RPG A Day 2020: Day 31--experience

RPG A Day 2020: Day 31—Experience

Well, we made it to the end of another year of RPG A Day. The tale of the tape—I addressed every prompt with at least a link to a YouTube video. The rest were fairly long, but I hope they remained entertaining enough. ‘Tribute’ got the most views with a healthy 15.

What will next year bring? Who knows? I’ll likely participate in RPG A Day if there’s another one. I always have fun writing responses and reading/watching the other participants take on the entry of the day, but I might be responding with links to various songs every entry next time if I don’t get any new ‘experience’ playing. I can see already that it’s going to be a rough one. Just today I received my work schedule for the year and it’s loaded—not even counting all the professional development I’m going to need.

I can’t help but to sound overly dramatic here, but even if I decide to leave the hobby for good, the experiences that I had with friends, family and even total/semi-strangers will be told and retold again and again. 

RPG A Day: Day 30--Portal

 

RPG A Day 2020: Day 30—Portal

With ‘Portal’ it’s a good chance do the song playlist style of response. I love the two songs from Portal 1 and Portal 2 even though I’m not good at the games. When Roll 20 was able to stream music it was so much more fun as I think there’s a song for every mood. Trying to stream music I own or linking to YouTube clips is  just too clunky. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFDx5qTlGjU

RPG A Day: Day 29--Ride

 

RPG A Day 2020: Day 29—Ride


My initial thought were to write about my RPG playing journey which has been a long ride unto itself. I’m not sure what the next phase of that ride will look like or if I have indeed taken my last ride, but I wrote enough about that yesterday.

Next, I started thinking about the amount of time I have spent riding just to get to a game session—time that could probably have been spent doing something better. I wrote a little bit about that, but ultimately deleted it. Probably the most interesting thing I had to say about that was how I had driven around five hours one-way to play random games at a mini-cons in Dubai during my UAE years—those games were few and far between as you can imagine with a ride time like that. I deleted most of that and started over—too boring.

Finally, I have decided to write this final paragraph about all the things—to the best of my recollection—that I have ridden:

1. A Saint Bernard— no memory of this, but I have been told several times that when I was a toddler that would ride on back of a St.Bernard named Big Boy.

2. Planes, Trains, Automobiles, Boats, Ships, Tuk-Tuks, motorcycles, scooters, four  wheelers—no helicopter, no submarine, no spacecraft and no hot-air balloon otherwise man-made conveyances are pretty well covered.

3. Camels—UAE

4. Elephant, Goat-drawn carriage—Sri Lanka

5. Horse—Philippines

I guess I need to ride an ostrich eventually. 

RPG A Day: Day 28--Close

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V41a_5INzVY

RPG A Day 2020: Day 28—Close

There are two ways to pronounce today’s prompt and I’m sure it was done by design. RPG A Day will soon come to a close vs. we are very close to wrapping up RPG a Day.

I have to say that most of my responses have had a negative vibe this year. Hard to avoid it what with everything going on in the world. This one is no different for better or worse.

I feel that I am closer to walking away from hobby than I’ve been in years. That’s not to say that I won’t come back at some point or that I will stop following the updates and taking an interest in upcoming projects—even participating in next year’s RPG A Day. I think my daughter is about a year or two away from being ready for a full on introduction to the hobby and hopefully she’ll bring some friends with her and I’ll be the gaming dad, but that’s really all I see on the horizon.

Some say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it has been my experience as an overseas teacher, that for many things the more proper saying is out of sight, out of mind. I used to be a big NFL fan, but now some 11 years into the overseas career, I find that I rarely watch aside from the Super Bowl and I have no plans of even watching that this year. The separation from the latest RPG group due to the Wuhan Flu has finally steered me in a similar direction with table-top gaming. The time that I didn’t invest—I still refuse to call it time wasted—in playing and preparing to play has been spent on other endeavors. I’ve come to the realization that we need to redeem the time, and I’m not sure that playing RPGs is the best way to do that.

I’m going to link here the story of another DM who felt similar. Very interesting story. I don’t want to put out the wrong message. I love RPGs—I find nothing satanic or wrong in a Christian sense about them—and will likely come back or never fully leave, but listening to him—and I did come across this some years ago—gave me a lot to think about. There is nothing wrong with RPGs in and of themselves, but they are a time sink, and I don’t think anyone can deny it. 

