970 (not pictured because I value your continued employment).  Later this issue we see Barda in a bikini, and it’s an unusual amount of skin for a Kirby book, though she has no belly-button…

Barda’s also here to provide backstory. In the Mister Miracle series so far, every month something eerie and threatening happens, but Scott Free does not lose his cool: he expects it, and he’s pretty tight-lipped about explaining things to the poor, mystified Oberon.  Clearly there’s an origin story here, but Scott apparently is keeping it bottled up inside.  Barda’s less circumspect: she tells Oberon (and the readers) that she grew up with Scott in Granny’s orphanage and eventually helped him escape to Earth.  They’ve got a shared history, and at least one of them is willing to blab about it.

Barda is also here to add some chaos to Oberon’s somewhat-frayed domesticity.  It’s interesting to contrast the home life scenes in Mister Miracle with those in Forever People and New Gods.  The Forever People hang out with Donnie and Uncle Willie for a little while in issue #2, but the humans are weird hosts and the gods are strange guests, and they can’t wait to tell Donnie, “Have a nice life!” and leave in issue #3.  (The typical super hero doesn’t make such a formal goodbye unless he doesn’t expect or intend to return.)  The “O’Ryan Gang” is somewhat more ordinary than a crippled child living alone in a slum with his senile, gun-toting uncle, but they can’t take a break from formally introducing themselves long enough to have normal interactions.  Yet Scott and Oberon have a convincing foolhardy-child/worrywart-parent relationship, and Barda helps bring this characterization to the fore.  I’m trying to think of the last time I saw a male super hero cook dinner in a Silver Age comic…

And of course, Barda is also here to punish fools.

Yes, butch Barda’s version of Mother Box is called her “Mega-Rod.”  Don’t joke about it to her face.

It’s hard to talk about Barda without also talking about female characters in super hero comics.  DC’s major heroines at this point were Wonder Woman and Supergirl, both of whom were strong and effective, but weren’t directly at war with traditional gender expectations.  Over at Marvel, the most prominent female characters at that time were probably the Invisible Girl, who was so stupid she couldn’t even pick a name for her baby:

And the Wasp, whose reaction when told that an innocent man is dying of a rare blood poisoning is that her boyfriend should stop working on a cure and take her out dancing:

By the late 60′s and early 70′s, the Women’s Lib movement was hitting its stride, sometimes depicted rather clumsily in comics.  So it’s kind of cool that Kirby presents this Barda character as someone who is physically powerful, assertive as hell, totally indifferent to gender expectations–and yet very friendly and cool all the same.

the day of the multi-cube!

So anyway, what happens in this issue, plot-wise?  How does Mister Miracle escape the falling trunk?  Well, he just does!  But later he explains the trick to Oberon:

He then gets throw into an iron maiden, on the set of some kind of Dungeons & Dragons style medieval TV show–because why wouldn’t there be a medieval TV show filming inside a modern office building?

Again, the multi-cube dissolves the back of the iron maiden, allowing Scott to escape.  Though Barda frequently offers to help, Mister Miracle refuses as it would compromise the warrior-code of this duel with Doctor Bedlam.  Eventually Bedlam himself manifests…

…and threatens them with a human stampede, except the multi-cube casts a sleep spell and the heroes are spared.  Mister Miracle wins again!

This issue closes with Mister Miracle giving Oberon a hypothetical account of how he pulled off these tricks, which is kind of a nice structure–maybe encouraging children to imagine how Mister Miracle could have done the impossible, and then revealing the secret.

kirbsday: will the REAL don rickles panic?!?

Last time in Jimmy Olsen 139: to secure a contract with Don Rickles, malicious media mogul Morgan Edge sends an eccentric employee, Rickles look-alike name-alike act-alike Goody Rickles, into a deathtrap managed by Inter-Gang underboss Ugly Mannheim.

“don’t ask! just buy it!”

Boy, you said it, Kirby!  Whew.  Okay, so basically, Clark’s trapped in space, zooming toward Apokolips…

…But is rescued by Lightray, a supporting character in The New Gods.  I guess this is nice, but given Clark’s secret identity it’s hard to imagine he was ever truly in danger.

Note that the collage is in color, unlike some of the previous efforts from a few months ago.  I’m not sure if this represents Kirby and the publisher discovering some new production technique, or just throwing a bit more care into the usual process, but by this point in late ’71 the photo-collages are starting to look a bit more vivid.

The Golden Guardian charges off after Ugly Mannheim and his Inter-Gang hoods, and beats an antidote to the pyro-granulate poison out of them…

And Jimmy and Goody Rickles make their way via the subway to Morgan Edge for medical help.

Meanwhile the real Don Rickles has shown up at Morgan Edge’s office, to the surprisingly demonstrative delight of the staff:

As Don and Edge sit down to iron out a contract, we get the inevitable collision…

The sudden onset of echolalia and echopraxia unnerves Don so much he’s got to sit down, even as Goody and Jimmy plead for their lives:

Morgan Edge calls the bomb squad, but is more concerned about his office furniture.  The Guardian saves them with the antidote, but Clark opens a boom tube right behind Don’s chair…

Finally, Don Rickles realizes that the only way he can escape the madhouse that is Galaxy Broadcasting is via the bomb squad:

and here we are again

So, although last issue was kind of inexplicable, Kirby manages to wrap the storyline up pretty well.  It works as a madcap action-comedy, and it’s a nice change of pace in a story about Black Racers, concentration camps at Disneyland, and mass hysteria.  There’s no denying it’s bizarre, and maybe the jokes could have been a little sharper, but hey: writing and drawing two issues a month.

