A few weeks ago I listened to Mike Shea talk about running a Ravenloft “funnel” for Halloween. And around the same time one of the players in my newly started Drakkenheim campaign had written up an elaborate backstory which had his character escaping from Drakkenheim as the meteor hit the city. As with peanut butter and chocolate, these two should go together quite well.
So first I need a way to generate a bunch of level 0 A5E characters. I have done some searching, but have not found anything yet. I may end up writing a tool, stay tuned.
I will do more research but it seems that it would go like this: have a pile of pregenerated characters, hand out one to each player. Roll initiative, the entire thing will be done in rounds (much like Shadowdark).
I am still trying to decide if I should have just one giant table, or split it apart into a table of encounters and a table of scenery. I am leaning towards the former in the interests of simplicity: one roll each round. But regardless, roll d100 plus the number of rounds played. The encounter table will be laid out to escalate, more difficult encounters are located at the end of the table, which will obviously go well past 100. Paint the scene, and run the encounter.
If a character dies, the player will grab a new one, and play proceeds.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
I was thinking of various ways to track progress towards a goal, but I have concluded the best way to do this is to set a real world timer. When that timer goes off, finish the current encounter, you have reached the city gates and have gotten to safety! You could measure the “success” of the game by counting how many rounds it took, the body count, or how many rounds each character survived.
I have a spreadsheet I am using to collect ideas for the encounter table. Suggestions welcome!
So after finishing Cory Doctorow’s book I have been thinking about all the enshittified platforms I have been entangled with and how to reduce my dependence on them. Then I start thinking about how they tricked me into these situations. And then I thought about the OGL debacle (here are my earlier ruminations on the topic), and how badly WotC mishandled things with respect to “monetizing” the brand. It seems like the enshittification playbook has been demonstrated repeatedly, so it was a colossal failure on the part of management there.
Here’s the way it should have gone:
[Since I started writing this, I heard an owner of a game shop pointing out that the digital bundles are a total rugpull against them. If most people will want to get access to the books on D&D Beyond, why buy them separately? The only reason you would go to the game shop is to get the special covers. This is some late-stage enshittification: “…abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” Good job!]
I am not sure if “OneD&D” complicates this picture or not. I think the key for rolling that out is to ensure the platform works equally well for 5th and 6th edition, and then just put the new books up for sale. Make it easy to switch over, and, for now, make it easy to stay with 5th edition. Make sure to keep the revenue flowing for 5th edition. It would be tempting to force people to the new edition, but you do want to make sure the effort to switch to the new edition is really trivial (once the requisite amount of money has been spent). But which edition is in use is kind of irrelevant as long as the monthly membership fees keep flowing.
Before the OGL Debacle, I was on the verge of buying a source book bundle and a paid membership on D&D Beyond. I was even reading the playtests packets for the next edition. If they had followed the above strategy, instead of burning a whole lot of goodwill, I would have been fully committed to the platform as they rolled out the above strategy. At some point I may have caught on, but by the time I did, the switching costs would have been quite high and I may have begrudgingly stuck with it, as I am doing right now with Amazon and Google. And even if I did work up the gumption to cancel my subscription, I would have been virtually alone. And where could I have gone? Without the OGL debacle, there would have been far fewer alternatives, there wouldn’t have been Project Black Flag or C7D20, and maybe Level Up A5E would have dried up.
So it is really mind-boggling that they blundered to the degree they did, especially since several of the executives at Hasbro came from Microsoft which is the pioneer of building tech monopolies via shitty business practices. Had they been patient and careful, they could have dominated the entire industry.
Trying to think like an evil genius has made me feel kind of dirty. I think I’ll go take a shower and get back to planning my Level Up A5E campaign.
When I watched Enola Holmes with my daughter, I really liked the protaganist breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience. And I had a thought: What if someone ran an actual play D&D campaign with the same mechanism?
When I am listening to actual play podcasts, I often hear the players create an unexpected situation, sometimes I can even hear a sigh or some other reaction from the DM that indicates they didn’t expect it either. It would be really instructive in those cases to have the DM stop, turn to the audience and talk about the situation and what they are thinking about doing in reaction.
Anybody who has run a game knows what it is like to have players make unexpected choices. For example, in a recent game I had a player approach a person in a tavern, and rather than ask questions, simply punched him. OK, I didn’t expect that, and I don’t want a full bar fight, mainly due to the time it would take. The NPC had some magic at hand, so he makes a “suggestion”: “why don’t you just sit down and have a drink?”. The character makes his save, which I didn’t expect as it was a high DC. So I have another, well armed, patron step in and make it clear that a fight would not end well. Or should I have let the full bar fight happen? While a one-way soliloquy would not have helped my current situation, but it would have helped other DMs into the thoughts running through my head as a desperately tried to cope with the situation. Being a DM can be a lonely thing at times, and at least seeing others deal with the unexpected would be comforting.
I briefly thought about doing such a podcast myself, but then I think better of it given that I have no experience with audio recording, I have a really annoying sounding voice, and I don’t think my current group would be interested in being recorded. But if someone out there does this, let me know.
I should have known better.
I wrote previously about my experience getting legal threats from TSR (and wrote more details later on, though DM David has an excellent post from a wider perspective). That experience caused me to abandon D&D and for the next few years my group played FUDGE. I had hoped that many others would follow my lead, but since I am neither articulate nor charismatic, that came to nothing and this was all forgotten.