RPG A Day 2020--Day 27: Favor

RPG A Day 2020: Day 27—Favor

I can’t think of a song about favors, so that means I need to write an actual entry today. Unfortunately, it’s another difficult prompt to write for, and to further that misfortune, I believe the ideas that I do have have a negative vibe to them.

I think about how over a period of time many things that were once in favor have now fallen out of favor. The way the game is played, the way people play them, the attitudes of the enthusiasts and even the creators of the games have changed and for the most part it hasn’t been for the better from my perspective. Here’s the most recent triggering: An old quote by Gary Gygax and a more recent one from Johnathan Tweet—now labeled misogynistic by the snowflakes that be. Here’s the link to an article by one of the offended who may well be a “friend” to RPG A Day for all I know.

https://stargazersworld.com/2020/08/26/the-misogyny-at-the-core-of-our-hobby/ 

I’ve tried to post the Gygax one, but you can read both comments from the original blogger’s post and  make your own judgement about how offensive they are.  Neither seem overtly misogynistic to me. Both comments seems like an observation and a report of facts. Stating facts have fallen out of favor over the years.

What is in favor is being overly critical at every statement that doesn’t tow the woke line. What is in favor is "cancelling" a person or finding them "problematic" long after they're dead. Here’s the response from the original blogger to the "offending" quotes:

“Over the last few years I have realized that looking up to “industry luminaries” is often a terrible idea. More often than not our “heroes” turn out to be terrible people. Even worse their often harmful ideologies make it into the games they created which make it hard to separate the art from the artist”.

Brother,—or sister, wouldn’t want to assume gender now would I?—did you ever hear the Tragedy of Chris Benoit the Crippler? If you think these benign comments from a couple of "industry luminaries" make it “hard to separate the art from the artist”,  then you better go find a safe space and hold on to your soy latte should you ever decide to investigate the matter.

I always end these "tough love" posts with the caveat that the hobby is big enough for everyone. Play how you like. Even if you have to clutch your pearls when looking at older material. I'd hope my SJW targets would use my ranting to grow a spine, but in this case, I can’t say that I fully understand why the hobby wants to change so radically to please a demographic made up of  non-players who’ll screw around a little with it then move on to the next thing they want to ruin while alienating the core  audience—niche as it may be at times—that made the thing a thing in the first place. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

RPG A Day 2020: Day 26--Strange

 Sticking with what I did yesterday, for today's prompt I went with a matching song. Strange takes the obvious choice. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Mz_IqpZX8

RPG A Day 2020--Day 25: Lever

 In a preview of what my RPG A Day 2021 entries might look like if I don't come up with any new gaming  experiences due to the Wuhan-Flu. Here's a link to a song about Lever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fVQwzv5Qfc

I might come up with a song for each entry every day or else just stick a song in when I can't think of anything better to say. So, that's it for today!

RPG A Day 2020: Day 24--Humor

RPG A Day 2020: Day 24—Humor

I couldn’t play these things without humor. It seems even in a serious game I often cast myself in the comic-relief role. I try not to be too annoying although I tend to play most of my characters like Kenders which is admittedly a bit strange when playing a Call of Cthulhu or Deadlands game, but nevertheless.

Puns are often called the bottom of the barrel when it comes to humor, but if you lift the barrel you may find punny names to be even lower on the list, but it’s what I do. I think I posted some of those punny names during another RPG-A-Day, so I won’t regale you with the list again, but even in Pokemon I stooped as low as to name my sandshrew ‘Sandy Claws’.

As I’ve gotten older the level of humor in my games has only increased while the seriousness has become less and less. I don’t want a lot of “Teen Titans Go!” style “bathroom humor” because it just makes me cringe. Unfortunately, humor is so subjective sometimes you have to even let something like that go for the good of the table. Even if you play the grimmest of the grim-dark I think you have to have some humor in there somewhere just for a release—even if it’s out of character.

