Indie Gaming - Red Box D&D

[Zak Arntson]

Okay, so our Sunday Indie Gaming went a little odd this weekend.  I had to step out while the gang played Chez Geek ...

One of our players had never played RPGs and expressed an interest in this D&D game that seems to be a strong part of gamer culture.

So I found a random dungeon generator, busted out my old red basic D&D books, and made a VERY quick adventure.  To make the experience authentic:

* Made characters according to the rules.  I.e., no rerolling Ability Scores.  Hit Points were never rerolled, etc. etc.  One PC was a 3rd level Cleric with 3 hit points and a Constitution of 4.

* Hired in a tavern by a man in a cloak to enter a dungeon.

* When the party attacked the man (he had money), it turns out he was godly avatar.

* Orcs fight.  They have treasure.

* I pretended to read boxed text, slowly, awkwardly and with BIG words that NOBODY uses.  "The luminescent moss illuminates the dungeon corridor in a sickly, putrescent glow."

* The other D&D-veterans were all having fun with their abilities:  EVERY ROOM Clinton's elf searched for a secret door (and if he found one I either a) created a secret door, or b) that door I drew earlier?  I'm sorry, that was a secret door.  Let me fix that.)

* The new guy even got in on the fun.  With a thief he kept "I'm going to Hear Noise."  "I'm going to Move Silently".  Whee!


Anyhow, what felt like 30 minutes wound up to be 3 hours.  Most of our time was spent being stunned at how truly bad the game played.  Some rules were hard to find, we kept pausing at how out-of-the-box, no-house-rules version was pretty unplayable.

All in all, it was a pretty absurd afternoon.  It ended after the first level of the dungeon.  "Okay, you guys see some stairs.  Do you want to go down?"  The consensus was "Okay, we see some stairs.  We should stop playing."

And the weird part ... we actually had fun.  It was the whole player vs. character issue.  Players KNOWING the whole thing is an absurdist joke, the characters playing up the Knights of the Dinner Table stereotype.  So much that Clinton and I are now talking about making an absurdist dungeon-crawl game.  But I would recommend a time limit (i.e., when everyone's ready to move on to something else)

So we didn't have time do play Inspectres.  But we did learn how to have fun with a dungeon crawl.

It also hammered in the importance of streamlined and easy-to-reference rules.  I mean, this was the RED BOX D&D SET which is supposed to be for a younger audience.  We spent a good 5 minutes trying to find the Armor Class for Plate Mail.  Jeez.



Oh yeah, we made Everway characters.  I can't WAIT to play that game.  I can, in all seriousness, make a monkey-based character.

[Ben Morgan]

This is exactly the thing I wanted to do when I came up with the idea for Munchkinfest: take everything you hate about D&D; all the cliches, all the absurd, off-the-wall, stuff that happens, every little min-max trick every moron has ever come up with, and throw them all together in one game.

Then Ron came up with Elfs. Oh well.

[J B Bell]

Y'know, this is EXACTLY how I used to play good ol' Citadel of Blood, the sequel to, um, Maze of Death from good ol' SPI.  (I'm glad Cheap-Ass is out there, but I miss the old pocket games of the late 80s.  Sigh.)

E.g.:  "Jord ibn Salaad ibn Hak-too y Francisco Magnifico swings his mighty Sword of Cronk Cleaving +1 . . . (roll) . . . and misses horribly!"

Cronks.  They were weird.  Little furry things that had the Power of Puke.  They stunk so bad, you had to save against vomiting.

The whole thing was so absurdly random, and so basically boring, that the way to have fun was to ham it up to the absolute maximum.

Then those paragons of crass capitalism, White Dwarf, managed an even more ridiculous and much more expensive game, _Talisman_.  Pew.  I shudder at it now, but I played it for many hours when I first got it.

I guess I'd better check out _Elfs_.  For my own high silliness, I'm seriously considering a _Sorcerer_ "Steel Cage Death Match" game.  "SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY!  Four Demons!  One magically enhanced steel cage!  And a grudge that's a thousand years old!"

It's actually got some role-playing potential, if you have a mix of players handling the Demons and their Sorcerers, and a Contain on the cage that the officials *swore* was enough to contain anything . . . unless they decide to work together against their masters . . .

But this is Actual Play.  I'll maybe post a more complete scenario in the Sorcerer group.

--TQuid

[Bankuei]

Ah yes, D&D, one of my cousins gave me his old white box, it keep me from understanding the concept of roleplaying for 2 years as I attempted to understand what the hell half of the terribly ancient words meant...My sanity point loss from trying to comprehend encumberance is unforgivable.  Thankfully the horrible red box at least had a choose your own adventure style demo in it that somewhat gave me a clue what was going on...

Bad rules, bad layout=truly the work of the devil :razz:

Chris

[Jared A. Sorensen]

This (great) thread begs the question: how to do it right?

Example: Clinton's Elf checked for secret doors and, if successful, Zak created one on the fly. That should be an official rule.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

On 2002-01-02 21:43, Jared A. Sorensen wrote:
This (great) thread begs the question: how to do it right?

Example: Clinton's Elf checked for secret doors and, if successful, Zak created one on the fly. That should be an official rule.

The game inspired Zak and I to write our own dungeon crawling game done right. It's pretty much done, to tell the truth - and has official rules like above. Expect it to be released after I beat Zak into submission and make him send me comments. (Jared - I'm e-mailing you a copy of what I have now.)

[Zak Arntson]

On 2002-01-03 11:57, Clinton R Nixon wrote:
The game inspired Zak and I to write our own dungeon crawling game done right. It's pretty much done, to tell the truth - and has official rules like above. Expect it to be released after I beat Zak into submission and make him send me comments. (Jared - I'm e-mailing you a copy of what I have now.)

Truth be told, Clinton wrote the bulk of it. We did collaborate tons on the mechanics and stuff, though. And Clinton, I'm going to finish this manuscript sooooon. I've decided that instead of all-nighters (which kill me), I'm switching to a goal of 1000 words minimum a night.  Some advice I found (I think at http://www.watt-evans.com).

But this weekend I may be able to do some gaming.  Call me!

Oh, and the secret door rule is actually something we discussed in detail during our game's design. That was one of those things, along with my goal of "A single roll should allow you to kick in the door, have the door fly into the room, and then hit one of the orcs on the other side."  My secret door example was "A single roll can create a secret door, and the player can influence the passageway to lead past the troll in a nearby room."

Anyhow, it's a big weird feast of goodness.  Just wait 'til y'all see the Ability Scores.