When I rediscovered D&D 20+ years later, the old TSR (They Sue Regularly) was long gone and it seemed the new stewards of the brand would be better behaved. I had briefly looked at alternative systems like Pathfinder, OSR, or even returning back to FUDGE. But the fact that WotC had put 3rd and 5th editions under the OGL, convinced me to stick with D&D, that I could trust them again. By late 2022, I was on the verge of getting a full D&D Beyond subscription and spending hundreds of dollars on a bundle of books on there and commit fully to using all the “official” tools.
We all know what happened next. They say that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. This time, rather than threatening a handful of hobbyists running ftp sites in their spare time, they threatened actual companies with nullifying their business model. So unlike last time when the “resistance” consisted of a few guys on a USENET newsgroup complaining, this time it was a large scale revolt, to the point that several companies vowed to cut ties with the OGL by building their own systems and licenses.
But given my experiences, I saw the OGL as a positive thing: a way to draw a clear line between what you could and couldn’t put in your own D&D related work. Even though where they drew that line was very generous to themselves and the whole thing was on very shaky legal ground. But it was still a known line, and as long as you followed their rules you, theoretically, had little to fear. Had the OGL existed in 1994, my ftp site would have continued running relatively unmolested. But I never would have predicted that they would attempt to revoke the OGL, thus turning a tool which enabled a vast expansion in the D&D market into a cudgel with which to threaten the entire community unless we paid their ransom.
I have long said that any organization which exists for long enough will eventually forget their original purpose. The TSR which sent me a threatening email was 20 years removed from the gaming enthusiasts putting together pamphlets in Gary’s basement, and 10 years removed from the founder even being at the company. It was no longer about the game, it was now about protecting potentially profitable turf. Or to put it in more modern terms “the brand is really under monetised. Of course, there was no way for me to know at the time, but this company was now circling the drain towards its demise three years hence; so I now also see those threats as an act of desperation to somehow right a sinking ship. WotC seems to be following that same process, forgetting who they were to pursue greater monetization.
As George W. Bush said “fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.”
So, I’m done being fooled… where to from here?
As Mike Shea has pointed out, once we own the books we can play the games forevermore without any interference from WotC. We own the game. This is true, up to a point…
But there is D&D Beyond. It is telling, given events 8 months later, that on the Mastering Dungeons podcast (21-Apr-2022) they expressed relief when Hasbro acquired D&D Beyond. There was a fear, before that, that WotC could pull the license and everything they had done on D&D Beyond would be useless or gone. So, it seemed, in that moment, that the acquisition would guarantee that D&D Beyond would no longer suffer that fate.
At the moment all of my D&D is played online, and the siren song of D&D Beyond is quite powerful. The online character sheets make life a lot easier, and being able to search for rules and spells is a huge time saver. But it is a company town, a walled garden. You can only get WotC products in there and you have to pay a significant amount of money for the illusory ownership of source books. You do not really own anything, it can be changed out from under you at any time. What will happen when 6th edition comes out? How long do you think they will let you continue playing 5th edition? What are the odds that 3rd party content (other than Critical Role) is ever allowed within their walls? Everything there is temporary and trapped within their enclosure. While the platform is not yet enshittified, the lack of interoperability means the only barrier is how much goodwill they are willing to burn for more monetization. The OGL fiasco shows that they are quite willing to burn a lot of goodwill. (For more on this general issue, read Cory Doctorow’s latest book, The Internet Con).
They have shown that they cannot be trusted.
So I want to avoid the siren song of D&D Beyond, and the best way to do that, and at the same time to support independent creators who were most harmed by the OGL fiasco, is to use a different system. But which one? I know there are many systems other that D&D, but I like D&D and I am an old man and have limited bandwidth for learning new systems. Especially to learn it sufficiently well to feel confident running games. So that leaves me with one of the 5e variants which have popped up lately. At the moment, Level Up Advanced 5th Edition seems like the most complete at this point, though I am keeping an eye on Tales of the Valiant. I am going to try out the former in my next campaign, perhaps something else in the next one.
The main puzzle is how to replace D&D Beyond. We are fortunate this happened before they rolled out a virtual tabletop, as I have already committed to Owlbear Rodeo. Having the rules and such available online is already there at https://a5e.tools. But the character sheets are the problem. They need to be online, as I like to review the characters before each session (as per the first of eight steps of lazy rpg prep), it seems the only immediate option is to share form-fillable PDFs. I guess I’ll start there. Stay tuned.
Sometime in 1997 I played my last D&D game. We were still playing AD&D first edition, as we had when we started about 13 years earlier. We had avoided 2nd edition as it just seemed like TSR was trying to sell us more books which we really didn’t need, and there didn’t seem to be enough improvements to justify the cost. Due to the events I related in a some previous posts, I stopped paying attention to what TSR was doing, and was unaware of what happened to company and the game for the next 20 years.
When I finally came back I was shocked to see it was now up to a fifth edition! I had heard references to the Edition Wars, but it seemed that a lot of the controversy was dying down. I had thought about just returning to first edition, since that is what I knew. That might have happened if all my D&D books hadn’t vanished in the intervening years. But since I had to start fresh, I decided to settle on 5th edition and started reading the rule books and listening to actual play podcasts.
I finally started playing the game in 2020 (thanks to the pandemic) and I have been pleased with 5th edition. It felt very familiar, the basics of the game were about the same, with a number of key fixes. When I played AD&D I remember thinking how some of the rules made no sense or that they were a bolted-on afterthought and I am glad to see most of those went away. I always thought the lack of a skill system was a problem, but the homebrew solutions I remember seeing were hopelesly complicated. Often in our games, we would just come up with some arbitrary number and roll a dice against it, but that never felt right. But I think the way 5th edition dealt with it was simple enough, but allowed most non-combat actions to be decided in a logical way.