This is also a good time to mention the ‘X’ card. I already said that I hate all those “woke” mechanics like bringing “pronouns” into a game. I’d be quick to turn someone who identifies as he/him as ‘soy boy’, one who identifies as she/her as ‘soy girl’ and a they/them as ‘soy non-binary’ and tell each and everyone of those snowflakes to find a safe space away from my table. However, I really don’t want to legitimately hurt anyone’s feelings. In one game we were stealing dragon eggs and one of the characters dropped an egg. My knee-jerk reaction was—looks like the short bus for him.—not knowing that my GM had a special needs child. I meant absolutely nothing by it and my friend the GM knew this and didn’t make a big deal out of it, but had I known it was a touchy subject, I’d have never made that joke at all. Having that ‘X’ card to show should be a signal to the GM and the fellow players that the humor is going too far. No need to elaborate, just flash it and if the group of friends are at the table they should respect that and back off. Most of the time people are being offensive they don’t even realize it.

RPG A Day 2020: Day 23--Edge

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 23—EDGE

I’ve talked a lot about my collection this year and the ever growing stack of games that never get played—and in many cases have never been played. Why is it that for the most part Dungeons and Dragons is what groups start out with and go back to? Why does it have the edge over everything else in the stack? I’m preaching mostly to the choir, but I want an entry for every day this month and this is one of them.

1. Name recognition: Right or wrong D&D and RPG are practically synonyms. Every soft drink is a Coke in the south. Every facial tissue is a Kleenex world wide—at least in ‘merica and UAE anyway. Even if you explain to a non-player what an RPG is they’ll say, oh like Dungeons and Dragons.

2. Ease of access: As of this writing there are D&D products in Wal-Mart now. My Mandela affected, Swiss cheese memory taken into account, I remember this from back in the 80’s in other dept. stores. People can get it or are friends with people who have it. Every new edition—even if it’s just Malibu Stacey with a new hat—will get higher sales than anything on the market. This isn’t even mentioning the online saturation.

3. Ease of system: Especially in 5E’s case, it doesn’t take long to create characters and learn to play. I’m coming from older editions and other complex systems, so of course it was easy for me and at the end of the day nobody plays the rules 100%, but all that said the new players in the group last year were total greenhorns and they picked right up on it.

4. Third Party Support: I’m using the video game term, maybe I should call it open-license? Either way a lot of the Kickstarter projects either add settings or supplemental material for D&D. It’s easier to get people to try something new when it’s more or less D&D. I mentioned Runehammer games in an earlier entry and their ‘D&D Hardcore Mode’ which is such a good tweak—ICRPG is it’s own thing, but it too can plug right into 5E and it’s cheap, streamlined and easily acquired. I also backed a Kickstarter called ‘Journey to Ragnarok’ by Mana Project Studios which was a Norse Mythology based setting and adventure. There are many more out there if you look. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/257334/Journey-To-Ragnarok--Adventure-and-Setting-for-5e

Back in my day….I like to think that it’s still my day, but nevertheless…we all seemed to have more time to create characters and learn new systems. I still like reading new rules and making characters and maps for games that I’ll likely never play. I sometimes think that's the equivalent of becoming a cat lady if I were a woman, but I take enjoyment in it. For others, however, it’s a time-sink that they may be unable or unwilling to make. If they learn a system, it’s usually the latest and “greatest” new version of D&D.   

RPG A Day 2020: Day 22--Rare

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 22—Rare

I’m old enough at age 46 that I prefer print media to digital any day of the week. I’ve purchased, collected, gave away, lost, downsized and reacquired many RPGs and related materials over the years. I still have regrets about not finding a way to hold on to a large collection of Champions books that was gifted to me by a friend who also had to downsize—as well as a ton of old PSM magazine issues, what a good video game magazine that was. That said, as much as I wish I’d kept certain things being a hoarder really never did me any good. The stack just keeps growing and you know you can’t take it with you…not even in this world. As I’ve mentioned before I have bits and pieces scattered all over the place USA, Philippines and here in China and as much as I want to keep it all, I can’t. When I’m trying to drag my library with me through the airports and paying all those fees, I can see the appeal of sticking with PDFs. On the other hand, I don’t see any digital downloads ever being rare or desirable and once it’s released online the pirate industry kicks in.

In spite of all the trouble I’ve had holding on to my hard-copies, I’ve not lost everything to the ravages of time nor has all my collection fallen into complete disrepair. Just by virtue of my being old some things in my RPG collection are uncommon if not rare. Here are a few.

