The Ballad of Old School D+D vs. the Cell Phone

Well…Mike’s gone completely off the deep end, now, hasn’t he? Why would he title a post like this?

Because he’s guilty of it. We all are. Tabletop gaming is threatened by those little mobile devices in our pockets. The world’s interconnectedness means that gaming is more and more difficult to break up into convenient four hour sessions.

That being said, because of our jobs, because of our lives, because of whatever it is that grabs our attention, cell phones can be transformed into a major issue at game tables around the world: a distraction that causes people to pick up the phone. You’re never more than a nanosecond away from your wife, your job, or your zombie horde, who may slaver for brains uncontrollably without constant orders.

That being said, cell phones can also be a powerful tool. They can have dice rolling apps so you can play games in places where dice are awkward. They can have a copy of the map, or your character sheet, or just about any other piece of data you might want. Unfortunately, far too many people are merely texting friends or not paying attention.

I’m going to list my top five good and top five bad cell phone uses during the game below.

Good

1) Map and Rulebook Storage: This is great. Need a rule? Look it up.

2) Inter-character roleplay: In the old days, there was something called bluebooking, where people wrote in little blue books to have character conversations. Why not just create a thread linked to your email with the characters names in it and finish up the conversation while other stuff is going on. Email it to your GM. He might give you experience points.

3) Dice Rolling App: This is fantastic, especially if you’re in a place where dice can be awkward, like a cruise ship, train, or other moving conveyance in which you might want to play RPGs.

4) Picture Saver: Are you in combat? Do people have to be home at a certain hour so that their boss doesn’t fire them? Take a picture of the battlefield, break it down, and set it up next time!

5) The emergency pizza call: I’m sure it’s happened to your gaming group before. Someone forgot to order food. Well, this is probably one of the more important ones on the list. Hungry people say stupid things and destroy friendships. Don’t let it happen.

Bad

1) Playing another game. This is really rude. People should not be playing another game while the GM is sweating his or her butt off to give people at the table a good time. It creates distractions, causes other people to do the same thing, and the GM should have the right to ask you to leave.

2) Texting other friends. Work should always be okay, but if you come to a game to play it, you should really not be texting outside the group during the game unless it’s an emergency.

3) Music: It’s one thing if the GM asks you to play it. It’s another if you do it yourself. Captain Headbanger who doesn’t roleplay! This means you!

4) Internet Shopping: Unless you’re ordering something you just realized you only have a PDF of and you need a hardcopy soon, you might want to save this until after the session is over.

5) Hookups: There’s probably a better time to use your cellphone to hook up then during the epic battle with Lord Reichenfell and his evil squad of fallen Hound Archons….

Escaped Notice

Yesterday, a good friend of mine made an internet video that hit me in the gut like a runaway train. It was a simple, joyful video about the latest nintendo product. But it was her link to the product that shocked me the most. It included this simple message. “Seriously, I can only play a dude?”

For that matter, “why can’t I play a girl?” I’m a gamemaster. I run roleplaying games. I have to play characters of both genders to satisfy my audience and simulate a world, right?

Seeing this, despite my ignorance of Nintendo, lit a fire under me for the first time in a very long while. And my long memory stirred to life. I decided to do a little digging. There are a huge number of articles about how sexist Nintendo is.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nintendo-girls-club-is-so-sexist-it-made-me-sick-2014-4

Nintendo’s War on Women, Minorities and Democracy

Nintendo apparently has a long history of promoting harmful stereotypes that are not necessarily endemic to any society of the modern age. I understand that they are trying to change this. But they need to do a better job. Millions of people the world over are looking to the games they love for characters they can look up to.

That being said, then there’s this.

EDIT: #GamerGate

This is actually serious. If you commit a crime, you should go to jail. Death threats should be taken seriously.

This begs a number of issues.

1) Am I being sexist in my own products? If so, please let me know. I can attempt to correct this in the future.

2) The question of sexism in the gaming industry is growing larger. Part of the problem is this. Are we asking the right questions when we design characters and promote products? Who are the role models that we want people to be like, and how can we clearly delineate those role models?

3) Is the issue about sexism itself, or is it that we cannot remove years of history from Mario, Donkey Kong, the Kingdom of Furyondy, Azoun IV and the Forgotten Realms, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four (Although the fact that the woman in the group goes invisible was the best social statement they possibly could have made).

A final note. A young girl wanted to play Donkey Kong where the Princess rescues Mario. Her father wrote a hack to make it possible.

And again, that makes the statement more effectively than I could.

Hellbow Rune Video Interview

Dwarven Tavern interviewed me about my book, Hellbow Rune! You can find that interview on You Tube!

Hellbow Rune Sells Out!

No, no, we didn’t give you a cheesy ending. We sold every copy we brought to Gencon. We even tried to bring in more, but the cost of the shipping was more than the cost of the books.

A great start! Thank you, for everyone who bought this book, and thank you to everyone who will!

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, the link to Amazon is here!

Hellbow Rune on Amazon!

Hellbow Rune can now be ordered on Amazon.com

There’s no picture of the cover, and no blurb yet, but you can order it by clicking on this link.

Hellbow Rune Now Available!

Well, Hellbow Rune can now be ordered!