All in all, I am really glad I missed the Edition Wars. Though I have been fascinated to learn about all this in retrospect, one of my favorites is The Editon Wars podcast Also the Plot Points Podcast has been reading the 1st edition DMG aloud and the commentary has shed a lot of light onto the weird corners of the original game.
I can see why people got so attached to their particular editions of the game, but if there is another Edition War, I may, once again, be AWOL. I plan to focus on getting together with my friends and playing the game. That’s what really matters.
My first attempt at DM’ing was The Keep on the Borderlands. I was probably about 16 years old and we bordered on being murderhobos. Even so, I was troubled when I hit this passage:
Of course, the players marched in and started killing kobolds. We had a brief discussion about how to deal with the young ones, and we soon decided that since their race was inherently evil, killing them was not a problem. But it always bothered me. To the point that I remember that moment vividly over 3 decades later.
A while back I saw discussions on Twitter about “inherently evil races”, and I immediately knew what they were talking about; I was right back in those kobold caves. This discussions even made it onto NPR.
Looking at the various threads on Twitter and Reddit and there are quite a variety of reactions. I am honestly confused by the controversy here. I don’t think anybody is saying there can’t be evil in the world, or that you can’t have evil Orcs or Drow. But when you see a Drow you can’t just assume they are evil and kill them without thought; you’re going to have to find out first. It may well be that the bulk of their culture encourages evil behavior, but there are always exceptions. You might even have to role play an interaction with them to find out where they stand before rolling for initiative.
It is good to see this discussion take place. As with so many discussions on the internet it generated much more heat than light. But for me, it was comforting to see so many others troubled by situations like the one above. At least I am not alone, and there are many others ready to change this.
So now when I role play the goblins in Cragmaw Cave (for example), I think about why they are there and what their individual motivations are. They are not mindless automatons who will fight to the last; they may flee, surrender, beg for mercy, etc. And if the characters persist in mindless slaughter, there could be consequences to that: they could miss out on key clues, or they could gain a reputation as genocidal maniacs. The goblins may react in greater force to them next time knowing this. They could spark an even larger human-goblin war, which could have even more consequences for the characters.
And if you don’t like that, and you just want old-fashioned inherently evil races, you can do that at your own table, just don’t expect to have a lot of company.
I was introduced to both computers and Dungeons and Dragons around the same time. I did not even see a computer until I got to high school, and soon after I could be found in the computer lab every day after school playing a number of role playing games including Temple of Apshai, Akalabeth, and, Ultima II. I got my own computer not long after and was able to spend way too much time playing those games and others including Ultima III and SunDog. Note that I am only mentioning role-playing games.
I also started playing D&D around this time and it was clear that those games all owed a lot to D&D, in fact the basic mechanics of the games all clearly were derived in some ways from D&D mechanics. The one problem with D&D is that you can only play as often as everyone in the group can play, which was weekly to monthly through the years I played. The advantage of a computer game is that you can fire it up at any time, and play at your convenience. As a result, I began a long search for the holy grail of an immersive game which could be as fun as D&D.
Once in college, I was introduced to Unix and many games including a number of roguelike games like Rogue, Nethack, Omega and a few others I forget. A friend of mine set up AberMUD on a spare machine and I dabbled in that. As GUIs developed I played Crossfire and others of the sort. Years later I tried playing Neverwinter Nights, dabbled in Runescape, Second Life, Vendetta Online, and Neverwinter.
I spent a lot of time on these games in the times I couldn’t play D&D. But thinking back, for all the time I spent on each, I never once thought after a D&D session, “Wow! That was a waste of time”. But most of my time on various video games was usually followed some level of regret, of time wasted. Whenever I play D&D with my friends I have always come away happier than when I started and never a touch of regret. Why is that?
I remember someone jokingly saying that tabletop role playing games were “a bunch of numbers theory disguising itself as a game”. But really this is more true of the computerized versions. The bare mechanics of tabletop roleplaying games were transplanted into the computer, but the actual role playing, the human spirit, the creativity, was left behind. There is no “role playing”, even when there are actual choices to be made, the mechanics are always foremost in any decision. There is a satisfaction to choosing the optimal build, and making all the right choices and getting the higest score. With a computer, the choices are, perforce, limited, such that it is always a railroad. The number of tracks can be greatly increased, but in the end you are on a track, with countless options out of the question.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, which is why this story has sat half-finished for at least 5 years. If my step-son ever locates this story, he will write a lengthy critique explaining how wrong I am, and I am certain he is not alone. So it was comforting to find, at the end of chapter 6 of Joseph Laycock’s fantastic book Dangerous Games a few pages on this very subject, declaring “These are not characters in any narative sense, but collections of attributes and numbers. … in most computerized role-playing games, playing a character does not entail articulating and reflecting on the world, but is really an exercise in arithmetic as the player seeks to advance through a prewritten narrative by manipulating the mathematical representations of fantasy elements provided within the game.”
While I am certain the state of the art has improved greatly over any of the games I have mentioned above. And with recent advances in AI, it is only a matter of time before the game play will become more sandbox than railroad. However, as the years have gone on I have realized the holy grail I was searching for is illusory. What I crave isn’t the bare mechanics of a game, but rather the creativity and camaraderie of a group of friends sitting around the table weaving a story. Or perhaps the holy grail was not illusory, but rather, it was in my hands the whole time.
“The band, Elwood, the band!”
“The band? The band. The band!”
