How I got here: D&D Part 1

 I've been doing a lot of writing this past week and it got me thinking about different tastes or styles in RPG adventures and how what is popular has changed over the years.  It's not a question of better or worse, it's really just about different.  Personally I really like current generation game rules, but if I'm being honest I still really prefer the style of adventures and game content that were published when I first got into D&D.  It got me thinking about my first year playing D&D and the first few products that shaped my view of how the game is played.

When I first got into D&D I was 11 years old.  I had basically no money of my own and my family was tight enough for money that I couldn't just go out with my parents and get the things I wanted (or knew of for that matter).  I ended up doing what every 11 year old focused on one thing they want does; I asked for nothing but D&D stuff for Christmas.  I don't remember in detail a lot of Christmases from my youth, but I remember Christmas 1983.

My younger sister used to get up CRAZY early on Christmas morning to open presents.  After a couple of years of ridiculously early December 25ths my mom had set down a rule that when we woke up we could open and play with everything in our stockings, but no presents under the tree, and no waking her up before she got up on her own. So on December 25th 1983 at about 3:30am my sister came busting into my room with her stocking (mine was leaned up against my bedroom door) to go through our stockings.  Every year since my mom had started this practice my sister had come into my room, gone through stockings, and then we would fall back asleep after she got bored, this year would be the first time I stayed up.  My stocking was full of fruit, nuts, candies, and toiletries (the usual for us) but tucked in behind my stocking leaned up against my bedroom door was my first ever D&D book; The Fiend Folio.

I was thrilled!  Not only was the artwork AMAZING but a ton of my early gaming was playing through Fighting Fantasy  books Warlock Of Firetop Mountain and Citadel Of Chaos.  Getting a D&D book that was filled with monsters with the same aesthetic and sensibilities excited me more than any other D&D book I could have gotten at the time would have.  My sister fell back asleep and I sat up in my bed reading the Fiend Folio from cover to cover while everyone else in the house slept.

Hours later we all  went downstairs and started opening presents.  My mom obviously knew which way my interests were going as the first two packages I opened were a JRR Tolkien box set and a CS Lewis box set.  That was awesome!  I had 11 books to read that couldn't wait to get into, but the next package properly kicked off and interest that is still going strong 39 years later...

This was unbelievable!  I was overwhelmed that I had both a Player's and a Dungeon Master's book!  I'd never actually seen this box set before, I had only seen the the AD&D hardcovers before.  And in 2022 I can't accurately convey what a big deal it was to have my own dice, at that time I didn't even know where I could get polyhedral dice from!  I remember thinking I couldn't wait to get together with my friends after Christmas to start playing with my new stuff, and that was before I opened the Player's book and realized it had a solo adventure I was going to be able to play through that day.  That old D&D box combined newness and completeness in a way that still informs my view of what a good starter set for a game should be.

My final gaming present from that first Christmas was another showcase of how great gaming content was at the time.  My first issue of Dragon Magazine.

How could one magazine have; an entire city setting, an complete adventure, a piece of fiction, and a TON of background articles, and even ads (seriously ADS!) that had tons of amazing original artwork?

Christmas 1983 was my first deep dive into fantasy role-playing.  Next up I'll cover summer 1985 when my philosophy of adventures and adventure writing started to take shape.

-Jay

Design Diary: Movement

When considering how models move in a tabletop game there are a few elements that always seem important to make me feel like movement "feels" the way I want it to:
1.  Moving fastershould make it more difficult to hit with shooting attacks and to be hit by shooting attacks.
2.  Moving flat-footed every turn should not give you the same speed as someone who has been flatout running for multiple turns (or actions) without interruption.
3.  Vehicles should be able to continuously accelerate until they achieve their maximum speed.
4.  Vehicles should not be able to instantly and radically alter direction while moving at speed.

So to this end I've worked up the movement system for ground vehicles and figures on foot.

MOVEMENT
Every model may move it's "M" characteristic as a distance in inches at the cost of 1AP.
Models on foot may move M*1.5 for each consecutive AP expended on moving after the first (non-cumulative)
Vehicles may move M+0.5 for each consecutive AP expended on moving after the first (cumulative)
Vehicles performing a single M action may make (at base rate of movement) may make a 90 degree turn at either the start or end of their move.
Vehicles performing multiple M actions may make a 45 degree turn at the start or end of their move following a sucessful control roll.  A failed control roll interrupts the action and takes the player directly to the LOSS OF CONTROL (GROUND) table.
*Example 1*
John is a basic foot model with 3 AP and an M3.  If John expends 1AP on movement he moves 3", if he expends 2AP on movement he moves 7.5", if he expends 3AP on movement he moves 12".
*Example 2*
John is a basic foot model with 3AP and an M3.  If John expends 1AP on movement, 1AP on shooting, then 1AP on movement he moves a total of 6" (3", then resolve shooting, then separate 3" move)
*Example 3*
John is driving a car.  John has 3AP and the car has an M4.  If John expends 1AP on movement the car moves 4", if John expends 2 AP on movement the car moves 10", if John expends 3AP on movement the car moves 19".   If after expending all 3 of his AP on moving John also spends his first AP of his next activation on movement the car will move 32.5".

