Party Coherence

I've been reflecting a lot on D&D lately (I partly blame Antagonist Relations), specifically on the history and rules. But the game is really in the playing. A ruleset is a tool, better for some tasks than others. But any rule set will generally get the job done. What we don't really see rules for in RPGs, however, is party coherence.

I'm not sure why that is, but I suspect it stems from the general lack of social rules and cooperative attitude that games like D&D engender. What is party coherence though? My ideas on this are colored by my old LARP experience.

See, I used to play LARPs at conventions. These weren't long-term things, just one four-hour game. But the social interaction there required a skeleton of player knowledge. This was generally done by a lengthy list of the characters in the game and a short description of your relationship to each one. So-and-so was your brother in the Mafia family, or in your delegation at the peace conference. So-and-so was your rival, the person you wanted to take down. Without this basic background info, you were lost in this type of political intrigue game.

Some of the people who ran those games also ran D&D games at convention I used to frequent. And you see the same sort of thing in a convention game. My favorite one had my friend JG as my daughter, and I suspected that this other guy that I knew was playing my son that I put up for adoption. Instantly I had connection to the rest of the party. It was awesome.

When the Story was in the Stars

I was just recently reminded of a quite amazing Fading Suns game that I ran/played in a number of years back. I didn't document it as much as I might have liked now, but we tried. It was a great little game though, which lasted about two years. The original idea was for a character-focused drama, in the line of Outlaw Star and Cowboy Bebop. I even went so far as to post Tv-guide style summaries of some of the sessions, and title the arcs. I'm sure I might have more in my lost notes on some old backup CD somewhere. The best, of course, being the Revenge is a Big Fat Wealthy Bitch arc, where the party got revenve on a Scraver casino owner who had busted their balls in the Maltese Gargoyle incident in her casino earlier.

When I read the title of one of the episodes of that arc, Follow That Bitch!, I laughed out loud.
I'd like to get back into Fading Suns, or a similar game, eventually. Its really some of the character-driven stuff that I miss (along with playing in general). I think D&D makes some longer-term things easier, but some of the stricter party structure can make it harder to improvise or deal with missing characters. Even when you're not playing 4e, you know its going to be hard if you're missing one PC.
I've always said (or at least often remarked) that D&D is about 3 parts combat, two parts puzzles, and one part roleplaying. That's not necessarily true, but its what the rules lead one to believe. Its well-suited for busting into ancient tombs and finding treasure, but not always my tool of choice for doing more character-centered stuff. Right tool for the job and all that.

Rule of Law: Church of the Wisdom Kings

The best D&D world I've played in is, of course, the homebrew one I made with two good friend a few years ago. I don't want to catalogue all of its greatness here, but the way we created the setting was amazingly good. I'll use the Church of the Wisdom Kings as the best example of our collective world building.

Originally, we wanted a morally clear orc-killing game. Knowing me and my friends, we drifted from the original goal a bit, but were all pretty happy with where we ended up. The way we did it though was pretty fun and ensured that everyone could have a say in the setting. That's because we made it all up.

The basic rule: whatever you introduce, you get to define.

My D&D

My introduction to D&D came a bit too late for me to be a true grognard. Hopefully no one will blame me for being born well after the first edition books came out. But my brother got Heroquest for Christmas one year, and we played the junk out of that game. Wore the skulls off the dice, in fact. We even had the original Elf and Barbarian quest packs, which were far too difficult for us to actually complete, even with all the treasures from the basic game.

I think it was in October of the next year that I got the black box. It was definitely for my birthday, and the box came out in 1991, so I either got it that year or the next. I even remember exchanging it at Toys R Us because I though it was defective and missing the adventure or something.

Where is the Tower of Infinite Evil?

The actual Tower of Infinite Evil was a AD&D campaign from my golden age. It was a sandboxy megadungeon setting that my friend Zack and I ran. There was no real setting beyond the Tower, so I can't even say which campaign world it was on. I think we played the Tower during our later middle school years, but I'm not sure of the exact time. Nonetheless, it had all the awesome properties a couple of teenage dudes could imagine.

The tower had some grand history that I've long since forgotten. The important thing was that it had a lot of different levels (infinite levels, presumably) and we each got to create a few characters so we could play whatever we wanted in the tower. I think I ran the ground floor and everything above that, Zack took everything downwards.

Like all my games back in that age, I don't think the Tower lasted too long. Probably just 5 adventures or so. My levels were carefully crafted dungeon crawls with places to take over and set up base/shop. Zack took the tower to be more like Yggdrasil from Planescape and each level was a different plane (or its own demiplane?). In the end, his idea might have been more exciting than mine.

The tower has probably been long since forgotten by the people who first ventured into it, but its still a relatively iconic memory of my own golden age. Alongside the priest I made once using the Skills and Powers rules who's main class feature was unlimited Solipsism spells. Pretty brokawesome when you can just think anything into existence that you need when you need it, even if no one else can ride your imaginary giant butterfly.

Because the Golden Age is 12

With all the new D&D talk online, I've been reminiscing about my own golden age lately. I'm currently overseas, so I don't get the opportunity to craft an adventure, round up the guys, and play some D&D these days. Instead, I can at least yearn and plot to reclaim yesteryear again once I return stateside.

So the real question of this blog is, what would my new Golden Age D&D look like? Will the upcoming D&D Next do the trick? Do I need to go back to AD&D 2nd Edition? Hopefully by the time I get back to the US I'll have a better idea.