It was the last day of my senior year of high school. Since seniors finished school a week earlier than everyone else, my final project in auto shop had to be evaulated. My partner and I had done a partial rebuild of a Vega engine. Mr. P. came over with his handtruck and other hardware for starting engines. He hooked up the jumper cables and tried to start it. Nothing, it was turning over, but never firing. But he kept trying until, finally, a gout of flame jumped several feet out of the carburetor towards the ceiling. Mr. P. jumped back (as we all did), recomposed himself, realigned his ridiculous comb-over, quietly unhooked the jumper cables, said “you pass” without making eye contact and walked away. I’m sure my partner was able to get the engine going in the next week, since he actually knew what he was doing.
I don’t remember much else about the day, but after the last bell, walked out the front doors right to my father’s pickup, who was waiting for me. Everything had been packed the night before. We immediately started driving south. I wanted to be as far away from there as I could. I wanted a clean break. By the time the graduation ceremony rolled around I was in Los Angeles; the cap and gown in my closet would never be worn, and I would have no further contact with anyone from high school, except…
A few weeks later, I drove to Portland and met up with Lance and Chris to play Dungeons and Dragons. We started playing D&D several years earlier and had played regularily ever since, and with only a short break for my trip and time for Lance to move to Portland, we resumed where right where we left off and kept on for 12 more years. But then big changes in all of our lives brought it to and end and all those distractions caused us all to forget.
I didn’t really think of the importance of those two friends or of Dungeons and Dragons for many years. When you are young you don’t think about such things. But when a chance occurrence 20 years later made me think of Dungeons and Dragons, I tried to get back in contact.
I located Chris in 2019 and when the pandemic started the next year we started playing online, with his sister and kids joining in.
All through this I struggled to find Lance, every phone number I found did not work, the addresses were all out of date. But early this year my searching turned up a new address, so as I had done with every other address I found, I sent a letter. In the midst of a Father’s day get-together my phone rang. Some random 503 number, probably junk. But instead, a vaguely familiar voice asked for me by name. It was Lance! It is hard to express how happy I was.
So these two were the only friends from my childhood who I stayed in contact with, and I credit that to Dungeons and Dragons. At the time, I think we all just thought of it as a game, something to spend our Saturday afternoon doing to avoid homework. But now I see it was the glue that kept us getting together on a regular basis for all those years, and it helped us build a relationship that was deep enough that after a 20 year hiatus, we were able to just pick up where we left off.
Mike Shea wrote a touching article entitled Playing D&D Can Save Your Life which all of us middle aged men should read. And then pick up the phone and call that old friend you lost touch with. Get together regularly, and maybe an ongoing game would be just the thing to ensure you keep it up. It may save your life.
So, several months ago I wrote up my experiences with TSR in the early days of the internet. A few days ago, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Plot Points, interviewing Shannon Appelcline, and was surprised to hear someone else involved in those long ago events.
While I had some bits of history he did not (e.g. the email TSR sent to me and related names and dates) I realize I left out some details. Also, in my searching, I found another account of these events, and a detailed web site and I found Rob Repp, himself.
One difference between our cases is that his site was devoted entirely to non D&D games. Which means he could laugh off the threatening letters. My site, on the other hand, covered many systems and there was a lot of D&D content, mainly because that was what I played. When I saw something on USENET of interest, I would archive it on the FTP site. As such, the D&D parts of my site were probably the only materials which I personally read. None of it was directly copied from any TSR materials. None of it, in my opinion, violated any copyrights.
But what was on there? Those files are likely long gone. I think I have a DAT tape containing those files, but finding someone with such a tape drive is unlikely, and I doubt the tape would be readable after all these years. The things I do remember where things like new magic items and spells, alternate critical hits tables, alternate rules, new character sheets, new classes, etc. A big section of the site was campaign write ups, basically transcripts of sessions. Now that I think about it, the modern day equivalent would be all the live-play podcasts which are quite common nowadays (my current favorite is The Titans of All’Terra) But at that time, my favorite was Navero which, coincidentally, I finally found on rpg.net, which is the site Shannon runs.
For reasons I explained in my last post on this subject, I had entirely checked out of the discussions following the lobotomizing of my FTP site. I was angry and demoralized that something I had worked for years on could be destroyed so easily, so I walked away. That was probably also contributed to my giving up role-playing games entirely a few years later.
But after hearing the podcast with Shannon, my curiosity compelled me to go look at the messages on rec.games.frp.dnd, see what I had missed, and piece together a larger timeline. What follows is quite lengthy and probably of little interest to most people, but it interested me, so here it is.
Please be advised that every element of our gaming system must be licensed
before you can incorporate it into a piece of software. This includes game
tables, item descriptions, and any copyrighted monster/character names. Feel
free to contact me by email regarding licensing. Most of the authors that have
written AD&D(R) software in the past neglected this step, and we're most
interested in preventing that from happening in the future.
Thanks!
Rob Repp
Manager, Digital Projects Group
TSR, Inc.
AOL: TSR Inc
InterNet: tsrinc@aol.com
InterNet: mobius@mercury.mcs.com
CompuServe: 76217,761
GEnie: TSR.Online
In article <2uljn4$6ho@thepoint.com> John Scott, j...@thepoint.com
writes:
>Anyone know of an ftp site that has a monstrous compendium availible for
>download? Thanks in advance. (Please email to j...@thepoint.com).
I'd be interested in knowing about this one myself. :)
Rob Repp | InterNet: tsrinc@aol.com
Manager, Digital Projects Group | InterNet: mobius@mercury.mcs.com
TSR, Inc. | CompuServe: 76217,761
__________________________________ | GEnie: TSR.Online AOL: TSR Inc
All opinions are my own, not TSR's | 414-248-3625 Fax 414-248-0389
It is available at ftp/mpgn.com, version II should be out soon.