These plots involving Morgan Edge remind me a little bit of some classic J. Jonah Jameson gags in the early days of the Spider-Man comic.  Way back when, Jameson wasn’t simply content to denounce Spidey: he wanted to defeat him by proxy, so he paid mad scientists to create killer robots, scorpion-men, and fishbowl-headed vigilantes to take the kid out.  Naturally, not only does Spider-Man win, but Jameson suffers a humiliating comeuppance.  (I can never get enough of the Scorpion-comes-after-Jameson storyline.)  Yet Kirby doesn’t humanize Edge with Jameson’s preening buffoonery: Edge is all coldblooded psychopathy.  I wonder whether any of these portrayals owe anything to longtime Marvel publisher (and Stan’s uncle) Martin Goodman–as a family member, Stan could have afforded a humorous wink at Goodman’s sharp business practices that would have been livelihood-threatening to employees like Kirby.

In the letters column this issue, readers grapple with the DNA Project.

The trouble with people like Randy Hiteshaw is that they aren’t privy to the classified documents that would explain how keeping hundreds of microscopic naked Jimmy Olsens in little white underpants is vital to winning the Cold War.

i am going to rationalize you, goody rickles, if it’s the last thing I do

One of the things I love to hate about comics fandom is the seemingly irresistible compulsion to rationalize everything.  Any loose plot thread or inexplicable occurrence must be harmonized with established continuity.  You see this with DC Comics all the time: in the mid-80′s they thought their setting’s history had gotten too complex, so they junked most of it with the Crisis on Infinite Earths.  But ever since then, they’ve had to revise stuff left dangling in the aftermath in Zero Hour and 52 and Final Crisis and the New 52 relaunch.

I generally think these efforts are unnecessary and quixotic. but dang it, even I give into temptation sometimes.

Weird things about Goody Rickles:

• Named after Don Rickles
• Looks exactly like Don Rickles
• Acts like Don Rickles would if Rickles were written by Jack Kirby
• Dresses in a super hero / New Genesis style costume with a big zero on the chest
• When he meets Don Rickles, Don ends up reflexively repeating Goody’s words and body language

This leads to one and only one conclusion: Don Rickles is a robotic “follower” unit as seen in Mister Miracle 2.  Goody is a native of New Genesis, High-Father’s court fool, dispatched to Earth and toiling away at the nerve center of a major metropolitan newspaper to keep an ear open in the aftermath of “The Pact!” (see New Gods #7, coming in like… 12 weeks) or maybe “Himon!” (again, weeks away).

Being a show-off entertainer, Rickles builds himself a follower and sends it off to Hollywood, where it becomes famous.  He names it “Don” as a mock-lordly title.  Due to signal interference from Doctor Bedlam (who employs a similar animate-technology) or perhaps the Overlord device used by Granny Goodness (one of Goody’s relatives?), Don Rickles starts operating independently and forgets its true nature.

Goody, meanwhile, stays in character like Edgar in King Lear.  The minute he suspects Inter-Gang involvement at Galaxy, he bursts in on Morgan Edge and harasses him for an investigatory assignment.  He tries to steer Kent and Jimmy away from the dimension-trap, and is heartbroken when Kent disregards his warning and seemingly dies.  Once he’s been booby-trapped with pyro-granulate, Goody makes a beeline to Morgan Edge, hoping the crisis will blow Edge’s cover and force Darkseid’s network to reveal itself.  Goody Rickles: unsung champion of the Life Equation. 

Well, I’ve wasted my morning!  Jeez, comics….

time of the dragon

Warning: wordy and nostalgic, but there’s a TPK at the end.

Among the Old-Timey D&D Nostalgia & Rehabilitation Crew, people will often talk fondly about the weird, evocative settings of the 2e era–Dark Sun, Planescape, Al Qadim, Spelljammer (okay, maybe not always fondly for Spelljammer)–but hardly anyone ever mentions Time of the Dragon.  Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who remembers it existed.

what the heck are you talking about?

Time of the Dragon was an extremely non-Tolkien campaign setting box set, written by Zeb Cook and published in 1990.

Time of the Dragon was ostensibly set in the Dragonlance world, but on an entirely separate continent.  Though there were a few scattered references to the regular Dragonlance setting, the connections aren’t very deep.  The Acaeum suggests this started out as a new campaign world very late in the 1e era, and got retooled for 2e.  It’s possible that someone said, “Hey, remember Zeb’s big project?  We’ve sunk a lot of cost into producing that thing, and then retooling it for 2e.  Dragonlance is pretty hot right now, let’s just slap a logo on this thing, sprinkle some references for the fans, and ship it.”  Time of the Dragon got comparatively little support over the next year or two and then sank out of sight, which makes me wonder if its budget got cut midway through the design cycle.  The fact that the boxed set’s cover was swiped from an issue of Dragon magazine hints that there may have been problems.

what’s in it?

Time of the Dragon presents the continent of Taladas, via 96 pages of fluff for a dozen or so cultures, 32 pages of new rules, a couple of huge maps, and 24 cardstock illustrations.

The backstory is pretty standard: Golden Age + Enormous Space Rock = Catastrophe, and now there are a zillion little groups running around in the aftershocks.  Lately four gods have taken an interest in mortal affairs and have recently restored priestly spells to their most devoted followers, throwing some societies into confusion.

Here is what you won’t find in Time of the Dragon:

• Comic Relief Kender
• Comic Relief Gully Dwarves
• Comic Relief Tinker Gnomes
• Knights of Solamnia
• Towers of High Sorcery
• Draconians (well, one prototype version)
• Dragonlances
• Complicated, millennia-long histories
• Railroads or meta-plot
• Tie-in novels (well, not until like 15 years after the line sank)

By those standards, it’s hardly Dragonlance at all.

map made by fans

The rule book contains rules for Lizard Man, Ogre, Goblin, and Minotaurs as 2e player races as well as a new school of magic (but no unique spells for it), but the bulk of the rule book is taken up with “kits,” combinations of skills and equipment that help to differentiate the broad classes of 2e.  I’m ambivalent about the proliferation of kits in the early days of 2e: I haven’t especially missed kits in the OSR generally.  But some part of me likes the idea that my pseudo-Mongolian cattle rustler is going to look a little bit different mechanically from your pseudo-Polynesian islander, even though we’re both Fighters.

what do you like about it?

