Summer slowdown - solo gaming

I'm in the midst of summer vacations, and gaming is now happening less than usual. A few years back I remember a friend saying that soon it would be summer and then there would be more opportunities for games. I've found that instead it means even less. Everyone is gone, to summer houses and trips abroad for those who can afford. But, not wanting to give up I've tried to do some solo gaming.

For many years I saw T&T as that game which was all about solos. I even considered it an odd choice of a game, since I had a gaming group and didn't need such a game. Poor fool I was. Actually, the first contact I had with adventure gaming was through that marvellous little book The Warlock of Firetop Mountain with those fantastic Russ Nicholson illustrations. God knows why I then developed that attitude towards T&T.

Having a pile of T&T solos I grabbed a small volume by Andy Holmes, being one highly regarded solo writer. I have played some of his solos before, but this one Wytches, was new to me. This time it felt there was a story to it, with some quite decent pieces of exposition setting the mood. I started to play it and explored the small village. Walking around talking to people getting to know the story of the solo was a nice change from the kind of solos where you walk from fight to fight. Naturally I finally found myself in a fight, and was squashed like a bug. I had +5 combat adds and had to go up against a monster of +30 or something like that. Might as well have said, "you die" that paragraph. Holmes seem to be very fond of that kind of solo writing where you encounter a monster which is a total TPK waiting to happen. It's not just Holmes doing that, though.

It has been said that "balanced" encounters is a true sign of the decadence of modern editions of the world's most popular rpg. When it leads to players feeling entitled to "challenges" scaled to their level, and treasures as their due I feel it has gone very wrong. That being said, I think monsters which are way out there should at least be very uncommon or possible to avoid. In a solo the possibilities for evasive maneuvers are often not that common, so I prefer those to be random encounters and/or things which the solo writers include an "escape clause" for. Victories won by the skin of your teeth are valued the most, but it's a fine line. I think maybe the subtle queues gained by a GM from her players is needed to gauge when it's time to let the big stomper in on the stage and when the players will just feel harassed by it.

Naturally, I had to bring a Fighting Fantasy book on my vacation as well. That's where it all started after all. City of Thieves, the den of inequity, is where my brave adventurer headed. Once again we have a solo where the main task in not to fight, but to enter a hostile environment to find a person and then having found him scout for the the items of power needed for the main task. The city almost felt like a real place, with a mood of its own when you carefully approach proprietors of different kinds of stores illustrated by the classic look and feel of Fightiong Fantasy artists. I don't think I really appreciated before how much of my imagination of the fantastic have been shaped by these artists.

Once again I run into the limitations of the solo format. Dead ends can, and will, happen when you take one of the paths through the numbers not tested and tried by the authors. To their defence I should say that in a solo of 400 paragraphs that is juist to be expected. You would need a computerized testing suite to find all those possible dead ends. Ian Livingstone have at least prepared for it, writing the paragraph I ended on so that coming there you had to check if you had the needed components before travelling further, a small checkpoint if you like.

It is amazing how this hobby is to its very nature a creative one. Having played these two solos I now find myself wanting to beat them at their game, and write my own! I did it once and that was a mini solo of less than 40 pages, I think. Was it even 20? It was a lot of work. Maybe, just maybe, the summer with its lack of gaming opportunities will be the fount of something after all.

Another way to have tricky games, the Stable system

Yesterday I read about the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and how you sometimes have to metagame and play them more than once, since there are plenty of instant death situations in those books. I realized there are other solutions which could make those "tricky" situations in a non-solo game.

If you use your henchmen like trap detectors the next lot to sign on will demand extra pay, surely. But, what if you use your own PC?

Way back in the days, everyone used to have multiple characters. In the T&T rulebook from 1979 it's even mentioned as the way to do things. So, maybe it's possible to have those tricky dungeons which "demand" to be tested before you can take intelligent decisions. Just send in one of the clones...

Once again, eggs. With werewolves!

Long time readers of my blog might remember that I once posted about my wide eyed attitude toward pickled eggs. Today I once again had a close encounter with these fantastic things.

I have a lot of very fond memories of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A lot of young gamers in the UK, and other countries where Fighting Fantasy gamebooks where sold, have started their dungeon delving careers in the tunnels under that mountain. On my way to work today I picked up my sword and entered the mountain.

Imagine my surprise after having beated a werewolf and his dog companion. He has a store room, and there's a jar of pickled eggs! It was not, like I wrote in my old post, a troll that guarded a larder with pickled eggs!

How did I managed to mix up trolls and werewolves?