1. WWF Basic Adventure Game (1993): The World Wrestling Federation—now known as WWE—was a very different beast back in the 90’s when this game came into being. It is post-Hogan/pre-attitude era with the likes of early HBK, Yokozuna, and Doink the Clown stinking up the ring. The game itself looks good if not overly complex. I’ve read through it several times, but never played it aside from creating wrestlers. It’s current location is in the Philippines in my treasure chest.
https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=40

2. Tinker’s Damn (1997): An anime inspired game with loosely defined rules that left coming up with most play mechanics to the imagination of its players. Again, one I’ve never played, but one that I did read through several times. Nowadays, with Kickstarter and whatnot it is fairly easy to pick up a book with a limited print run if you want it. Back in the 90’s and earlier if the neighborhood shop didn’t order it, you would probably have never even heard of it. In my case, this one fell off the truck at work because I liked the cover art.
https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=13712

3. Dreadmire (2005): This one supposedly has an interesting and controversial backstory which I didn’t know about at the time when I picked it up. It’s a supplemental about swamp setting. I’d like to read it someday as the person who wrote it seemed to know a lot about living in a swamp. Unfortunately, the print setting is so small that I find that I never get very far in any attempt.
https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6891

Also, of note is that I have a first printing of Vampire: The Masquerade from the old White Wolf books along with the Gangrel clan book. I don’t say those are all that rare either, but they survived several culling and I hope to keep them.

RPG A Day 2020--Day 21: Push

RPG A Day 2020: Day 21—Push

Today’s prompt is push. A lot of ideas come into my mind with this word.

I think of how—at age 46—that I am indeed pushing fifty or at least I’m on the wrong side of forty if you will, and the amazement that I feel that I still get enjoyment from a hobby I first played as a kid.

I also think of how some players—right or wrong on the GM’s part—have to be pushed to role play. A lot of players feel uncomfortable doing it at first, and for some, that aspect of the game never comes into being. It’s good if they still enjoy it. Nobody needs to be told how to play. Sometimes though, it’s that little push that can lead the player into bigger things than just rolling the dice and playing as one does a board game.

Lastly, I think of how I have to push myself to play a lot times right up to the minute of game time. I’m always getting the feeling that I’d rather do something else or—in the case of running one—that I don’t have enough prepared. Most of the time once things get going, I find my anxiety to be unwarranted and we all have a good time.

Right now I’ve become stagnant. I have a lot of work to do and many new aspects of my job to train for. I am caught in between pushing myself to start up something new in Roll 20 or seeking out any possible existing groups in my new neighborhood, but I’m afraid I might be staying right here for a bit longer. Someone will really need to push me to pick it back up again. As a teacher with a lot of set holiday time—winter break, spring break, summer break—I’ve always found long absences to be the bane of RPG groups. With the pandemic and an absence of eight months now, who knows if it will ever go back to the way it was. 

RPG A Day 2020--Day 20--Investigate

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 20—Investigate

Keeping the daily blog streak alive with this one. Immediately, the first idea that comes to my mind with this prompt is that it is the time of year when I am highly vested in investigating the ideas of fellow players and GMs and their feelings on the hobby. Throughout the rest of the year I may visit a blog or two or catch a video, but for the most part, the month of RPG a Day is when I branch out from the so-called “big names” and see what all is out there. It’s a big community. 

The second thing I think about is how lousy most campaigns are that focus on investigation and solving mysteries because number 1,  the characters are smarter than the players and number 2, sessions are disjointed and even for those who take copious notes it’s usually difficult to come up with the answers…always a let down when the big reveal of the mastermind finally happens and nobody knows who that  person is without checking their notes. The same goes for riddles and puzzles. It might be fun to give it a try, but when I’m struggling, let me roll for my girl. She’s got an 18 INT, she shouldn’t be counting on me. It’s not as if you make me pick up a sword and fight a guy when I’m playing as a character with 18 STR.

Until tomorrow. 

RPG A Day 2020--Day 19--Tower

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klGRVTTntoI

RPG A Day 2020: Day 19—Tower

I don’t have much to say about ‘tower’, but when I think about the word, I can’t help but to remember the Macho Man—among the best pro-wrestlers of all time and one of his promos—“The Tower of Power too sweet to be sour…etc. etc”. I want to think that I’ve heard the same from Superstar Billy Graham and possibly Dusty Rhodes as well. Surely, “funky like a monkey” was used by a lot of wrestlers in the 70’s and 80’s, so they don’t exactly trademark their promos. I think Dolemite, Rudy Ray Moore may have said it a time or two too.