At the most basic level, I like that Taladas doesn’t feel like a mainstream fantasy setting.  Personal faves:

• Roman-style Minotaurs, overseeing an empire of human plebians, locked in a border war with a nation of priestly necromancers.
• The Uigan nomads (Mongolians manque) feuding with the Elf Clans and other ancestral rivals on the high steppes of the Tamire amid the scattered ruins of a bygone age, as the Minotaurs gradually steal their territory.
• Beetle-armored, self-flagellating swordsmen sailing a Sea of Glass on ice-boats, between agoraphobic “deep dwarves” and Gnomes who are holding back the armies of Hell with steampunk.

Time of the Dragon came out after several of the late-80′s culture-heavy setting books: Kara-Tur, FR5 The Savage Frontier, and the several of the Gazetteers from the BECMI line.  I had a few of these, but they often felt padded or boring, filled with calendars and holidays and stuff I never really gave a shit about.  Mainly I remember these awful in-character introductory paragraphs for each chapter.  Cook thankfully omits these, and the cultural write-ups manage to give me enough inspiration that I can come up with fun material, without bogging down in minutiae. This is admittedly a matter of taste: I want enough detail to be evocative, but not so much that I suffocate.  It feels a bit like if an issue of National Geographic was published with eye for Sword & Sorcery adventure locales, except mostly text and no boobs.  (Not the best analogy, I’ll admit.)

Also, I really liked the pantheon, though this is mainly due to spendingway too much time thinking about it during college.  Taladas supposedly shares the same gods as the regular Dragonlance continent, but Cook selects the four gods he cares about and throws the rest away.  Maybe the most influential of the remaining gods is Hith, the god of damnation–he who gives you everything you ever wanted, but it’s hollow on the inside.  And Erestem, the goddess of savage destruction–but is necessary to clear away the old to make room for the new.  I spent an embarrassingly large part of my junior year of college concocting various myths about and theological correspondences between these deities, Philip K. Dick, and all the other wacky stuff people think about in college.  Yet the idea of Hith has some personal relevance to me even today, and although if that’s because I put in a huge amount of work fleshing out this pantheon in my own mind, Cook did supply a pretty fertile patch of soil.

what sucks about it?

Well: 96 pages is rather gabby for a culture book, at least to my taste.  I don’t need to be told that pseudo-Eskimos herd reindeer, for example–but I can see the argument that, in the days before the Internet, it would have been handy to have a one-page summary of Eskimo-type stuff written for teenagers.

I’ve heard that some people don’t dig the interior art, though I rather like it: there’s a . . . silent quality to it, somehow, that really works for me.  And the attempt to fix the Tinker class didn’t really go far enough–that class is just hopelessly bad (and you still need the Dragonlance Adventures book to play it, though that’s not the case with the rest of this setting).  The kits could probably stand to be a bit leaner, maybe with a more radical design.

More importantly, paging through this thing at age 35, I have a pretty good sense of how to run something like this.  Zero in on a particular region, highlight and complicate the conflicts going on there, and then just see where people go, sandbox style.  Time of the Dragon isn’t especially dungeon-centric, so you’d need some good hex-crawling procedures, some skills at running soap opera/political intrigue type games, and maybe some workable rules for mass combat.  (Time of the Dragon includes army stats for the then-current version of Battle System, but those seem way too involved for my purposes.)

my very first t.p.k.

In Ninth Grade we had been playing for just over a year in a Dragonlance campaign run by my friend Adam.  (I played a Minotaur Ranger who, via cheese in the Complete Fighter’s Handbook, could dual-wield Two-Handed Swords.)  I’d gotten Time of the Dragon the previous Christmas, loaned it to Adam enthusiastically, and he agreed to run a game where our guys took a world cruise.

Here is my recollection of the adventure, admittedly it was like 21 years ago:

GM: So you’re sailing in your boat, because you’ve heard rumors of another continent…

RED WIZARD: Wait, we have a boat?

GM: How else are you going to get to the other continent?

KNIGHT OF SOLAMNIA: Other continent?!

ME: Shut up guys, it’s gonna be awesome!

GM: …When your boat is approached by a Minotaur vessel.  The captain of the Minotaur ship bellows out, “Furl sail and prepare to be boarded in the name of the Minotaur Empire!  Your vessel may be carrying contraband!  Come about and do not resist!”

ALL PLAYERS: We resist!

(fighting)

ME: Wait a minute, why am I killing other Minotaurs for the sake of humans?  My guy stops fighting.

WIZARD & KNIGHT: wut

ME: I shout out, “Let us parley!  There has been a misunderstanding!”

WIZARD & KNIGHT: Oh great they threw us in jail, good going.

ME: Bah!  They have this gladiatorial justice thing, don’t worry, we’ll kick everyone’s ass and they’ll apologize.

GM: James, your guy has to do a solo combat against this Minotaur gladiator.

ME: Cool!  I’m gonna climb up on the top rope, and do this flying headscissors takedown, where I launch my legs around his head and just force him to the mat.

GM: . . . . You do that to him?  Like, catapulting yourself thighs-first at this guy’s head?

ME:  What?  I saw it on Wrestlemania one time.  I think you were with me when we saw it!

GM: . . . Okay . . . so thighs first at. . . the Minotaur gladiator?

ME: . . . .

WIZARD & KNIGHT: Oh, he totally does that.  Can we roll for the damage?