We ARE aware of the fact that people want to be able to share their
creative efforts with others, and we're trying to find a way to manage
licenses to allow this without giving it all away.. In the meantime,
any software, netbook, etc. which uses TSR copyrighted names,
material, etc. is unlawful.
Let me include a copy of a policy letter we just drafted recently. Here goes:
As we have begun to explore the online community in depth, we've found many
avid gamers and fans. We're interested in providing you with the best in
gaming products that meet our own standards of quality, as well as suiting
your needs and interests. We know that many gamers develop campaigns and
other materials entirely for their own use. We think this is great!
However, when gamers begin sharing their creations with the public, whether
for profit or not, they are infringing our rights. If we don't make an
earnest attempt to prevent this infringement of our trademarks and
copyrights, our ownership of these extremely valuable assets may be
jeopardized.
A gamer in this situation has a few options. He can strip every TSR
trademark and all copyright from his creations before putting them in public
(i.e. "genericize" the adventure). Or he can share his creations with the
public in a way that is licensed and approved by TSR. This is the more
desirable solution, as it protects our rights, and still leaves room for
gamers to share their creative expressions.
Sometime very soon, we're going to create a place where gamers can legally
upload and share their creations, including modules, stories and software. At
that time, I'd be happy to work with you to give your product a base to work
from. We are definitely interested in fostering goodwill among customers,
and we'd like to see our upcoming effort as a pilot project. Eventually, we
want gamers to be able to turn to TSR in cyberspace as easily as they do in a
hobby store.
> Again, this is all missing the point. TSR can't sue me if I publish a
> 'generic' adventure with the monster 'goblin' in it. But if I list that
> goblin as having AC 7, 1-4 hp, THAC0 20, Intelligence Low, etc, then I'm
> using TSR's copyrighted monster. If I needed the Monstrous Manual or
> other TSR product to get the information for 'goblins', then I've
> probably violated copyright. Note, I am NOT saying TSR can copyright
> terms like Armor Class, Intelligence, etc. But, if I get the information
> for goblins from a TSR product, and republish it in another form, I've
> created a derivative work, and am thus liable.
This interpreatation is correct. I checked with legal, and you've got it.
Due to the large volume of mail we're receiving, we're not replying to most
of it personally. Copyright comments and legal questions will be archived for
later examination. Policy statements will be posted to rec.games.frp.dnd.
Customer service and gaming questions will be routed internally and answered
as quickly as possible.
For those of you who aren't entirely certain I exist, I'll be on a panel
discussion regarding online services at GEN CON. David Goss, Bruce Nesmith
and I will discuss proposed projects, future plans, and take questions
from the audience. See you there! :)
For the curious:
Yes, I did PlaneScape's border art. I do exist, and I am your internet
contact. Snail mail can be directed to:
TSR, Inc.
POB 756
201 Sheridan Springs Rd.
Lake Geneva, WI 53147
ATTN: Rob Repp, Digital Projects
I did, in a fit of pique at being repeatedly misquoted, deny someone's
recent request to quote me wholesale. Please feel free to paraphrase the
gist of that response. Actual verbose policy statements and clarifications
will be forthcoming, complete with a request to repost them where-ever you
like.
Any opinions on the border art?
Maybe I'm just ignoring you... :)
Nope, I'm pretty sure that's not it. I must be busy, or maybe I just have
nothing to contribute. Hmmmm, maybe I was in an accident. Nope. Ummm...
"When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed."
David Byrne
Official releases forthcoming. Meanwhile, I'm quietly watching the
commentary go by. That's all, nothing too sinister. Generally, when
addressing a crowd, you should say only what needs saying, lest you draw
fire. In fact, this comment is probably a mistake, but I couldn't resist.
Have a nice day!
REGARDING TRADEMARKED AND COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL USED ON-LINE:
TSR is now an active member of the on-line gaming community. Since
Day-One, TSR products and artwork have been developed by creative people
employed or hired by TSR. This has resulted in the creation of an
extensive line of products, identities, names, rules, game mechanics,
logos, and standards of quality, to name a few. The gaming products,
novels, and publications are designed to encourage resourcefulness and
creativity in play. All of these created properties are owned by TSR
through national trademarks and copyrights which protect their publication
electronically or published on paper. When they are published by anyone
other than TSR, Inc. or their licensees, this publication becomes an
infringement to TSR trademarks and copyrights.
However, the gamers, designers, writers, artists, and editors who work for
TSR, do not wish to inhibit role playing game play.
SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR CONTINUED PLAY:
WHEN USING TSR PROPERTIES:
You can create material using the AD&D game mechanics, etc. and place that
material on MPGNet, a licensee of TSR, or place it on AOL on TSR's new
Bulletin Board. You can download anything -- graphics, games, etc.
appearing on TSR AOL for your personal use. Currently, any other
distribution to the general public in paper form or on the net of
AD&D adventures, other TSR materials and game mechanics, or copyrighted
materials is considered unauthorized. However, you CAN freely distribute
or publish "generic" novels, stories, game mechanics, etc. Read on.
HOW TO CREATE GENERIC MATERIAL SOME TIPS:
Don't specifically use AD&D statistics. Be creative. If you want a PC to
encounter a stupid but strong NPC, let the GM determine the NPC's actual
stats for the game system used by that GM. If the party encounters a
hydra, let the GM look up the stats for the hydra in the game system he is
using.
Don't set the adventures in a TSR world. Create your own or use one from
history or legend. For example, you could set your adventure in Atlantis,
but not in the FORGOTTEN REALMS Adventure World.
