Why do I have such a downer on updates to game systems?

1. It’s expensive.
I’ve spent thousands of pounds over the years on roleplay books. At least 90% of that was on supplements and campaign settings rather than rulebooks so you can understand when I get a little miffed when the publishers bring out a new version that makes all those supplements and settings worthless in the eyes the new system.

2. Same old story just different rules.
So when WOD went through a reboot very little changed. The mechanics where mixed up and ‘refined’ and that’s about it as the same basic story kept going. To be fair to White Wolf they basically shot themselves in the foot when they first published that Gehenna was on it’s way. Or were they just very shrewd people that knew exactly how many people would buy the new rules?

With Dungeons and Dragons 4ed  they’ve basically turned it into D&D lite. It’s not a refinement of the previous games or an expansion on the system. They’ve took the popular parts from online computer games and melded it together with the previous rules to create something that doesn’t feel, to me at least, like any D&D game I’ve seen before. Why not keep the old D&D line going or at least fix the bits that didn’t work and release 4ed as a new game line but one that uses the same world? Have it as an extension of the mini battles game and market it to the crowd of young gamers moving up from Pokemon and the other card games that seem to be morphing into spinnig top battles.

3. Did I say it was expensive?
Forget the cost of the books I’ve bought in the past that are now worthless. Lets look at how much it costs to get a Forgotten Realms game going now that 4ed is out. The DM/players guides come in at $60 for both of them and the setting books add another $60-70 onto that as well. Your talking over $120 just to play the basic setting and never mind any of the expansions they bring out in the future. What if you go to all that trouble and you find you really don’t like the new setting or you really don’t like the new 4ed rules?

4. Physical space
I live in a normal sized house in the UK. We have plenty of shelf space and yet I am forced to keep a sizable amount of my books in boxes in the attic. I cannot find anywhere to keep my almost complete collection of oWOD books never mind space for the new system should I ever give in and buy it.

5. Mental space
I’ve already memorised the rules and mechanics of 13 separate gaming systems over the years. Do I really need to squeeze another one in? At what point will my mind begin to fail and the AD&D equipment charts start to meld together and be mistaken for the Small Creatures Crit Table from Rolemaster?

The old games worked. Sure they had their flaws but so do the new versions. Pick one and stick with it but I just wish the old system I loved still had official work being published for them.

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You will always find a character within the group turns themselves into a walking hardware store. Most DM’s I’ve come across in the past do not really care just how much a player carries until it gets to the stage where they are trying to walk away from a battlefield carrying the King of Jobrovia’s personal security teams power armour in their rucksack.

What has always amazed me is that they go into so much detail in what they are carrying, what it’s stats may be and how it looks that they completely ‘forget’ how heavy the item is or for that matter just how big it is.

I’ve seen players trying to go dungeoneering whilst carrying a ladder and two ten foot long poles each and then conveniently forget about them the moment they get attacked or they start off down the tiny side tunnel that leads them to the gold.
So what normal items have you found your players trying to hide upon their person or get away with carrying lots of in your campaigns?

Over the years I’ve managed to get a Top Five list of items that I cannot go a game without a player at some point trying to get away with carrying them.

1. Ten foot pole. It’s self explanatory really. I mean how many people can walk through a forest, go into a dungeon or even wander about town with a ten foot long pole in their hand or attached to their pack and not have a great deal of difficulty? There is a reason why most players do not pick pole arms as a primary weapon and it just so happens it’s the same one as why people don’t walk about with poles!
2. Ladder. For the exact same reason as the pole except that its even bigger. Unless your player is a window cleaner then he’s not going to be carrying one around with him where ever he goes.
3. 50′ Rope. OK so it’s far more portable than the pole or ladder ever will be but if they claim to be carrying it on their person you need to remind them just how bulky that rope is. You also might want to remind them that 50′ isn’t really that long once you get down to it. By the time you’ve found something to tie it to as well as tie a decent knot they will be left a lot less than the initial 50′ they thought they had. They might catch on to this though and pick up an extra length of rope. That’s when you remind them again just how bulky that stuff is. It’s a whole other ballgame in sci-fi campaigns.
4. Ammo. It doesn’t matter what your setting is at least one player will always try to find space to take 50 arrows in to combat or 1000 rounds of ammo for their assault rifle. That’s a hell of a big quiver in anyone’s books and an normal combat loadout is usually more like 250 rounds with the rest being left back at home as those bullets are heavy!
5. Sorrell Nuts. This one is actually a personal peeve from years ago whilst I still regularly played Rolemaster. One of the players favorite healing and resurrection methods involved a sorrell nut. They were expensive and hard to come by but over the years in game one of the players learned to cultivate and grow the plant needed for this item. From what I recall the weight and size were negligible and so no figures were ever given in the rule books. This meant that the player had a stash of several thousand nuts on him at any one time and sold them off to the local townsfolk. The DM read the ruling as they were that small the player could hold as many as he wanted and the only limiting factor the player ever had was on how much gold he could carry to his tavern at night after selling them that day.