GM: Okay, for your punishment the court sends you to the ruins of the Aurim Empire, to recover some Dragonlances from shattered civilizations.

(lots of fighting and dungeon exploring; we get pretty banged up)

GM: There is a shrine here to Mishakal, goddess of healing.

KNIGHT: Wow, we really ought to rest and heal up.

ME: What?  Come on, we’re adventurers.  Stopping to rest every five minutes isn’t very heroic.  The Wizard still has most of his spells.

WIZARD: I could use some healing, but I’m fine if we want to press on too.

ME: We don’t rest.  “Fight on, my friends!”

GM: Okay… (rolls dice) You encounter an army of Frankenstein-Draconians.

KNIGHT: Oh man.  We should have rested.

ME: I’m sorry, okay?  Wizard, help us out here.

WIZARD: I cast invisibility.

ME & KNIGHT: wut

WIZARD: And then I fly away.

GM: The monsters attack!

ME: You can’t cast a new spell like fly and still keep your invisibility up!

WIZARD: The flying isn’t a spell.  I’ve been a Draconian passing as human for the whole campaign.  GM, I fly away real fast.

GM: Their archers pop out of cover and are peppering everyone they can see with poisoned arrows.

KNIGHT: You’re not going to help us fight?

WIZARD: The last words you hear from me, as I invisibly soar away on great leathery wings, are nearly lost in the din of battle, but if you strain your ears you can just barely make them out: “Kiss…. my….. ass…………”

ME: Gah, I’m at 0 HP.

GM: James, your Minotaur is unconscious.  Knight, you can see the Draconian soldiers fall back, as their chieftain moves to the fore.

KNIGHT: I bellow out that I will challenge him to single combat and poop on his corpse!

(single combat begins)

GM: …Okay, so with that hit, he knocks you clear across the room, and you land in a pile of rotting human corpses, perhaps previous challengers.  Your sword clatters on the flagstones, about 10 feet away.  Under the corpses, there’s what looks like . . . yes . . . a Dragonlance!

KNIGHT: I’m going for my sword.

ME: What?  No, the Dragonlance!  You inflict your current hit points as a bonus to damage on dragon-dudes.

KNIGHT: I have 3 hit points right now.  I’m specialized in sword, so I have a better chance to hit and would do almost as much bonus damage.

GM: You’ve only got time to grab one weapon.

KNIGHT: Sword.

WIZARD: Seriously, if you let this guy close in melee he’s going to get all those extra attacks again.  You’ve gotta take him out at a distance if you can.

ME: Take the Dragonlance, and throw it at the chieftain.  I saw it in a movie!  Maybe Ladyhawke or Kull?  What was that movie with the tri-blade?

KNIGHT: Throw the Dragonlance?!  That’s stupid.  If I miss, I won’t have any weapons and he’ll be right on top of me.

GM: Okay, come on, what’s it going to be?

KNIGHT: Sigh… Fine, I throw the Dragonlance.

GM: ….And you miss.  Well, I guess you are all killed.  Thanks for playing, guys!

The really sad thing is that my plans haven’t gotten any better over the past twenty years.

you must be this lucky to play (a paladin)

This blog post started out as a puzzler, but then I just sat down and did the work.  I’ve got a provisional answer to this one, but maybe you can beat me using some obscure publication that no one has ever seen.

Rolling 3d6 straight down the line, what is the hardest class for a human to qualify for in TSR-era D&D?

Humans & 3d6 straight because the probabilities are really easy.  I’ll work up how to do the math for 4d6 drop lowest arranged, but not today.  If you are curious about 3d6 Probability Charts, I used this one.

james, wordpress makes your charts look terrible.  can I download some readable copies?

Sure thing, baby!  If I’ve done this right, you can just click to download these as PDF’s…

Class Qualification Charts – 3d6

Qualification Chart for LBB + Greyhawk + Blackmoor

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Cleric	none	Any*	100.00%
Fighting-Man	none	Any	100.00%
Magic-User	None	Any	100.00%
Paladin	Cha 17	Lawful	1.85%
Thief	None	Not Lawful	100.00%
Assassin	Str 12, Int 12, Dex 12	Neutral	5.27%
Monk	Str 12, Wis 15, Dex 15	Any	0.32%

* = The 0e Cleric must align herself with either Law or Chaos upon reaching Level 7.

Check out how out of place the 0e Monk is.  Most classes: 100% entry requirements.  Paladin, ~2%.  That’s crazy.  But the Monk is even crazier: 3 characters out of every 1,000 would qualify.  The fact that these are being offered in 0e–particularly the Monk, which receives a ton of space in Supplement II: Blackmoor yet is almost mythically rare–indicates that cheating on stats, or at least a total indifference to rolling stats, started pretty early in the hobby.  (Understandably, maybe, given that stats are close to meaningless in 0e other than as an XP accelerant.)

Qualification Chart for BECMI (and BX as a subset)

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Cleric	None	Any	100.00%
Fighter	None	Any	100.00%
Magic-User	None	Any	100.00%
Thief	None	Any	100.00%
Dwarf	Con 9	Any	74.07%
Elf	Int 9	Any	74.07%
Halfling	Dex 9, Con 9	Any	54.86%
Avenger	None; Fighter 9	Chaotic	100.00%*
Druid	None; Cleric 9	Neutral	100.00%*
Knight	None; Fighter 9	Neutral	100.00%*
Mystic	Wis 13, Dex 13 **	Any	6.72% **
Paladin	None; Fighter 9	Lawful	100.00%*

* = These classes, introduced in the Companion rules, have no stat requirements beyond reaching Name Level.  This is a crazily high barrier to entry—over 200,000 XP in the case of the Druid, and 240,000 XP for the Fighter-variants.