Don't use monsters, spells, etc. that were created by TSR. Create and name
your own. Draw on history, legend or reality even spell their actual
names backward for uniqueness.
Or, if a monster or spell is used in several different game systems, this
is a good indication that it is not owned by TSR. For example, Drow were
created by TSR, but a hydra is a known legendary monster and is public
domain.
You really can get going creatively when you invent your own, unique, game
mechanics . . . worlds, monsters, etc. And you are free to publish
anywhere when you specifically do not rely on AD&D game mechanics or other
material from TSR.
With our new on-line forum on AOL, we'd like to hear from you about games,
graphics, audio, and other material you'd like to download for your own
gaming. Please let us know. We plan to be electronically publishing a lot
of great things in the future for your gaming use.
(R) and TM designate trademarks owned by TSR, Inc. (c) 1994 TSR, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
] The answer is simple: If you're selling a separate product based on our
] material, or free-distributing something that competes with things we
] license (e.g, software), then we would keep a level of control and ask for
] a piece of the action. On free-distribution GURPS software, we go through
] a quality-control and licensing procedure but no money changes hands.
]
] If you're creating a fanzine, or sharing your own original stories or
] online, then more power to you. We think it's great. We make no attempt
] to license or control fanzine writers, whether their medium is print or
] electrons. The two are indistinguishable these days, really.
]
] If you do create something neat, it would be a courtesy to send our
] webmaster a copy and give YOUR permission for us to archive it on our own
] system for our users to enjoy.
> Does TSR regard it as illegal to play AD&D with a dozen or so people over the
> Net, as opposed to playing it with a dozen or so people in my living room?
We certainly do not. Saving up all the moves, however, and republishing
them as a separate work would probably be an infringement. Playing by any
means is fine.
> Could anyone tell me what the WWW Home page is for TSR?
Not yet, but soon. :)
Date: Tue, 30 May 1995 14:43:29 -0400
From: "TSR, Inc." <TSR...@AOL.COM>
To: Multiple recipients of list ADND-L <ADN...@UTARLVM1.UTA.EDU>
Subject: Help Wanted
I realize that this is an ad, but I couldn't think of a more likely bunch of
people to be interested in it, so here it is. :)
Rob Repp
Manager, Digital Projects Group
TSR, Inc.
ONLINE COORDINATOR
TSR, Inc., the international leader in fantasy game, book, and magazine
publishing, has an immediate opening for a motivated, organized individual
with excellent communications and technical skills to assist in development
of content for commercial online services and the Internet. Qualified
applicants to be familiar with current online material. Ability to contribute
to development of imaginative new content. Preferred skills include: HTML
and/or RMPlus scripting; Adobe Photoshop; TCP/IP software tools; experience
using WWW, FTP and Usenet; and interactive multimedia development. Online
event planning, forum coordinator experience a plus.
Send resume and salary history to:
TSR, Inc.
201 Sheridan Springs Rd.
Lake Geneva, WI 53147
ATTN: Human Resources
or TSR...@AOL.COM
Actually, I just hired a new online coordinator. I remain the "online
rep." More and more TSR people will be out on the net in the future,
though. We're getting more wired all the time.
Rob Repp
Manager, Digital Projects Group
TSR, Inc.
I'm Sean Reynolds, TSR's new Online Coordinator. Rob Repp has taken a
job with another company, and so he is no longer here at TSR. I'll be
in charge of our online contacts, including the internet, AOL, etc.
I forgot to mention it yesterday, but yesterday was my
first anniversary of working for TSR.
This means that _today_ is the first anniversary of
the day Rob Repp _left_ TSR.
>Tell us, Sean, what have you learned in all that time about being
>an online rep?
Take several slow, deep breaths before saying anything.
After looking at all this, it appears that if I had just blocked off access to the D&D related directories, within a year the whole thing would have blown over, and, two years later TSR would have been taken over by WotC and the landscape changed entirely. Though, on the other hand, FTP sites were on their way out, and, my site would have been rapidly become a historical footnote if I didn’t transition to the web. I may have been considering such a transition around the time of these events, but I honestly don’t remember.
I will do my best to recount my small part amidst the decline of TSR, but many of the original files are gone (or are on media which nobody can read), so the exact dates are a bit fuzzy.
I had been playing AD&D since the early ‘80 while in high school with two friends, but in total isolation. I rarely met anybody else with interest in it and so our games were pretty much limited to published materials and our own attempts to concoct our own. In fact, my first DM experience was with Village of Homlett and then I tried to write the sequel promised at the end of that module. It is probably a good thing that I lost those materials.
Sometime around 1988, I discovered rec.games.frp and related newsgroups on USENET. This changed everything for me, suddenly I was reading details of other people’s games, alternate rules, monsters, maps, stories, etc. This cross-pollination greatly improved my own game and rejuvenated my interest. I started buying material for the new Forgotten Realms setting and started a campaign based on it.
Within a couple of years, my university got connected to the internet, and we set up an ftp server on a Tektronix workstation sitting in the computer science lab (on more than one occasion the FTP site was down because a student bumped the network equipment behind that machine). One of the first things I did was start collecting the useful bits from rec.games.frp and populating my ftp site. On 10-Apr-90 I sent an announcement to rec.games.frp, and even more things started coming in and the site grew by leaps and bounds.
In early 1994 I took a new job. A few months later, an email was forwarded to me by my successor:
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 94 17:28:59 –0400
From: TSRInc@aol.com
To: postmaster@rigel.cs.pdx.edu
Subject: TSR Copyrighted Material
SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR:
Your site was recently included in a list of noted FTP sites for
DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS and ADVANCED DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS gaming
material. You should be aware that DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS and all
related marks and properties are copyrighted by TSR, Inc. of Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin.