There’s a lot of overlap between wrestling and RPGs. If you have trouble getting into character watch some wrestling promos.

Honorable mentions to a new guy, Brandon Cutler who wrestles for AEW. He’s big into RPGs and even uses it for his gimmick. 

RPG A Day 2020: Day 18--Meet

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 18—Meet

Today’s prompt opens discussions that are more apropos than ever what with much of the world still in the throws of the Wuhan flu and/or whatever else 2020 seems to have in store for us on the daily. For those joining me today, I am an expat English teacher and for the last two years, I’ve been teaching in China, ground zero—if you will—for our pandemic woes. It’s quite the large ground zero however, and I haven’t lived in an area with very strict measures in place. The most I’ve had to do is wear a mask to grocery stores and the like. We have our temperatures taken and we’ve been using a phone app that tracks where we’ve visited, but no big deal really.

I’m in the second week of orientation at my new and we are meeting as normal. In about a week and a half the plan is to put us in face to face meetings with students just as we normally would. However, we—teachers and students alike—will be required to wear masks starting from that time due to government mandate. Students—I’m in a middle school/high school—may also need to spend their entire day in one classroom—those classes also set-up with social distance measures in mind.

We’re an international school, so a lot of teachers and even some students are still stranded overseas as they have been since the Chinese New Year break back in January/February. In those cases, the absent teacher will be broadcasting with a second face to face teacher assisting—makes for a fun situation like when I’m scheduled to assist in economics and haven’t seen hide nor hair of such in over a decade—or students receiving my broadcast as I teach the face to face students. Then there are more regulations than that that may come and go as you can imagine since we’re dealing with children. I’m hoping we don’t go on full lock down again, but this did happen in Beijing only a couple of months ago. I’m fairly sure it was said that the students were able to attend a total of two weeks last semester—a couple of weeks at the end of May—before the whole school got shut down and exclusively teaching online again. Back near my hometown in Georgia USA one school was in session for literally less than a week before going right back on lockdown. There’s no escaping this thing or at least no escaping the changes.

What does this have to do with RPGs? The problems and precautions of meeting nowadays affect everything. There may be a group who plays or wants to form, but they will probably be leery of getting together. Meeting online is an option, but for someone like myself, an additional 3hrs or more of screen time isn’t all that appealing when you’ve been spending so much time on screen as it is. Conventions have almost all been cancelled or taken online, and even production and distribution of certain product have slowed or taken even bigger hits. Can the hobby take it? Could it actually make it into a bigger thing? Will we ever get back to the way things were? It seems so overly dramatic for a virus with a 98% recovery rate, but here we are.  

RPG A Day 2020: Day 17--comfort

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 17—Comfort

‘Comfort’ is another challenging prompt. I can only say as a player or DM/GM there are times that one should step out of their comfort zones and try something new. For better or worse, true or technically not quite, Dungeons and Dragons is synonymous with role-playing, and for many that’s as far as they’re likely to go. There are so many more out there to try and thinks to crowd funding and self-publishing even more coming down the line, but most never go beyond D&D and a lot of time they don’t even go beyond the edition they broke in with. You never know what hidden gem you might be missing. 

Best I can do today. Maybe tomorrow’s will be more inspiring for me. 

RPG A Day 2020: Day 16--Dramatic

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 16—Dramatic

It will be a really short one today with dramatic. Most of my games have never been dramatic—or at least not overly so. My latest DM had a lot of flair, but there still seemed to be humor throughout.

One bit of drama that I do remember came from one somewhat recent Roll 20 group wherein I played as a Dwarven Ale Bootlegger/Merchant named Darville Frostbeard—fighter class, but I played up his background more than anything. We were playing through that 5E Tiamat campaign. I had gotten into a semi-regular habit of doing brief set “cut-scenes” with one of my fellow players—an actual real-life girl BTW. I made them funny as I could and I think the other players and the DM really got into our “dramatic” performances.