** = These requirements come from the Rules Compendium; seemingly the Master rules would let anyone play a Mystic.  Since the Monk has been rare across all editions, I chose to go with the Rules Compendium’s requirements.

I love this chart.  I use with some house rules on alignment (Clerics can’t be Neutral, Elves can’t be Lawful, Dwarves can’t be Chaotic) but this version of the game is soooo generous.

Qualification Chart for 1e

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Cleric	Str 6, Int 6, Wis 9, Con 6, Cha 6	Not True Neutral	61.28%
Druid	Str 6, Int 6, Wis 12, Dex 6, Con 6, Cha 15	True Neutral	2.87%
Fighter	Str 9, Wis 6, Dex 6, Con 7, Cha 6	Any	58.30%
Paladin	Str 12, Int 9, Wis 13, Dex 6, Con 9, Cha 17	Lawful Good	0.10%
Ranger	Str 13, Int 13, Wis 14, Dex 6, Con 14, Cha 6	Any Good	0.16%
Magic-User	Int 9, Wis 6, Dex 6, Con 6, Cha 6	Any	61.28%
Illusionist	Str 6, Int 15, Wis 6, Dex 16, Cha 6	Any	0.37%
Thief	Str 6, Int 6, Dex 9, Con 6, Cha 6	Any Neutral or Evil*	61.28%
Assassin	Str 12, Int 11, Wis 6, Dex 12, Con 6	Any Evil	6.39%
Monk	Str 15, Int 6 Wis 15, Dex 15, Con 11, Cha 6	Any Lawful	0.04%
Bard	Str 15, Int 12, Wis 15, Dex 15, Con 10, Cha 15; Fighter 5, Thief 5	Any Neutral	0.00%**

* = A Thief may rarely be Neutral Good

** = The odds of the 1e Appendix II: Bard is actually 0.0017%.  That is, if you rolled 1 million AD&D 1e characters using 3d6, you could expect to see 17 Bards occurring in nature.  But these characters would have to survive through 5 levels of Fighter and then 5 levels of Thief before beginning Bard training.

(Edited to add: commenter Olivier Fanton helpfully noted that the ability score section of the 1e PHB imposes certain restrictions–i.e., characters of Strength 3-5 can only play Magic-Users–that are not explicitly listed in the class descriptions themselves.)

At commenter Roger’s request: the expected odds to develop psionic powers in 1e would be about 0.22% using 3d6 straight, or about two characters in a thousand.

Man, wha hoppen?!  Four out of ten core classes occur less than one time out of two hundred, and the optional Bard class is statistically impossible with 3d6 in order.  So what’s the deal?  Well, after I made this chart and several others from the 1e era, it turns out the 1e PHB doesn’t even tell you how to roll stats: you’ve gotta look in the DMG for that.

Quoth Gygax:

As AD&D is an ongoing game of fantasy adventuring, it is important to allow participants to generate a vialbe character of the race and profession which he or she desires.  While it is possible to generate some fairly playable characters by rolling 3d6, there is often an extended period of attempts at finding a suitable one due to the quirks of the dice.  Furthermore, these rather marginal characters tend to have short life expectancy–which tends to discourage new players, as does having to make do with some character of a race and/or class which he or she really can’t or won’t identify with.

In other words: mediocre stats bum people out because they can’t play awesome characters with cool classes.  Gygax then lists four methods of rolling stats, of which 4d6 drop lowest arranged to taste is Method I.  Which kind of seems like an odd response to the problem identified above.  If the problem is that people get lame stats and have to settle for a class, why not let folks play whatever they want?  Any of the methods Gygax supplies could still give you some uninspiring stat arrays, and with Method I you still run a ~70% chance of failing to obtain Paladinhood.  I get that sometimes the dice inspire you, and that there’s something to be said for prestige.  But it strikes me as a weird thing.

so if 1e advises against 3d6 straight, why’d I spend my afternoon making charts?

The New York Red Box group seems pretty firmly in the 3d6 straight down the line camp.  We make it a point to roll stats in the open so we can jeer when you wind up with two 5′s.  I started doing it this way because I grew up with Mentzer; I’m not sure why Eric M. continues with it.  (I believe he’s even disallowed the 2-for-1 point swapping, because he finds it gives Halflings a significant advantage in being the tank.)

One of our players loves to whine about stats, and even quips about using loaded dice for character creation.  He simultaneously craves statistically impossible ability scores, and yet if you offer to give them to him outright, he shuns the offer.  It’s like he’s saying, “I want to earn my ability scores through suffering!  But I don’t want to suffer!”  I don’t get it.  At least in B/X and BECMI high stats mean something: a Fighter with Strength 16 is basically attacking as if she were 3 levels higher…

Anyway.  Moral of the story: 1e is apparently not a 3d6-in-order type of game, but that’s always been my benchmark.  I’ll eventually get around to the Method I comparisons, and we’ll see what it looks like then.

Qualification Chart for Unearthed Arcana

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Barbarian	Str 15, (Wis 16), Dex 14, Con 15	Any non-Lawful	0.14%
Cavalier	Str 15, Int 10, Wis 10, Dex 15, Con 15	Any Good	0.03%
UA Paladin	Str 15, Int 10, Wis 13, Dex 15, Con 15, Cha 17	Lawful Good	0.00%**
Thief-Acrobat	Str 15, Dex 16; Thief 5	Any Neutral or Evil*	0.43%

* = As a subset of the 1e Thief, the Thief-Acrobat may rarely be Neutral Good

** = Specifically, 0.0002%.  If you rolled 1 million characters using 3d6 straight, expect to see about 2 of them qualify for UA Paladinhood.

Yep, that’s right: Unearthed Arcana devotes 12 pages to classes which, combined, would account for 0.60% of all characters rolled with 3d6 in order.  I guess it doesn’t matter that the Cavalier class is broken if only 3 guys out of 10,000 would qualify.

