Blackmoor Vituperative

Bruce Harlick was kind enough to clue me in on how the other Hero Games “old guard” — the people who made Champions the great game it is — are doing.

George MacDonald is working as a consultant for various internet companies, game and non-game related. He’s still gaming. “I just had lunch with him yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

Steve Peterson works as a marketing consultant for various companies and is putting together his own ideas for a game. He’s still gaming. “His oldest kid is finishing his freshman year at UCLA, which makes me feel a little old, since I’ve known Steve since before he was married!”

Ray Geer is a massage therapist (his clients include a lot of the local computer game companies). “He still games, and is a player in my regular D&D 3.5 game.”

You know, I don’t know any of these guys from Adam, but it makes me glad to know that they are all still gaming and that they’re doing well. They didn’t create Champions for me, and I’m no one to them, but whether they know it or not, they have each contributed a huge amount to me and my friends over the past 20 years. Champions is what brought most of us together, back in the 1980s when I moved to Virginia from Califiornia. I do not think it would be an understatement to say that, if these guys had not written Champions, my life would have turned out a great deal differently, and not for the better.

I find myself wondering what happened to the Hero Games “old guard”, the people who made Champions great: Ray Greer, George MacDonald, Steve Peterson, Bruce Harlick, and company. Does anyone know where they are now, or what they are doing?

Thinking about characters and games, and how my favourite long-term characters are mainly superheroes. Why is that? I have had fantasy characters I’ve loved, but they don’t have the longevity that superheroes do. I think there are a couple of reasons for that.

First, fantasy characters are almost always tied to a specific fantasy world. More than that, even: a specific fantasy world being GMd by a specific person. You can make up the same character more than once for different settings or different GMs, but they really aren’t the same character.

For superheroes, it’s not like that. If the game system is the same (and in my experience, most people stick with one superhero game system for years and very rarely change it), you can drop a superhero from one game into another with minimal fuss. The genre makes that a trivial exercise: the hero moves from their old campaign city to a new one, or gets recruited by a new team, or at worst, gets sucked into a vortex and arrives in a new version of Earth. For a superhero, that’s just a typical Tuesday.

Second, fantasy characters almost always exist on a “level” spectrum. A typical fantasy character changes a LOT from Day 1 to Day 100, with new powers, more potent abilities, better equipment, and so on. There are fantasy game systems that don’t have this continual power inflation, but in most cases, a fantasy character that’s been played for a year is virtually unrecognizable from how they started out.

For superheroes, it’s not like that. In most game systems, a superhero starts out more or less fully-formed. A speedster, a vigilante detective, a flying armored alcoholic… they don’t change that much, even after a decade of play. Sure, they get a bigger base, they fly a little faster, maybe pick up a new power or two, but the core of the character doesn’t really change.

That’s why I have superhero characters that I have played for *decades*, and could easily play again. Could I do that with any of my most beloved fantasy characters? No, not really. They are tied to a specific time and place in a way that superhero characters really aren’t.

Once upon a time, people used to participate in role-playing games played through email. These were called, appropriately enough, PBEM games. They were great.

Then Internet-based computer games came along, and PBEM games slowly withered away.

I run a site devoted to helping people who want to play PBEM games find each other: PBEM News. As the years have passed, I have seen a trend: fewer games are being advertised, and the few that remain have gone almost entirely to being forum-based or wiki-based rather than being genuine email games.

I just don’t understand why anyone would run a game on a forum rather than use a venue like YahooGroups, which allows you to read on the web or read in your email, which lets you reply on the web or reply via email, which archives everything on the web and sends it to you so you have a local copy, which provides file space for documents and images, etc., etc. Rather than use YahooGroups (or a site with similar functionality), people running the few remaining straggling online RPGs have nearly all opted to host their games on a forum, which offer less than half of the functionality of YahooGroups and are often more complicated to use.

Here is how bad it is: I run a site devoted to PBEM games, and I can’t even find one superhero PBEM game looking for players. Not one.

Is PBEM roleplaying, like disco, dead? An artifact of a previous age, like channel dials on televisions, mourned only by Luddites and old fogeys?

I don’t know. Maybe play by email games are just… over. Like Usenet, and doctors who make house calls, and gas station attendants who pump your gas.

I feel really old.

That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft’s stories as “hackwork,” with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Talesand Amazing Stories, “where…they ought to have been left.”[1] Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult— there is no other word—that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.

Since then, though, for a writer who depended entirely on the meager sustenance of the pulps and whose brief career brought him sometimes to the brink of actual starvation, whose work did not appear in book form during his lifetime (apart from two slender volumes, each of a single story, published by fans) and did not attract the attention of serious critics before his death in 1937, Lovecraft has had quite an afterlife. His influence has been far-reaching and, in the last thirty or forty years, continually on the increase, if often in extraliterary ways. Board games, computer games, and role-playing games have been inspired by his work; the archive at hplovecraft.com includes an apparently endless list of pop songs—not all of them death metal —that quote or refer to his tales; and there have been around fifty film and television adaptations, although hardly any of these have been more than superficially related to their sources.