But, then real-life online drama started to set in as the DM was really favoring the girl. I didn’t care because I’m older and kind of go along to get along anyway in my disposition, but it was clear/blatant. The girl for her part was a newbie, and fell into sort of a rules lawyer type. I say the rules are there for a reason and we should try to play at least in the spirit of them, but I remember her getting too into it. Meanwhile, the other players started losing the plot. Say what you will, but those intrigue games never seem to go anywhere. No matter how intelligent the characters might be, the player behind the mask is the one controlling their actions and I’ve found we’re not all that deductive in our reasoning. Often when the “big reveal” happens we have to check our notes—if we bothered taking them—to even figure out who the bad guy is.

Anyway, the campaign was totally meandering along  with tension at the virtual table. If I remember it lasted about three sessions more before everyone dropped save for me, the DM, and the girl. The DM still wanted to run the Tiamat campaign as we had not even gotten through the first module. The girl was down for it, but for me a total reboot after having played from the beginning just wasn’t in the cards. I took my bows and headed on to running Roll 20 games of my own. 

RPG A Day 2020: Day 15--Frame

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 15—Frame

We’re suddenly just about at the half-way point for this year’s RPG A Day experiment. ‘Frame’ is another tough prompt for me to come up with anything of alleged import to say. When I give prompts to students—prompts will usually be more than one word BTW a topic that’s too open and you never know what you’re gonna get, but in most cases it’ll be a lot of blank stares—I usually tell a struggler to use the dictionary or thesaurus to look up other words and meanings that might inspire them to come up with something more than a blank page. I did this for ‘frame’ and found one of the definitions for the word when used as a verb: “to shape or adapt to a particular purpose: to frame a reading list for ninth graders…” I’m going to run with that and frame a short list of RPGs that I think are appropriate for beginners:

1. Pathfinder Beginners Box—I haven’t messed around with 2E if there is a BB for it yet, I don’t know. I really like the 1E one because it essentially offers up all one needs to know in one easy to use box with a map and paper-minis. It is rule light in a sense, but you could play this BB and shift over to just about any other D20 system. It also has those props and visually stimulating character sheets and artwork that really helps you to “sell” the hobby.

2. Index Card Roleplaying Game—mentioned it already this go, but I think it’s good because it’s self-contained and it strips down RPGs—primarily D&D 5E— to it’s most essential and intuitive form. I actually like ICRPG best of all in some ways but the PF:BB gives you props whereas ICRPG has you create your own…which can also be fun, but we don’t want to overwhelm anyone just starting out.

Any of the Runehammer Games are good to go for beginners. If you want some cyberpunk style action try ‘Altered State’ which I haven’t been able to play yet, but which I have read through. It is so much easier than Cyberpunk:2020, but I envision putting the CP:2020 lore—along with upcoming RED and CP:2077—in the background but using these AS mechanics.

3. Faery's Tale Deluxe—another good one, particularly for kids just starting out. The suggested age range begins at 6. The subject matter is more kid friendly fantasy, but I think there are quite a few adults that like it too.

4. Ryuutama—I’m an early Western convert to this Japanese TTRPG and never miss a chance for proselytizing. This game is about traveling and is often described as Myazaki meets The Oregon Trail. The subject matter is definitely kid and beginner friendly and even comes with built-in mechanics for a GM controlled character that sticks with and helps the PCs and some simple town and world building elements that PCs can join in with. The combat system is very much simplified like an old NES JRPG, but the magic system can be deceptively complex for a kid or beginner as magic tends to be in all systems.

5. Dungeons and Dragons 5E Starter/Essential Set—The starter set for 5th isn’t bad at all for beginners, comes with a dice set, and one of the best starting adventures. It’s bare bones when it comes to other swag though. The PF:BB gave more bells and whistles. I understand the essential set is a little better, but also costs a little more. I don’t think you could go wrong with either. I would say one of the better ones for beginner adults. It’s not necessarily little kid friendly and yes, the magic system is out there at times, but kind of fun altering and figuring out. It probably won’t be too long before 6th edition starts being heard of in the distance, but worth leaning the 5E way and lore behind it because it’s most likely what you’ll end up playing.

Honorable mention:

MÖRK BORG a new and highly-stylized—if you can get the print copy—rules light dystopian fantasy setting that purposefully tries to be all the bad things RPGs were accused—framed if you will—of being back in the 80’s. Doesn’t make the cut because it might scare away the ones that don’t realize how tongue-in-cheek it is especially kids and their parents.