Design Diary: The beginning of the commencement of the start of something.....

A few years ago I proclaimed that I was going to design a miniatures game.  It was a great idea and once I had made my announcement people started asking me odd questions like; what kind of game, when will it be done,what have you worked on, etc and so forth.

I started off by sitting down and over the span of a few weeks hammering out a workable game system that I felt fairly proud of.  Being a game designer isn't so hard I thought, everyone should do this.  Then luck stepped in in an unlikely way and saved me from total embarassment and a complete loss of credibility; a friend of mine let me know he had also designed a game and asked me to take a look at it and let him know what I thought.  I read his rules and told him what I thought, "your game is good, but there isn't a single original idea in it".  He had basically taken the combat system from one existing games system and married it to the campaign system from another existing game system and presented it in the style of a third existing game system, etc and so forth.  I felt bad about dumping on his game but I felt like if he published it he was paying to print exhibit A to be used in the lawsuit an existing game company would bring against him.....then I thought about what I had written....my game was atleast as unoriginal as his and in some places almost seemed like I'd just cut and pasted blocks of text from existing games.  So I went back to the drawing board.....repeatedly.

Today I'm starting a new feature on the blog; Design Diary.  Each entry will present one core rule or mechanic from my upcoming game leading up to the distribution of a set of playtest rules for anyone who wants to have a go and give me some feedback.  Today's entry will be very short on mechanics and very long on describing where my headspace is from a design perspective so you can gain some insight into my process thus far.

The genesis of my original idea was that I wanted to do a post-apocalyptic-zombie-survival-horror game.  I liked the models that were out in the market place but everytime I picked up a set of game rules to use they were always 'not quite' what I wanted.  This isn't to say there aren't good rules systems out there but everyone I tried left me feeling like something (something different in every case) was missing or just not quite right.  After talking it over with friends I realized that my problem was that I liked the genre but there wasn't 1 sized game I wanted to play.  I wanted a game that would work if I wanted to fight out The Battle Of New Jersey from World War Z or if I just wanted to game 7 strangers defending a farmhouse against a seemingly endless horde until the sun came up.  It seemed that games that worked well for one size game just didn't work properly for the other.  The first breakthrough I had when coming up with "new" mechanics was realizing that conventional miniature wargame army list or force composition structures weren't going to work for what I had in mind....but we'll come back to that in a later post.

Once I decided that force composition would have to be completely different it opened up another new avenue of thought; why do models/character/unit selections have to feel or look like they do in other wargames?....but we'll come back to that in a later post.

And when I came up with the idea of how force lists will be assembled (believe me, some assembly will be required) I realized that what I was still seeing in my head as primarily a near future survival horror game didn't need to be that, or more accurately be just that at all....but we'll come back to that in a later post.

I'm exicited to be finally sharing my thoughts and some insight into where these rules are coming from with everyone and I hope you will all please leave comments (good or bad but hopefully constructive) as we go along.  Now without any further ado lets look at our first rule.

ACTIVATORS
An ACTIVATOR is any model or group of models that can be activated.  When activating a single model the model uses all of it's ACTION POINTS (AP) for the turn at which point it's activation is complete.  When activating a group of models (a group can consist of multiple models which were purchased as a UNIT or a group can be created using a relevant ability like: FORM FIRETEAM) the group uses it's action points together as a team in sequence, example; a unit of 3 police officers with 3 AP each are activated, the first point is spent on moving-all 3 police officers move before the second AP is used, if the second AP is used to shoot then all 3 officers shoot before the third AP is used, and so on.

The primary idea behind identifying "activators" is that player A might have a force comprised of 20 zombies.  Instead of activating them 20 individual times player A could purchase his 20 zombies in 4 units of 5 which would then function simultaneously thus inceasing the number of close combat attacks he could muster against a single target in 1 activation (that will be important when we talk about STACKING later) and/or increasing the speed with which he can move larger groups across the table.  It also allows players to tailor the size and number of their units to the scenario they actually want to play.  In the previous examples if someone wanted to play the army in the Battle Of New Jersey they would probably buy their soldiers in 10-20 figure blocks to maximize the effectiveness of their shooting whereas in the 7 people in the farmhouse that player might want to buy 2 units of 2 models each and buy his remaining 3 models as individuals to allow greater flexibility of movement.

That's it for entry one in the Design Diary.  You'll still be seeing plenty of regular "hey look at what I painted!" posts but there are alot more of these in our near future together.

Thanks for reading and I hope you're all ready to start a fun ride with me.

-Jay