Monday in the after meeting conversations that follow my twice-monthly writers group meetings I encountered an old role-play gaming temptation.

I was describing to a trio of writer friends how back in the day I used to run RPG that were simply feature films with players in the place of the principal characters. I do not mean inspired by the film, I ran the exact movie, usually fairly well known geek favorites, as much as possible scene by scene, and watched as the players varied or followed the plot as it had progressed through the film.

This worked because the main character was played by someone who had not seen the movie and that is where to fun laid. Watching that person navigate the good or bad plot. Often the other players would have varying degrees of familiarity with the movie and as such nudged and guided the story generally in that direct the script had taken.

I had started down this conversation rabbit hole because I was going to discuss one variation from a plot that I thought was interesting from a writing perspective but my three friends stopped me.

1) They thought the idea of the movie/RPG mash-up was fun and apparently it was something they had never encountered.

2)_None of the trio has seen the 1980 production of Flash Gordon.

You can see where this is going. I am very tempted to take these three friends and role-play gamers and run them through the entirety the 1980 Flash Gordon, after all three players and three earthlings, hurling their bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out there.

If I did this, what game system to use? Something fast and loose, not overly burdened with details, and probably t system will need drama points or such to allow for cinema’s improbabilities.

OH it is tempting.

In addition to just hanging with family I haven’t seen in three years one of the joys going back east on vacation was seeing which games my nephew David had acquired and wanted to play.

On this trip he introduced me to Viticulture: The Essential Edition a game of growing grapes and making wine. Okay so it principally an economic game about a subject that I have low interest in, after all even before my no-alcohol medications I was a very spare drinker. The game mechanic is ‘worker placement’ so there’s no dice rolling in this game, only card draws for randomness, and very little direct action against the other players. All in all this sounded like a game that would have at most just a passing interest for me.

At my urging we played it nearly every single day I was there.

I still can’t break it down logically why this game worked so well for me, but it truly sang with fun. Perhaps it was the mechanic, ‘worker placement.’ I look at my collection and I see that I have no game that use that mechanism as their core play. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the game play without degrading the game’s reply value. Whatever the reason I really enjoyed Viticulture and I am thinking about introducing it to my friends, though I suspect except for one it is really not their gaming style.

It has also gotten me more interested in the whole ‘worker placement’ game mechanic. I shall have to look up more games with this and give them a try. Perhaps last month I discovered a whole new world.

Today’s election day – go out and vote. Thus ends todays political posting.

This past weekend I ran my 5^th Edition D&D game and had a success that truly made me feel good.

I had engaged in a bit of an experiment. The week leading up to the game I spent my lunches here at work writing journal entries for a game handout. The journal would cover decades, but only a scattering of entries remained. Some might contain vital clue, others might be mundane, and other might only serve at atmosphere. By the time the week ended I had written 3000 words of entries.

I used three different scrip fonts to represent the different ages of the fictional author and then I cut each entry apart onto its own piece of paper, mixing them up. (The journal was found in a old stone manor house, most of it missing the rest thoroughly out of sequence.)

Game night game and despite missing a few players we managed lift off. When they got the scraps with the journal entries I was quite nervous. I had written them in the ‘pantser’ style, simply making things up as I went along. Would the entries be interesting? Would the puzzle work? Would they have fun?

Judging by the players looked I would say it did work. They poured over the slips, one player quickly seeing the different fonts sorted them accordingly. As they examined the entries they read out disturbing, interesting, and passage that they believe to be clues. His worked out so much better than a skill roll a bullet point of data.

I wish all the players had been able to attend.

So for a number of years I have been running a 3.5 D&D campaign setting. For the last four years it has been a particular campaign. Sadly of late I feel like the game is getting out of control and beyond my ability of manage. That has brought several issue to the fore concerning 3.5 and how much I have come to loath certain aspects of the system.

1) Wizard’s Wal-mart

The variation of D&D that i learned, knew best, and enjoyed the most, A D&D had now rules for the buying or selling of magical items or spells. You found them as loot. 3.5 introduced crafting rules, selling rules, and buying rules. In my opinion that has horribly damaged the tone of the game. Where once magical items were things of power, rare and unusual, now they are consumer goods. When players obtain treasure the motivation is to sell it so they can go shopping and buy the magical items that they really want. The whole concept of item being tied to story is trashed. In addition to devaluing the emotional impact of magical items, this has the larger effect of transforming settings from quasi-medieval to sort of a pre-industrial consumerist culture. Magic isn’t rare and strange power, it’s just a skill set like programming or drafting.

2) Mundane Magic

I can recall clearly looking around at my players and noticing that everybody save one cast spells. The proliferation of new and unusual classes and prestige classes has so greatly inflated the number of potential spell casters that being a spell caster is nothing of note. The use of magic in such a situation quickly becomes no more interesting than the use of any tool. Magic has been demystified from arcane and unknown lore to a set of Ikea instructions.

3) There’s a rule and an exception for everything

Once upon a time I ran long running campaigns with only three books. The DMs guide, the Players Handbook, and the Monster Manual. That was it. The entire library needed to play my campaign. Currently on my shelf there are 31 rule books. Every single one introduces new character classes, new spells, new feats, new items and new ways of doing things that have to be integrated into the existing system. It makes StarFleet Battles look positively straight-forward. Of all the players in my game both active and those on a temporary hiatus, very few come from just the core books. Running a game is often derailed into not only looking up a rule, but trying to find which cursed tome holds the information.

4) Complexity Curses Spontaneity

Back in my days of running an A D&D games I often rans for hours with very few notes, flying by the seat of pants through the encounters and storyline of the game. 3.5, just the core books, introduces a level of complexity that make spontaneous encounters quite difficult. Once the ‘splat’ books are added it becomes an impossibility. (At least for me.) Every encounter must be pre-generated, the numerous statistics documented, and the paperwork prepared. All this is doubly true if your players are of the sort who challenge rulings causing the game to stop so the 31 rulebooks can be consulted, If the player group diverges significantly from the expected play line the games usually has to stop because the system impedes ‘winging it.’

5) Behold the Mighty Munchkin

Start with a system that from its complexity rewards detailed attention, add in 31 books of exceptions to rules and interesting abilities, mix on top of that the ability to pick and choose your magic items at Wizard’s Wal-mart and you have the ideal recipe for Munchkin Mayhem. A player with even a modicum on intelligence and the will to do the research can craft characters that engines of efficiency, molded from the right classes, the right feats, the right spells, the right items to be far more powerful than a ‘standard’ character of that level. Worse yet such players tend to drag the entire campaign down the rabbit hole of combat calculations.  No one wants a weak link in the team and the advice on builds end up guiding everyone down the ideological paths.

That’s my rant, my course of action?

I don’t know.