Qualification Chart for Dragonlance Adventures

Yeah, I’m doin’ it.  Shut up.  Minotaur Rangers 4eva!

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Knight of the Crown	Str 10, Int 7, Wis 10, Dex 8, Con 10	Any Good*	18.56%
Knight of the Sword	Str 12, Int 9, Wis 13, Dex 9, Con 10; Crown Knight 2	Any Good*	3.33%
Knight of the Rose	Str 15, Int 10, Wis 13, Dex 12, Con 15; Sword Knight 4	Any Good*	0.05%
Tinker Gnome	Gnome only**; Int 10, Dex 12	Any	23.12%

 * = I strongly recollect that all Knights of Solamnia must be of Good alignment, but I cannot find the citation now.

** = If you want to be a Tinker Gnome, you first gotta qualify to be a Krynn Gnome: Strength 6, Constitution 8, Wisdom no higher than 12, and you get a +2 adjustment to Dexterity.  This has all been factored into the “Odds to Qualify” category.  But trust me: you do not want to play a Tinker Gnome.

Qualification Chart for Oriental Adventures

This book is so weird, arbitrary, badly edited, and uncomfortably close to yellowface–yet I really want to run a few sessions with it.

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Barbarian	Str 15, (Wis 16), Dex 14, Con 15	Any non-Lawful	0.14%
Bushi	Str 9, Dex 8, Con 8	Any	52.02%
Kensai	Str 12, Wis 12, Dex 14	Any Lawful	2.28%
Monk	Str 15, Wis 15, Dex 15, Con 11	Any Lawful	0.04%
Ninja-Bushi	Str 9, Int 15, Dex 14, Con 8, Cha 14	Any non-Good	0.15%
Ninja-Sohei	Str 13, Int 15, Wis 12, Dex 14, Con 10, Cha 14	Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil	0.01%
Ninja-Wu Jen	Int 15, Dex 14, Cha 14	Neither Good nor Lawful	0.24%
Ninja-Yakuza	Str 11, Int 15, Dex 15, Cha 16	Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil	0.02%
Samurai	Str 13, Int 14, Wis 13, Dex 13	Any Lawful	0.28%
Shukenja	Str 9, Wis 12, Con 9	Any Good	20.57%
Sohei	Str 13, Wis 12, Con 10	Any Lawful	6.08%
Wu Jen	Int 13	Any non-Lawful	25.93%
Yakuza	Str 11, Int 15, Dex 15, Cha 16	Any Lawful	0.02%

Yes, that’s right: even with the easiest class to qualify for, the Bushi, you still might flunk out ~50% of the time using 3d6 in order. But again, Oriental Adventures explicitly declares that you should use 4d6 drop lowest arrange to taste.

Qualification Chart for 2e

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Fighter	Str 9	Any	74.07%
Paladin	Str 12, Con 9, Wis 13, Cha 17	Lawful Good	0.13%
Ranger	Str 13, Dex 13, Con 14, Wis 14	Any Good	0.18%
Mage	Int 9	Any	74.07%
Hard Specialist	Stat 16 *	Any	4.63%
Easy Specialist	Stat 15 **	Any	9.26%
Cleric	Wis 9	Any	74.07%
Druid	Wis 12, Cha 15	Any Neutral	3.47%
Thief	Dex 9	Not Lawful Good	74.07%
Bard	Dex 12, Int 13, Cha 15	Any Neutral	0.90%

* = The “Hard Specialists” are the Diviner, Enchanter, Illusionist, Invoker, and Necromancer.  By the strict rules as written, these do not have an Intelligence requirement, and I haven’t factored that in.  If you assume they must also have an Intelligence of 9 or greater (because the PHB doesn’t list a chance to learn spells for those with lower Intelligence), the odds to qualify become 3.43%

** = The “Easy Specialists” are the Abjurer, Summoner, and Transmuter.  Again, the rules don’t explicitly call for an Intelligence requirement, though one is probably implied.  If the Intelligence must be 9 or greater, the odds to qualify become 6.86%.

2e brings back 3d6 straight down the line as the default stat rolling method, god bless it.  Note that 2e is far less generous than 0e or BX, yet appears absolutely wild with abandon compared to Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures.

Just for laughs: the odds to qualify for the 2e Psionicist class is 17.36% using 3d6 straight.  The expected odds for human Warrior or Rogue types to develop psionic talents is about 1.21%, and the odds for a human Wizard or Priest type, or any demihuman, would be 1.06%.

Answer to the Puzzle: What’s The Hardest Class to Get Into, Using 3d6 Straight?

Two major contenders: the Unearthed Arcana Paladin (2 characters out of every million) and the 1e Bard (17 characters out of every million).  I’m going to give it to the 1e Bard, because although the stats are over eight times more common, it takes a hell of a long time to accrue 28K points to go to college, especially if you’re earning 10K of those as a Thief.  I think it’s pretty likely that a 1e Bard would get slaughtered, or the campaign would end, before he ever matriculated.

Honorable mention to the Thief-Acrobat (4300 out of every million–common as dirt!, comparatively–but similarly harsh level requirements), the Ninja-Sohei, and the Yakuza, which may be one of the weakest classes ever designed especially given how rare it is.  And especially honorable mention to the BECMI super-prestige classes, where you have to earn over 200,000 XP just to get your foot in the door.  I’m figuring the 1e Bard, though roughly only 10% of the XP requirement, is still vanishingly rare–but that’s mainly because I don’t know how to assess how often people reach Name Level.

Have We Learned Anything?