So what has been your bugbear over the years with your players equipment lists?

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So this months blog carnival is about transitions and transformation and within seconds of putting my thinking cap on I realised I’d already started writing a post that would fit in perfectly with this subject.

They say our tame GM eats dice for breakfast and that he built his home from worn out copies of the 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters Guide. But how did he get there?

I don’t really know how I got here but I seem to be the groups gamemaster for most of our campaigns. In recent years both Mark and Willie have taken their turn and ran great campaigns but most of the time it’s me that will be sitting with the rulebooks in front of me telling the story.
When i first started out playing we had a couple of players and our GM was a friend’s cousin who would run games for us when he was visiting from London. It meant we could only ever play short campaigns maybe twice a year but because of this we savoured every moment of it. That was until one day my childhood friend Joe was given a copy of the Basic Dungeons and Dragons rules. He sat up all night reading over them until he knew them off by heart and then we sat up all the next night so we could get used to the rules. As players we were used to using the Rolemaster rules even if we didn’t understand them that well at that point so something this basic was actually a huge leap forward for us. We actually understood how the game worked for a start.

For the first year my friend was the GM. It was a no brainer. The rulebooks were his so it was his game. After a while though he soon grew tired of being the one to make up the story and wanted to play a character again. We all still wanted to be a player rather than the GM so we drew straws and I lucked out and so it would be another year before I ran my first campaign. It was not long after this that we purchased our own copy of Rolemaster. I say purchased but I’m sure a few of the Companions were pilfered from the local second hand book store. One of the group insisted that if you bought a boxed set they never checked inside so they filled the main boxed set with as many Companions as they could. I could never prove it though. Anyway we soon got to the stage where we were just lining up encounters and throwing the dice rather than actually roleplaying and I go bored very quickly.

I was never one for writing stories in English class. In fact I’d usually struggle to write a 500 word short story while I was at school and my written English skills haven’t really increased over the years if I’m being perfectly honest. With this in mind you can understand that running my own games didn’t come naturally to me. I could devour a rulebook in an evening and be able to quote back to you complex combat ‘what if’s’ or spell descriptions of even the less well known spell lists but if you were to ask me to write down what I planned for a game session I’d struggle. I still do to an extent but over time I manage it. I’m perfectly happy with an idea in my head but when it comes time to formalise it for a campaign I have real trouble.

From all this came my GMing style. I improvise. I push and pull stories until they match in game and I steal ideas from everywhere. I’ll have scribbled down a bullet point list of whats going to happen or how things are laid out but that’s it. Everything else stays in my head until it’s needed. It’s better for everyone that way.

The change over from player to GM was a very smooth process for me. I’m not sure if it’s like that with everyone but once the initial worries were shoved out of the way I gradually grew to enjoy it far more than just being a player. When your part of a group of characters you can easily get stuck concentrating entirely on your character and forgetting about the players and characters around you. It’s only natural that you’ll spend more time on that one ‘person’ than on anything else and its like a child or a favourite pet. You nurture and grow them from being a few scribbles on a bit of paper to a well rounded character than is far more than just the sum of its stats and skills. As a GM however you get that exact same feeling when you look out at your party as each and every single one of them grows and your world carries on it’s day to day routine as well as growing in the same manner as the characters. That feeling of success you get after running a successful game that has everyone talking about it can never be beaten by that you might get from just taking part in it as a player.

That’s why I can never go back to being just a player. No matter how hard I find it to succesfully GM.

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