(from The New York Review of Books, The Heroic Nerd)

Go read the whole article.

It’s not a secret that having two different ways of rolling physical damage in Hero System [xd6 for Normal attacks, and (xd6)*(y-z) for Killing attacks] sorely vexes me. Right now I am writing up weapons for Dark Empire (a game I hope to run soon), and some of them have two different kinds of damage. For example, a Veejhad Shockprod does a certain amount of electrical Killing damage, and it also does a few dice of NND damage. Writing up weapons like this and trying to explain how they work is really freaking annoying, because of this two-ways-of-rolling-damage thing.

So I am thinking again of trying to find one way of rolling damage. So here’s my new suggestion. The first part is the same as my old suggestion:

When building the character, “Killing” is a (+0) Advantage on Energy Blast or Hand Attack, just as “Stun Only” is a (-0) Limitation. The Powers “Killing Attack (Ranged)” and “Killing Attack (Hand To Hand)” are not available.

Killing damage is rolled the standard way, just like any other damage: 1d6 (one Damage Class) for 5 points.

Here is the new part: how to count Body. This would apply to all attacks, both Killing and non-Killing.

The pips on the dice are counted as Stun. In addition, one or two pips are counted as zero Body, three or four pips are counted as one Body, and five or six pips are counted as two Body.

What do you think?

Here’s an example of why I keep reading the Hero Games forums, even though I am no longer posting to it. I learn about nifty things like this, a live map of Hero System players:

Herophiles United

Google, will you never cease to amaze?

Well, the bloom is off the rose. After a month, I am tired of City Of Heroes. You know, the box says it’s a “role-playing game”, but calling a computer a game a “role-playing game” is like calling soy juice “milk”. It just isn’t. As a computer game, it’s okay, but I can’t see playing this month after month like some people do. I’d rather play Knights Of The Old Republic over and over again (and KOTOR is a great game, but it’s not a role-playing game, either).

I am still impressed by the character creator, despite its deficiencies.[1] [2] [3] I will hold off cancelling the account for a while so I can crank out a few dozen character illustrations. I wish I could access the character design screen without having to actually log into a server. Or, even better, I wish I had access to a brilliant 3D artist who’d do all of my character designs for free. 🙂

On a side note, I have to say that the City Of Heroes official message forum is the most aggressively hostile online community I have ever seen, and I have seen some real doozies in my time. I have a theory about that. The same people who publish City Of Heroes also publish a game called City Of Villains, and the same message forum is used for both games (yes, it’s confusing and stupid to do that, but that’s how it is). In City Of Villains, the player (through her onscreen avatar) robs, kidnaps, and murders people, and is rewarded in the game for being successful at these crimes. There is no pretense of using evil against evil, as you find in games like Bloodrayne — you’re simply evil.

I have to wonder: does a game like City Of Villains attract hostile, obnoxious people, or does it create them? Many of the hostile, obnoxious people on the City Of Heroes forum have been there since long before City Of Villains was released. Were they always like that, or did they get worse once they started playing a game where they spend all day robbing, kidnapping, and killing innocent civilians? There’s a psychology paper in there, for the person willing to do the research.

It’s no secret that I am, and always have been, a huge fan of Hero System (what used to be called Champions, back when it was a role-playing game rather than a collection of rules). Yet, there are things about Hero that bug me. As elegant as the system is, it exerts pressure on the player toward some character types and away from others. I have never really sat down to analyze this, but I will some day. In the meantime, David Blue recently posted a damned good description of this phenomenon. If you play Hero System (Champions, Fantasy Hero, et al.), you really should take a look at this, and give it some serious thought.

Five or six years ago, I tossed out shelves and shelves of role-playing games and sourcebooks. Many were games that I had never played: all were games that I never intended to play again. All of my 2nd edition D&D books, nearly all of my indie RPG books, all of my Hero System/Champions books — all went. I saved books for games I still played, or still wanted to play, but this was a very small pile compared to what I got rid of. I also saved a few books that, for one reason or another, were special to me.

Nobilis was one of those games. I had a first edition copy of Nobilis, and I will have it as long as I own any books at all. You see, I was there when Nobilis was written. Oh, I didn’t contribute to it. Not directly. But I was there while the author played with ideas — strange, magical ideas. And in my small, probably insignificant way, I encouraged her. And when the book was published, I bought it.

Well, Nobilis is in its third edition now. Go buy it. Even if you never play it (as I likely never shall), it is worth it. It is strange and magical, much like its author.

P.S. A special, limited-edition autographed copy is available for a limited time. I am tempted. Sorely tempted.