Well, I can track the entry requirements for certain classes over time:

Class	0e	BECMI	1e	2e
Cleric	100.00%	100.00%	61.28%	74.07%
Fighter	100.00%	100.00%	58.30%	74.07%
Magic-User	100.00%	100.00%	61.28%	74.07%
Thief	100.00%	100.00%	61.28%	74.07%
Assassin	5.27%	*	6.39%
Bard			0.00%	0.90%
Druid		100.00%**	2.87%	3.47%
Illusionist			0.37%	4.63%
Monk	0.32%	6.72%	0.04%
Paladin	1.85%	100.00%**	0.10%	0.13%
Ranger			0.16%	0.18%

* = The Master rules contain rules for Thug NPC’s which are functionally almost identical to Assassins, but no rules for using them as player-characters.  I’m always tempted to do so, just to get some Supplement II: Blackmoor into my BX experience: after all, Mystics can be player-characters…

** = Again, 100% is a ludicrous overstatement, given that you’ve got to hit 200K XP for the Druid and 240K XP for the Paladin.  But I don’t know how to assess those odds.

kirbsday: the orion gang and the deep six!

New Gods #4 opens with the science-god Metron showing the child-god Esak some of the wonders of the universe…

Esak is curious about the difference between the New Gods and mortal men.  “Time to them is not as time to us–is it?  Tell me, Metron!  Are we truly beyond time?–Are we beyond death?“

Nope!

Last time, Orion and his human pets chased down agents of Inter-Gang, getting a timely assist from the bizarre Black Racer. This issue continues that theme, but Orion’s plot opens with his discovery of the murder of his friend Seagrin, who we haven’t seen before and will never see again.  He’s kind of like a hippie Aquaman: “He loved the deeps and all life in it!  It was his element!  Within it, he found harmony in living! . . . Somewhere in these waters he fought and died!”

Orion gives Seagrin a proper Viking New Genesis funeral:

And then, dang it, when Orion goes home after the funeral, the pets keep introducing themselves!  These guys are like parrots.  I understand that, in serialized fiction, you have to constantly reintroduce characters and their plotlines, but surely there’s ways to do that which are more elegant than having the characters repeat their own full names three times in four issues!

New Gods #1:

New Gods #2:

New Gods #4:

Damn it, you guys!  I know Orion found you hooked up to some Apokolips brain-scanning machine, but come on.

Anyway, the plot of this issue is: Seagrin is dead, and Orion’s gonna solve the case with the help of his pets.  The clue is that Seagrin’s Mother Box didn’t activate to save him, so it must have been jammed.  The jammer was likely built by Inter-Gang, Darkseid’s minions in organized crime.  So they must locate the jammer and destroy it.  And they’re going to do this by pretending to be a bunch of Irish mobsters, “The O’Ryan Gang.”

They locate a member of Inter-Gang named Snaky Doyle via Orion’s Mother Box.  (The jammer explicitly doesn’t shield humans from the Mother Box, which if you ask me is a pretty serious design flaw).  Dave Lincoln mugs Snaky with a pipe:

Once they learn of Inter-Gang’s “seashore base,” Claudia “Claudia Shane” Shane poses as a motorist in distress and gasses the guards.

Victor “Victor Lanza” Lanza pretends to be the O’Ryan Gang’s underboss, here to negotiate with Inter-Gang and learn the jammer’s location.  He encounters Country Boy, a mob boss with a fishing gimmick:

Orion locates and vaporizes the jammer, and his henchmen defeat Inter-Gang.  But Orion is captured by Slig and the Deep Six, who prowl the coasts and mutate sea-creatures into creatures of Apokolips.

anything to add?

I’m glad Orion’s friends actually did something useful this issue.  Orion has made a big deal about recruiting them into a secret war; it’s nice to see them actually participate for once.  But it may be too little, too late: we won’t see them again for months, and frankly I won’t miss them too much.

As far as the on-going cosmology: it’s implied in this issue that the New Gods will die if their Mother Box gets deactivated, either because that kills them outright or because it can no longer shield them from harm.

But as far as larger significance in this issue?  I think what we get here is that men can kill gods (albeit indirectly), and gods may disguise themselves as outlaws to move among immoral men.  And that’s about it.

The good news is that we’re setting up for some good stuff in the next few issues.  The bad news is that The New Gods until this point feels like it’s treading water a little bit.  The Forever People have embarked on a huge quest; Mister Miracle is always dueling the villain of the moth.  But Orion has fought a billboard that makes people afraid, some gangsters (but the lion’s share of the credit belongs to the Black Racer), and a guy who shoots a gun by using a fishing rod.  All of which is wonderfully weird, but kind of marginal.  Thor wouldn’t fight a billboard, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Walt Simonson had tried…

The most interesting stuff in The New Gods so far has been the asides on New Genesis, with Metron and Lightray and the Black Racer, rather than the supposed hero.  Kirby will fix that in time, but it feels like an unnecessary commercial risk.  The audacity of The New Gods as a series is that it’s the repository for all the crazy backstory in The Forever People, Mister Miracle, and the Kirbified Jimmy Olsen–basically, it’s the source and destination for all the odd cosmological stuff referenced in those titles, which means it isn’t always an easy sell.  When it works–when the title is devoted to chasing down loose ends in and explaining them with parable–I think it is really effective, but it’s hard to do that while time-sharing a 22 page story with Orion taking on the Mafia.

wait there is more

There’s a funny splash page of Kalibak here.  We didn’t get to see much of Kalibak in New Gods #1–he’s basically just a bellowing cave man with a techno-club thing–so it’s our first indication that he might be more important.