You should also be aware that any items created without a specific
license are infringements of TSR copyrights. Such items include (but
are not limited to) any software, net.books, modules, tables, stories,
or rules modifications which contain elements from our copyrighted
properties, including characters, settings, realm names, noted magic
items, spells, elements of the gaming system, such as ARMOR CLASS, HIT
DICE, and so forth. To date, TSR has not licensed any of these net
publications.
On behalf of TSR, Inc. I ask that you examine your public net sites at
this time and remove any material which infringes on TSR copyrights.
Our intention is to find a way to license these and future creative
efforts. In the meantime, remove them from your sites without delay.
Please feel free to contact me with comments or questions. I will
refer any pertinent queries to our legal department as soon as I
receive them.
Rob Repp, Manager, Digital Projects Group, TSR, Inc.
At this point in my life I was not prepared to deal with this: I had just taken a new job, I was a junior engineer frantically trying to learn new software and how to keep builds, and everything else, going. I was also teaching a system administration class at the University, and I was in the process of buying a house and preparing to move. So this was really the last thing I needed on my plate.
I was pretty angry about all of this, as I had nothing on my ftp site which infringed any copyrights. I read most everything that went onto the site, and I never would have permitted anything which outright copied TSR materials. Apparently, someone in TSR leadership must have felt than any fan-generated work represented competition that had to be stamped out. Since it was quite unlikely that any of these fans were capable of challenging TSR in court, it was an easy win for them.
As a result of all that, I don’t think I took any action. But TSR had been mailing other admins all over the University, and they shut down the site in September. They let me go in and pick out the non-D&D material and set up a new site. Over the next few weeks I butchered out 70 megs of stuff and brought the revised site back (here’s a message I posted about this). I sent mail to the TSR representative asking them to review in case I missed anything, but I never heard anything either way.
Since I had a fairly well-known FTP site and a lot of naive youthful enthusiasm, I thought I could have an impact on TSR. So put a README on the site explaining what happened to most of the content and encouraged everyone to boycott TSR. Within a week I had a manifesto posted there, further encouraging people to adopt freely distributed gaming systems to avoid this whole issue. If TSR wasn’t going to be nice to the fan community, we should abandon them. I had been active in the GNU Project for several years and clearly had delusions that I could be the Richard Stallman of FRP games. Hah!
I looked at various game systems and settled on FUDGE. I set to work reformatting the plain text rules into HTML and put that on the ftp site. Then I started putting together a fantasy supplement which was intended for former D&D players like me. That effort never got past an outline and a Texinfo formatted document (with no content). My gaming group started playing using FUDGE, but designing a game system is hard work, and the gaming sessions were not as much fun and both the game sessions and the fantasy FUDGE effort fizzled.
As this was going on, the arguments on rec.games.frp.dnd continued, though I was largely detached from that for the reasons mentioned above. Looking at the archives on Google Groups, it appears that the discussions continued for several years, with many people (including me) using the epithet T$R to represent the company’s apparent greed.
About 30 people pulled together a mailing list about the TSR situation, and some discussion ensued, both about legal options and alternatives like FUDGE. Unfortunately, this also quickly fizzed. The last email was in December of that year. One of the leading people in those discussions wrote an extensive article about this in his “Guildsman” fanzine. You can see this via the Wayback Machine.
So, what happened then? I don’t know, I barely thought about D&D until recently, so I had no idea what happened. Here’s what I have pieced together: It would appear that this legal action was part of TSR’s death spiral (listen to Why Did TSR Fail for details), and the bankrupt company was bought by Wizards of the Coast whose attitude towards the fan community was entirely different. The next edition of D&D was made freely available, which was a total reversal in policies. It seems like there is a lot of fan/3rd party material available, including on Roll20, DM’s Guild, and others.
So, with that, I officially retract my call for boycott, though I suspect only a handful of people remember it, and the only people still following it had, like me, abandoned gaming for other reasons. Since I started this article I bought the D&D Starter Set, so it is now officially official.
On a recent vacation I was driving through Utah and passed through Heber City. I had just started reading “Of Dice and Men” and the next day read the chapter about the Satanic Panic and this excerpt:
In May of 1980, parents in the “solidly Mormon” farming town of Heber City, Utah, convinced their local school board to shut down an after-school D&D club and acused its organizers “of working with the Antichrist and of fomenting Communist subversion.” Local Christian minister Norman Springer told The New York Times that the game was “very definitely” antireligious: These books are filled with things that are not fantasy, but are actual in the real demon world and can be very dangerous for anyone involved in the game because it leaves them so open to Satanic spirits."
This encapsulates my only regret about the vacation: that I did not get a picture of myself by the town sign holding a D&D book. By the time I read the above passage, I was a hundred miles away and wouldn’t be back there.
For more details of what happened in this city in 1980 see this paper.
I do not recalling hearing about any of these things when I started playing D&D just a few years later with a couple of high school friends. But soon after, I happened upon a copy of Jack Chick’s Dark Dungeons. At first, I found it hilariously wrong on so many fronts. But then I became more alarmed, knowing that my home town had many people who would actually believe this, in fact, almost certainly so, given I found the pamphlet in a local grocery store. And one friend had informed me a year earlier that I would be going to Hell for not believing his brand of Christianity. So a good old-fashioned book burning was not out of the realm of possibility. My D&D hobby was not something I talked about at school because I knew it would be just more fuel for ridicule and bullying. But now I had another reason to keep it to myself; bullying is one thing, but bullying in the name of self-righteous superstition and fear is far more dangerous beast (as some of my ancestors found out).