My Little Pony: Tails Equestria—I can’t include it because I haven’t been able to play or read through the system. I’d love to do it though. Essentially light D&D set in the MLP:FiM universe. Appealing to kids of all ages.

Meddling Kids—Been around for a while now and is good for kids 7 and up. I have read through this one, but haven’t been able to play. It is simplified and has a mechanic similar to Ryuutama wherein a GM controlled ‘wild card’—think Scooby or Captain Caveman—helps the PCs. For me it seemed a little too easy and not close enough to the kind of play that I’ve encountered at least. I’m also not sure how many kids are into the Hannah-Barbara Saturday morning type shows nowadays.

Alright, that does it for today and the half-way point. We’ll try to do it again tomorrow.

RPG A Day 2020: Banner

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 14—Banner

I like to hit these every day when this time of year comes around. I don’t have much to say about banner though.

I decided to make a banner instead and talk briefly about a good source I’ve found for visuals online.  https://www.canva.com

There is a free option and a paid option with an easy interface. I’ve always stuck with the free. I created this banner using that site. That’s all for today.
 

RPG A Day 2020: Day 13--Rest

RPG A Day 2020: Day 13—Rest

4:00 pm in the afternoon in China kind of late on  writing the entry today, but extremely early on the morning of the 13th back in the States. The topic is ‘Rest’ which I think is very important, but something I’ve been enjoying since January back before the pandemic struck as far as my RPG aspirations go. 

I truly have no upcoming plans to run games nor any prospective games to join. I was in a similar situation just last year when we first moved to China. The move to Beijing and the aforementioned Wuhan flu have proven to be just as challenging. There could be potential players at my new school…only time will tell. Roll*20 or similar virtual table-top? Maybe I’ll go back and try again, but I find the internet to be inconsistent in China and the players were inconsistent as well, so who knows.

What can we do with extended rest periods like these? Read…find a good RPG video game…watch some streaming games…discuss the hobby on RPGaDay…make plans for the next chance when play becomes available.

Not much to it today. Feel free to use any surplus time that you gained by not reading one of my long rants to have a bit of a rest yourse

RPG A Day 2020: Day 12--message

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 12—Message

When I think about message nowadays in the context of anything entertainment related, I unfortunately envision the “woke” / “Cancellation”/“Participation Trophy” culture.  If you’re one of my 15 or so regular readers—you are a strong and loyal group—or if you took the time to read my profile, then you know I embrace the deplorable term hoisted upon conservatives by Lady Hillary back in 2016. I don’t really like messages in my entertainment and usually the message amounts to propaganda and you can bet it usually leans to the left. I like my entertainment to be as neutral as it can be politically. We’re hopefully playing RPGs—and reading comic-books, listening to music and watching TV and movies for that matter—for entertainment, not for indoctrination.

I suppose I should point out the obvious and say that there are well known examples of all the media I just listed with “historic” and “cultural” importance that were purposely meant to deliver a message, but generally speaking the “very special” episodes of ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ that I had to put up with as a kid in the 1980’s were some of the worst I remember and any message they had only made me want to cringe. I get the same feeling from so many RPGs—there’s a whole drama with this culture involving comic-books, but it’s not Comic-A-Day—coming out these days with their “safe words”, sanitized presentations, and virtue signaling social media accounts. They aren’t quite selling—or not selling as it turns out—Gillette razor blades, but every time I read a tweet from these creators it makes me wonder whether or not I’m in the right hobby.

Much like an earlier entry this month, I do let the other shoe drop and ‘walk it back’ a little as the soy boys like to say because I like that in the case of RPGs that the table has become more inclusive because it gives me more chances to play. In my day there were almost no girls who liked to play aside from girlfriends and/or wives that were essentially dragged there. I like that we’re open to virtually all ages now. It has always been a thing for guys to never grow up or to have a second childhood, but nowadays it wouldn’t be embarrassing—except maybe to a surly teen—if a mom or grandma wanted to play. I like that. Believe it or not I also like the so-called ‘X’ Card. For all my bluster, anything beyond PG-13 in games I run happen below decks. However, it is still possible to be offensive and not even no it, so if one of the snowflakes flash the card or PM me with an ‘X’ I know to back off. 

If this entry has a message it’s to just have fun and know your table. If I had a message to the companies it is don’t preach to me and don’t imply that I’m a bad person for the way I play.