Dig those Kirby toes!  The Man-Gog from like Thor #156 or something has toes just like that.

trolling for 2e

Illustration from The Boy and the Trolls, by Jon Bauer

Over the weekend we did some impromptu delving with Heron Prior’s Trolls Will Be Trolls, one of the winners of the 2010 One Page Dungeon Contest.  Because the New York Red Box crew doesn’t normally mess around with it, I broke out Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition and we ran a bit of that.

one-paragraph review of a one-page dungeon

“Trolls Will Be Trolls,”which also appears in Fight On #10, features the lair of Stencheye, a Troll matriarch and witch-doctor, and her seemingly infinite brood of Trolls, Half-Trolls, and Devil Trolls.  There are scant plot hooks, but the map is nicely non-linear.  NPC’s include Stencheye herself (I gave her max hit points and the spells of a 6th level Cleric), a Hill Giant with the head of a pig, a spriggan named Droopteats, and my favorites the Scragglebeard Brothers, “a pair of insane, lecherous Dwarven warriors” who number among the Troll Queen’s lovers.  My one regret about the adventure as presented is that it’s extremely monster-heavy, particularly with Trolls who aren’t the critters you’d immediately associate with a “let’s defuse this confrontation with some RP” strategy.  Otherwise, you can see why it won “Best Lair” in the 2010 contest: it’s a great little dungeon with some pretty ferocious enemies.

what happened in play?

The two players, a 7th level Mage and an 8th level Fighter, recruited nine first-level Fighter hirelings, and decided to raid the lair searching for the fabled Horn of Gwall, a mystic relic of the primordial God-Mammoth.  They did pretty good, overall: the Mage had scored a mirror of life-trapping during random item rolls, and played it pretty hard, and a squad of melee dopes, even first-level melee dopes, kept things moving right along as the main Fighter carved up the harder opponents.  Eventually they ended up getting so interested in setting up an ambush that they got trapped in an ambush themselves, and ended up fighting on three fronts before the Mage used suggestion to get on the Trolls’ good side.  We left them there, about halfway through the dungeon after 3 hours of play…  I think with a full party they probably could have pulled it off, with a few losses.

Incidentally, I ran this using the 2e PHB and DMG, but using B/X for monsters, and never noticed any problems: the Troll write-up, at least, has barely changed.

2e: this step-child loves redheads

I don't care what people say, 2e 2 tha max

Man, I don’t know what the fuss over 2e is all about.  Or rather, I know what it’s all about and I think it’s bollocks.  Limiting yourself to just the Core Books from 1989 or so, it’s a pretty awesome version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Here’s where I agree with the h8t0rz:

The 2e DMG isn’t a compendium of the craziest random crap you can imagine, and Zeb’s writing doesn’t exude personality the way Gygax’s did. (Then again, the personality exuded by Gygax’s writing in 1979 is extraordinarily off-putting.)

And a lot of the 2e art stinks.  2e exchanges the incredibly awesome pseudo-amateur art of 1e for a blander and more professionalized style, and the art in both of the Monstrous Compendiums is downright bad: at first I was like, “Why are all these of monsters in silhouette?” and then I’m like, “Bring the silhouette back, that’s a terrible picture.”  And speaking of monsters, the loss of demons & devils to the SNL Church Lady is an unfortunate marketing misstep, but which may have been the result of TSR’s delusions of mass-marketing this thing to kids again, the way the D&D fad caught on in the late 70′s/early 80′s.

More critically, the game is far too coy about what it’s about: killing things and taking their stuff.  It’s almost the exact same game as 1e and B/X but it’s far less open about what it’s trying to do, pretending to be all things to all readers.  Again, maybe that’s the marketing folks talking: this game is for doing anything!  After marinating in the Old Ways for many years, it’s clear what this thing is good for, but that was a lot less apparent to me when I was 13.

BUT!

These books were edited.  By a sane person.  Who knew how to edit things.  I cannot stress this enough.  I read a sentence in the 2e DMG and I don’t think, “Please Uncle Gary, if you let the girl go I promise I won’t freak out over your compound-complex-super-subjunctive-passive-voice-pluperfect word stylings.”  Instead I think, “Oh, right: that’s the rule, right where I thought it would be.  Okay, back to the game.”

(Please understand: massive Wookiee life-debt to Gygax which I can never repay, yadda yadda, just saying WTF with the style in the 1e DMG.)

Also: the class mechanics are more-or-less streamlined.  I know some people get bugged that the Ranger gets d10′s for hit points instead of d8′s, and that Druids don’t get a 3rd level spell at 3rd level.  But I dig rationality.  The Bard class is interesting, no longer the mangled Frankenstein’s Monster of 1e nor yet the hopelessly music-is-maaaaaaagical of 3e.  And oh man, build-your-own-Thief is a godsend.

The other thing I like about 2e is that it’s pretty easy to customize for a particular setting.  “Okay, in this world, you’ve got the Base Four classes plus Paladins, Illusionists, and Necromancers.  You’ve got some Norse-worshipping Viking priests up north, who have a slightly different spell list, and the Illusionists and Necromancers hate each other and have been waging fraternity-house style pranks on each other for centuries.  And these dudes over here, they’re like fishermen, so if your character comes from that village you know fisherman-related skills.”

(I’m not a big proficiencies guy, and if ran a 2e game I’d just handle this with a handwave, but I do like the effort to reflect culture in the game, however crudely.  Fighters from over here ought to play a little different from Fighters over there.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, this emphasis on easy customization gave rise to a lot of really evocative settings: Time of the Dragon, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Planescape, Al Qadim, and some great Historical Setting books.   In time, market pressures caused each of these to bloat terribly (well, not Time of the Dragon) but the initial setting books were great stuff.

I’m not vouching for all of the optional rules: morale looks hella-complicated, the build-your-own-class tables are messed up, and individual initiative is a headache.  (I am intrigued by the “Different XP rewards for each class” rules, though.)  But the core 2e rules are very close to my idealized Dungeons & Dragons: the clarity of B/X with the “big boy” monsters & classes.  Throw in some inspiring settings, and I’m in hog heaven.