Gaming and food - a memory of trolls

When you think of gaming, do you think of food? At most gaming tables, snacks will be consumed. The availability of snacks are even codified in many rule books, which state what equipment you need to play the game. Eating and gaming go hand in hand.

I've read that in order for a memory to get stuck in your brain, it helps to have many different senses involved. Just imagine when you take down that big monster, and the pizza you were eating at the time. Big monsters always makes you think of mushrooms. I also have a memory of food and gaming, but not food I've ever eaten.

Back when I was a teenager we didn't eat that much while gaming. Usually we did take a break for some food, but snacks at the table were scarcer. Now when I have gotten older and my metabolism is getting slower, it's far more common with some eating. I figure I'm doing it wrong.

But, I don't have any specific relationship between food and gaming, no must-have snack. I haven't even ever used the pizza matrix on my excellent D&D screen from Kenzer Co! Maybe one of these days. But, I do think of eggs when trolls are mentioned.

Lodged in my memory is an encounter with a troll, when I was far younger than today, at the beginning of my career in dungeon delving. Tingling with anticipation I had bough the Fighting Fantasy solo game book The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and I was taking the first steps as a novice adventurer. I explored caverns deep beneath the earth and marvelled at the wonders found underground. There was a troll in one room, and he had a larder. When I had dispatched him, I no longer remember how many tries it took, I searched his storage and found eggs.

Eggs are nothing special, I eat a few every week. But, there was something highly mystical about these eggs. They were pickled. To my young mind nothing could be more exotic and weird than pickled eggs. Are they uncooked? Are they still in their shells? I tried to imagine how and why. Among the food I ate with my family, there were no such things as pickled eggs. They were purely in the realms of fantasy. The wonder of eggs.

Many times have I read about sense of wonder, which in science fiction is that sense that you're not in Kansas anymore and that wide vistas of possibilities opens up in your mind. I still like a good book giving me that feeling. In all the literature of the fantastic that "sensawunda" can be found if you are lucky, and for me the most wondrous thing fighting monsters under a volcano was pickled eggs.

Imagine my surprise when I decades later one day visit my local Loblaws supermarket and found a jar of pickled eggs! I just stared at them, barely believing that they existed. It almost made me want to buy them, go home and start digging a dungeon! Naturally I couldn't buy them. Pickled eggs are Fantasy, and only available as treasure after fighting trolls.

Free RPG Day Impressions - Dragon Warriors

I have seen Dragon Warriors mentioned, and it seemed to be one of those quirks of history, so I was surprised when I heard it would come back in print. I grabbed the freebie of DW and dived in.

The booklet contains rules for combat, generating characters for two classes, a short introduction to the world, a few monsters and s short adventure. Since it is a game from the past, you kind of expect it to be a old school system and it delivers. The characters have stats, and classes which give you starting values in certain basic skills. Having a value for Attack and one for Defend reminded me of the old Fighting Fantasy game books, also from the UK. Subtracting the targets Defence from your attack and roll a d20 to hit. Nice and simple. Different classes are inherently better at attacking or defending in combat. Also, you have some basic skills Stealth, Perception and Evasion. The classes then also have class based abilities, like Track or Berserk. It's classic old school weirdness that they haven't unified those two classes of Skills. All in all it looks easy enough to understand, and no more odd than some other classics. They have managed to include a roll to penetrate armor, but increase the amount of dice rolled, since damage is set by weapon. I kind of like that solution. I don't know if it works that way in the full game, but here I see an interesting opportunity to include weapon vs armor type effects in a fairly smooth way. Sadly we don't get any hints on how magic works, more than that there are a Magic Attack basic ability for some classes.

There is one thing which I found interesting in the system. Using the Evasion skill you can apparently dodge attacks, and other kind of calamities. There are no other system for saves, which for me is a big plus. They snap the suspenders of disbelief way to easy. Now, not only is this a understandable system for saves, but it uses 2d10 instead of d20. That could be considered a wart on the rest of the system, but note that this will give another kind of probability distribution than a flat d20 spread. I kind of like the implications of that.

The short intro to the world is intriguing. It looks a bit like a gritty, but fantastic, world somewhat inspired by our world. It is no Forgotten Realms kind of super magic to be sure. Maybe it feels a little bit too medieval for my taste. I can't stand Chivalry and Sorcery kind of medieval fantasy, for example.

Lastly, there's a short adventure. I have seen far worse, many times, so this little excursion to the land of Legend gave me warm and fuzzy feelings. It's nothing special, just a clear-out-a-location-from-monsters kind of adventure. But, it shows off the setting and system well.