The Grown Up Game Table

My name is Alexandra Erin. I am an author, and have been a player of Dungeons and Dragons since I was in the fifth grade. My first module was Keep on the Borderlands… it was my only module, so I built a whole setting for a campaign around it. In the process of doing so, I added a whole culture for the kobolds in the Caves of Chaos and a side plot involving a group of kobolds who were simply agitating for more rights.

Original Flavor D&D wasn’t really built for a lot of what I wanted it to do. I found the magic system bizarre and off-putting. The Vancian spells per day model didn’t map to any idea I had of what a wizard was, what a wizard did. The idea that magicians’ wands and staves were valuable things you found at random that could be used up and then thrown away? Very off-putting. I came to understand the idea behind these limiting factors as a matter of game balance, but it didn’t make the game world any more real to me, and as I came to understand just how poorly balanced the game was anyway, I grew dissatisfied with D&D.

Still, 2nd Edition AD&D appealed to me with its variety of world settings and greater complexity for a time, until I found other roleplaying games that… if they had their own faults… were a lot closer to what I envisioned when I closed my eyes and thought of wizards and elves.

When TSR got bought out, I stopped paying attention to the product line for a while. It took me getting into Order of the Stick to get me into 3rd Edition at all, though by then it was 3.5. I could see the improvements over previous editions pretty clearly. I was interested… on the line, but not quite hooked.

Then 4th Edition came out, before I really did anything with 3rd. My first reaction was pretty blah. Actually, it was pretty bleh. I’ve never really been into MMOs and it was pretty transparent that D&D was taking its cues from them. The idea of dividing character classes up by combat roles? What a weird and unnecessary intrusion of metalogic into the game! Paladins and Clerics belonged together more than Clerics and Warlords, obviously, and Warlocks should be Wizards rather than Rangers and Rogues. It was obvious! And defining Rangers and Rogues by their combat roles seemed like blasphemy. And most of the game book was taken up by combat rules and the rules for what each class could do in combat. It was like they were taking the roleplaying out of the game!

But of course, as my experience running Keep on the Borderland proved—back in an edition when there were no more than the six basic attributes, HP, and a set of fixed class abilities—the roleplaying couldn’t come from the game to begin with.

After that, other things started to fall into place. I realized that the roles were pretty meta but that’s all they were… they didn’t intrude into the game world at all. There was a clear delineation among “power sources” of arcane, divine, and martial, that mapped much better to my expectations… Paladins with Clerics and Fighters with Warlords. After playing a couple sessions, it clicked for me how the roles fit together… and also how the game designers had made it so that the roles had a tangible effect without being straitjackets.

I also appreciated how the investment in pages spent on combat rules and powers paid off. Combat was quite a bit different from my early days of playing in an edition where it had barely mattered who stood where. There were tactics involved now. Position and mobility mattered. Things happened that were more exciting than participants almost running out of hit points or running out of hit points.

And I didn’t miss the lack of non-combat rules at all. Not because we didn’t do anything but fight… because we didn’t need them.

I can’t think of how many “introduction to roleplaying games” articles I’ve read or forewords to gamebooks that have introduced the concept by way of this analogy:

“Remember when you were kids and you used to play a game, like cops and robbers? And how much fun you could have until it broke down because somebody said ‘BANG! I shot you!’ and someone else went, ‘Nuh uh, you missed!’”

It really is an apt analogy. Combat… broadly, conflict resolution, but in the genre at hand that’s frequently combat… is what needs the rules most often, because it’s what needs rulings most often. A workable combat system gives you a way of determining who hits whom how hard.

D&D’s always had a workable combat system, in the sense that it takes two characters and produces a result.

But with 4E, the combat system went from workable to freaking awesome. Now we don’t just have a system that lets us know if we hit or missed… we have a system that actually lets people work together as a team, that lets people pull out badass Big Damn Hero moves, that lets people take out two or three minions of evil with one swing, that encourages players to add their own personal flair and flavor to what they’re doing in order to turn a signature move or spell into more than just a collection of numbers.

And the rest? The stuff outside of combat? It’s Keep on the Borderlands all over again. The system stays out of my way. I love it.

I’ve come to learn that… among some gamers… the style of play where people sit down and have fun and use logic and common sense and imagination to create a plausible world and immerse themselves into it instead of looking through a bunch of books and tables to find the rules that tell them exactly how they can most fully exploit the imaginary world to get the most imaginary money and imaginary power aren’t playing D&D but are instead playing “Magical Tea Party”, because if we’re not pointing to a table that says we get xdy*z GP for stacking these three feats with this skill and using the Shoeshine Boy rules on page 273 of the Revised Manual Of Trades then we’re just making shit up as we go like a bunch of kids sitting around a table, pouring water out of a plastic teapot for our teddy bears.

Apparently, anybody saying that trolls regenerate because 30 years ago Gary Gygax said, “Hey, guess what? The big guy you just killed started healing. Surprise!” and now we have a book saying trolls regenerate is more meaningful than when I, in my role of a DM trying to craft an entertaining story and challenging adventure for my players, decide that the dark overlord will regenerate 50 HP a round unless the players find the mirror with his soul in it and smash it before combat. Because I make stuff up that they can’t find in their books, this interferes with their ability to figure out how to build a character that can beat anything… which apparently means I’m playing a meaningless made-up pretendy fun-time game while they’re playing the serious business that is Dungeons & Dragons.

Well, so be it. I’m grown up now, but I had a lot of fun pouring tea for teddy bears when I was a kid. I had a blast playing Keep on the Borderlands and giving kobolds personalities (and slings with acid pots and glue pots… made me feel weirdly prescient when I read the kobold slinger stats in the current Monster Manual) and adjudicating what happened when my friends wanted to do things the rules in the Basic set didn’t cover (which would be, oh, everything) according to common sense, imagination, and the relevant rules of coolness, humor, and drama.

I’ve created this blog to have a place to blog about D&D… roleplaying in general, but to be honest, D&D was my first game and it is my game now… so I don’t keep flooding my Livejournal with posts on the subject. While I’m taking their dismissive nickname for the style of game I prefer and wearing it like a badge, I intend for this blog to be more than a platform for me to counter-bash 4E bashers… at the end of the day, we’re all playing what a great philosopher once called “Pretendy Fun Time Games”.

We’re sitting around tables pretending to be elves and half-orcs for no tangible reward and many of us have paid hundreds of dollars or more over the course of our lives for the privilege of doing so.

I play the game the way that’s the most fun for me, the way that makes the most sense to me, and the way that lets me create a consistent and persistent world in which players can immerse themselves and have adventures and shape stories with me.

I’m going to use it as a place to post my personal tips and tricks, little essays on D&D and on roleplaying, bits of homebrew and houserules that I’m toying with, ideas for interesting characters, nifty permutations of the player content, start discussions, organize and host my online game sessions, and so on.

Welcome to the tea party.

Would you like one lump or two?