However, I continued to think about why people had such reactions to D&D. It seemed that there were some pretty profound misunderstandings of the game. For example after one game one of our parents asked who won, underscoring how D&D was different from other games.
I started comparing D&D to other games. First, chess. One one hand you have a game where you play a single individual and you have to face the consequences of your actions in the game. But with chess, the entire goal it to wipe out the enemy, pushing your hapless pawns (peasants) and other servants to their deaths, all to defend the relatively impotent king. That’s real wholesome: everyone and everything must be sacrificed to save some spoiled inbred brat whose only qualification for the job was who their daddy was. What about Monopoly? The entire goal it build up a financial empire, largely via luck of the dice, to dominate and destroy your other opponents. Another wholesome message. Poker? Take everyone else’s money. Actually it is hard to think of a game that does not involve defeating other players. Even when there are teams, they are generally trying to defeat other teams.
I think role playing games (like D&D) are unique in that all players work cooperatively towards a goal (which is usually to defeat evil monsters). Everyone collaborates to tell a shared story with an element of chance thrown in at every opportunity (via the dice). There are no winners, or, perhaps, they are all winners. With that in mind, the “communist subversion” accusation mentioned above makes a bit more sense. I mean, the nerve of people, to suggest working cooperatively! Next thing you know, they will be kind to their neighbors and start loving their enemies, a suggestion which got one man nailed to a tree 2000 years ago.
The common refrain back during the satanic panic was about people committing suicide or murder because of D&D. If a person is driven to such acts because of a game, the problem is mental illness, not the game. If a person is that detached from reality, most anything could set them off (e.g. a Beatles song, The Catcher in the Rye, Jodie Foster, etc.) It is an interesting coincidence that the people who asserted that D&D contains actual occult material and that you could actually summon evil spirits with it, also show an obvious detachment from reality. That isn’t to say that book burning is as bad as murder, but both are acts which can only happen when one has detached themselves from reality and their moral compass.
The accusation of “satanic” is, of course, laughable, but it is clear that such beliefs have not gone away, as I was writing this, a pastor at a Catholic school in Nashville banned Harry Potter books claiming:
“These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception. The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text,”
While I do not believe that it is possible to summon evil sprits (since I doubt such things even exist), but it is apparently possible to summon medieval superstitions, even in the 21st century. For more details, read this.
I could go on further, but others have explored this at length, The Plot Points Podcast has several relevant episodes: The Satanic Panic and Demons & Devils & Dungeons & Dragons: A Brief History and the book Dangerous Games seems to be an in-depth treatment of this topic; I plan on reading it. You can listen to an interview with the author.
It is one of those mid-summer days, and my daughter is struggling to find something to do. After several rounds of “I’m bored” and my unsympathetic response (“Bored? I was bored once… in 1974!”), I put on my headphones and pretend I’m having a meeting so I can focus on work. A while later I go out to get some tea, and I find her with a bunch of papers and dice, making up a story using the dice to determine what would happen next. That seemed familiar! Something I had not thought seriously about for about two decades came to mind: Dungeons and Dragons. Let the rambling history begin…
I had started playing in high school. My friend Lance played D&D, told me about it, and loaned me one of the basic set red books to read. I was enthused about it, but for some reason nothing came of that other than a few drawings of dragons. Several months passed before we finally started playing, and this included a new kid at school named Chris (in fact, it may have been the third person that gave us the impetus to start).
The trio of us played for many years, with other friends and relations coming and going over the years. Chris enlisted in the military and was gone for several years, though the rest of us kept things going. It was a great day when Chris returned, not just to have him back in our games, but then he started DMing again and was also studying literature in college. The combination of that influence and the fantastic Judge’s Guild campaign materials made for some of the best D&D I ever played.
There are many things I could relate here, including the various campaign settings we used (including Judge’s Guild), my activities on the Internet and TSR’s legal threats, an alternative RPG system we started using, and probably other things I will remember at some point, but I will leave that for other posts.
But, by the late ’90s, our gaming sessions gradually became less frequent as life started intruding (girlfriends, wives, houses, career, etc). I can’t quite remember how our last session ended, but I’m sure we couldn’t figure out the next date and said we would stay in touch and come up with another date. That never happened. Soon after, I changed jobs, sold my house, moved to a distant city, and a whole lot of other things happened (some glimpses of this can be found way back in this blog). So it wasn’t so much a matter of putting away “childish things”, but rather all the non-childish things took over and began a long period of amnesia.
So, now we are back to the present and I’m thinking wistfully about D&D. Almost all of my gaming materials were lost long ago in one of my many moves. How can I get back into it? Might my daughter be interested? Can I locate Lance and Chris and renew our friendship, and perhaps gaming?
So this is probably the start of many writings from my odd perspective of having played AD&D back in the day, and now coming back to it and looking back on the management changes and 4 editions which happened in the meantime, much like the proverbial “unfrozen caveman”.
Here’s a short version of my first impressions: I am pleased to see what seems to be a total renaissance. The backwards handling of the internet and fan works in the 90’s seems to have been entirely reversed (with the core rules being freely available, with numerous fan works), the core materials seem to much higher quality than I have ever seen. Furthermore, it seems that the game is now being embraced by many outside of the geek culture and is enjoying a wide acceptance than I ever would have thought possible.
I could ramble on further, but instead, I’ll try to write on specific topics in the future; first on my list is TSR’s handling of the internet which directly affected me.