You can read this astonishing, grim fairy tale and order it from Blackwyrm Books!!!

http://www.blackwyrm.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=178

The Prologue follows

Prologue: Leaving the Carnival of Monsters

“Let me tell you your fortune.” Madame Zhalla said, smiling under the rubber witch mask. She was my adoptive mother, taller than me, with pale blonde hair that had been winnowed by the years.
My hair was dark, and I didn’t know where I came from, so the fortune telling was a game. My mother always claimed she had the sight, and that she could see me in another place. She would tell me wonderful stories of a world of beauty, and yet she called me a wicked, dark haired thing, though everyone told me I was pretty.
My name is Symantha Markajian. I might be a gypsy or an orphan, a liar or a con artist, a stealer of wallets or a hero of stories. I lived in a carnival wagon with my adopted mother, amid the freakshow of the bearded ladies, the two headed men, the roustabouts and the archery contests. She didn’t care where I come from, ran her fingers through my dark hair, and called me ‘muffin.’ I was fifteen years old.
My mother took my palm in her clawed rubber hands when the nights grew dark, and the lights in the fortune teller’s tent grew dim. “You will grow up in a circus, and travel to places most people never see. You will meet the man you love by a pool in the forest. You will be a great hero, who will kill the King of Feathers, a wicked tyrant who rules over a wicked land. You may believe it all, or you may not believe a word of it.”
I didn’t believe a single thing. It all seemed stupid to me, and I had computer games to get back to. I won the computer in a card game. I was good at playing cards. We moved from circus to circus, and town to town. My mother’s prophecies were notoriously inaccurate. I chalked them up to coincidence.
It was upstate New York, in the fall. My mother was working late at the fortune teller’s tent, as she always did, and I crept out of our trailer, where the mist was thick and the forest was shadowed in the background. I was wearing jeans and a ratty t-shirt with a drunken fish on it. So I walked towards the forest, confident that I’d be back by morning. In the distance, the lights of the big top beckoned, and the carnival played on.
They say that’s how these things always begin…

A long road realized, a long way to go…

I am proud to announce that Blackwyrm Books will be releasing my first novel, Hellbow Rune, a Novel of Dark Fantasy, at Gencon. It took two years to write it and a ton of editing, but I’ve finally broken the glass ceiling and someone was willing to publish a book I wrote.

First novels are always tortured children. There’s a long struggle to realize what you make, followed by the hope that someone will actually publish it. I have gotten further than most, but that’s no reason to quit.

The book is a dark fairy tale about a modern girl who goes to a fairy tale land and meets some unusual companions and has adventures. It’s kind of like a creepy, evil Wizard of Oz. 🙂

I hope folks pick it up.

Holy Cow! I’m a Special Guest!

Chupacabracon 2015 has accepted me as a special guest because I have enough Hero System writing credits to actually be somewhat significant!

I’ll be running games and doing panels from January 9-11 in Austin, Texas, where I intend to enjoy some weather that is marginally better than the weather in New Jersey. If you’re planning on going, drop me a line! I’ll be happy to take out a few minutes for people who make appointments beforehand.

 

http://www.chupacabracon.com

Hallow Worlds

Currently, I’ve embarked on a project tentatively titled “Journey to the Center of the Earth!” For the past eight to ten months, I’ve been constructing what lies below at the center of my superhero world.

While some of these characters were already sheeted, the key to this enterprise is building an inner planet. I started out thinking “This is going to be awesome! This is going to be fun! A lot of my work is already completed, all I have to do is rework the math, and…”

Well, it’s 212 pages later. I’m about 2/3 done. This project is probably going to be about the size of “City State of the Invincible Overlord” or close to it.

Features include:

A Map of the Center of the Earth!

A sinister army of Reptile Men and their super-powered leaders!

The Earth’s Archmage, the Oligarch, and the Council, and they aren’t as friendly as one might expect!

Free Cities of the Center of the Earth!

Underground superhero gaming tips!

Cybernetic Mole Men! (Yeah. I love the classics. All at once, I do.)

Dozens of plot seeds, campaign hooks, and plot options.

Oh, yeah. And the Doomsday Beast! We’ve got him, too!

 

Always Name Your NPC’s Beforehand

I know I like to present myself as a guy who doesn’t make a lot of mistakes. So much for that.

My players and I started  a new Pathfinder game. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be much cause for alarm, but it was taking place in Galt, a French Revolution-style area of Golarion.

Sure, no problem. Well, the PC’s were attacked by some thugs. And I didn’t name the boss of the thugs. It didn’t even occur to me that this would matter. So I plunked down some pennies and this bottle cap from a belgian beer that I had served to a friend of mine the other day. It read “Biere de Trappiste” on the label.

So we get around to rolling initiatives, and someone says “What’s the boss’s name?”

Me: (Trying to cover my butt) You don’t know. Are you going to ask him?

Player: It’s a little too late for that now. Let me see. (Looks at the bottle cap. Reads the words “Biere de Trappiste”) Okay. He is now Trappiste.That sounds vaguely French.

Me: (Trying desperately to figure a way out of this mess, and realizing there is none. Even if I were to name him later, I know my players. They will call him Trappiste forever) Okay. (Sighing inwardly) He is now Trappiste.

Even worse, the PC’s dropped him to negatives and he SURVIVED. 🙂 Now this guy is going to be on their tail, and I still can’t call him anything but “Trappiste.” Oh, well. Trappiste is now the villain. Unlucky them.

Still, to be fair, you should always name your NPC’s beforehand.