Something’s happened between Facebook and I. We’ve suddenly become… closer. Out of nowhere, this strange social-domino effect has been set off, and old friend after old friend after co-worker has been ‘friending’ me, creating this vast network of ‘people I kinda know’ and ‘high school people who don’t know that I’ve gained weight and I’ll be damned if they’re gonna find out’.

Needless to say, I have a lot of work to do before the 10-year reunion, and a lot of clever photo cropping to precede that.

After beating my addiction to Fantastic Contraption, and the removal of Scrabulous from Facebook (along with my amazing scores and collection of completed boards), I was left with gap in my online gaming time - which tends to coincide perfectly with ‘when my boss isn’t around’ time. This is how I found ‘Dungeons and Dragons : Tiny Adventures’ on Facebook, and had a critical realization about why I’ve always enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons.

‘Tiny Adventures’ runs much like a basic, very quick D&D quest, except it’s 100% automated. You don’t have to do any math, any of that pesky social interaction or solving puzzles, and you don’t have to… well, think too much. If you’ve never played D&D, but have a remote interest about how it works, run through an adventure in Tiny Adventures and you’ll get a good idea of the very basics.

Because of this automation, there’s very little between the player and the events of the game. While you choose the race of your warrior, and his or her name, that’s about it. You can’t muck around in your various statistics to make your warrior extra charismatic or intelligent, and you can’t draw a sexy emblem for his shield - but at least you can still have your hand halfway into a bag of Tostitos while you play. That part of D&D will never change.

My warrior is a Half-Elf Paladin named Baconface the Delicious, because that seemed grossly inappropriate.

As the game generates steps to your adventures, once about every ten minutes, you can switch out your equipment or heal your warrior or buy and sell things from a shop, but the game pretty much takes care of itself while you nudge your warrior in one direction or another. You do your best to pile the odds on your side, adding points to your various abilities, ingesting potions and equipping more powerful weapons, but every ten minutes, something’s gonna happen, and you can’t really do anything about it. Once you begin an adventure, the game proceeds whether you’re present or not, and usually runs for about an hour.

The only other point of interaction happens while your friends are actively adventuring. You can click on a button near their profile and give them little boosts to their stats, or heal their declining health. There’s really no rhyme or reason to this, but let’s say you’re ‘casting a spell’ or ‘saying a prayer’ to cause these things to happen, because that’s how D&D works.

So, why in the world do I enjoy this game?

I’ve been asking myself that since I began playing, and I’m pretty sure that the answer is THE LOOT. Something inside of me happily anticipates some step in my adventure finally bringing me some imaginary sword that will make my warrior, who I have absolutely no attachment to, some kind of awesome, head-choppin’, butt-kicking superfighter. The loot has no real-world value and cannot be sold on eBay or even traded among your friends, but I think I’ve always loved D&D for the magical objects I could accumulate. Even if they meant nothing - I wanted hands FULL of rings, two on every finger, and a bottomless bag full of swords and potions. I wanted a belt that could make me fly wrapped around a belt that could help me breathe underwater, and another belt around my head that made dragons get indigestion.

When I played D&D, I even stored a great quantity of bones in my bottomless bag, and I used them to test traps, or occasionally pull some kind of Luke Skywalker vs. The Rancor move to save my life. I was a packrat. Even my man-rat adventurer companion was less of a packrat. It translated perfectly to my real-life perspective on collecting for eventual usefulness.

I’m a few adventures into the game, but the only really neat thing I’ve come across is the Sun Disk of Pelor, which has a +1 against undead creatures - and that’ll certainly help me in the ‘Vampire of Fallcrest’ adventure.

But not at all in real life. That’s okay.

Back in 1992, when I was 11 years old, I was falling in love with fantasy role playing games. Despite this, I wasn’t at all into Satan. The evilest thing I wanted to meet at the time was a Beholder, and only if I was holding a +6 Sword of Eye Poking. That’s funnier if you know what a Beholder is.

I had inherited a few tattered Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, but I really wanted to expand upon my gaming repertoire. Because the internet didn’t really exist yet, I had only one other source of information : trading cards (which also held true for my superhero knowledge). For about $1.50, I could buy a pack of ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons : 2nd Edition’ trading cards from the local Waldenbooks. I’d go in there once a week and buy a few packs at the counter, take them home, ogle the art and read the mini-biographies of the pictured characters, or the descriptions of neat new weapons and items. What are magical items but externalized superpowers anyhow?

But oh man, were they ugly.

It’s Deanna’s recent exploration of Garbage Pail Kids, and the upcoming Magic : The Gathering National Championships that have brought back some old collecting memories, back from my earliest acquiring days. I dug around under my bed and after some epic battles with spiders and a frightening layer of dust, I reclaimed my D&D cards.

Of course, $1.50 per pack wasn’t a small amount of money when I was 11, so ultimately, I wanted a lot of bang for my buck. Some of the cards managed to inspire a few new character traits and stories that I could incorporate into a game, but most of the cards… well, take a look.

Sure, some of the cards (though not the one pictured at left) had some really wonderful art on them - crisp, expressive stuff that could really evoke a sense of fantasy and inspire art of their own, but none of the artists were credited anywhere on the cards. Unless they chose to sign their image in an area that TSR couldn’t possibly cut it off during production, and signed large enough to be seen in trading card scale, they were anonymous forever. While there are a few Brom and Ken Frank cards scattered within the gigantic 500-card set, sometimes…. sometimes it hurts to look at the others. Please avert your eyes if you have any sense of human proportions, decency, or may be pregnant.

This is real ‘stuff I drew with my non-dominant hand in the margins of my notebook during math class after drinking behind the sports shed during lunch’ quality stuff. As we see with the biology and physics lessons that Istha Rockhead’s card provides (pictured above), the pointer finger is the longest finger on the humanoid hand, and one does not need to close one’s hand around the handle of a mace in order to be able to wield it successfully - gravity will surely do the job for you.

Mortos Ironbeard is an evil guy, if only because of his fashion sense. Everyone knows that belly shirts after Labor Day are completely unacceptable. Also, if you’re a 70 year old man. Also, if you’re wearing two shirts and NEITHER reaches below your bellybutton. Don’t be fooled by those embrace-me arms and come-hither grin - his name is Mortos, and ergo predestined for evil, and his bio states that he murders strangers and takes their place - possibly because he’s angry about being short. I’m not making that up.

The list of offenses doesn’t end with poorly-painted character cards, though. Getting a dreaded Checklist Card in a $1.50 pack was always a severe disappointment. It always invoked a feeling of “here’s a list of cards that you DIDN’T get because you got this crappy checklist card!”

Of course, nothing was worse than the ‘guy holding a pointed stick’ card, or the exciting card depicting ‘chair’ or ‘belt’. Sure, we want to flesh out the D&D universe in every possible way (the game’s creator even made up a probability table for the exact type of ‘woman of ill repute’ that you could encounter), and there’s a LOT of room to do that with 500 trading cards, but is it truly necessary to acknowledge ‘left big toenail’? I musta had at least a dozen ‘Elven Pancreas’ cards.

Still, I always went back for more. It was something about tearing open the shiny silver-and-purple packs and finding the treasures within, even if they were sometimes unbearable, and even if this next pack contained cards I already had quintriplicates of. It was about always having something new that I could find and come home with, and it was about adding onto a social experience with new bits of knowledge.

Ugly, ugly knowledge.

Last time, I mentioned that I avoid Dragonlance books like the plague. And if there’s any ambiguity in that statement, yes, I actively avoid the plague. At least until they make action figures of it.

The prevalence of wizards and dragons and overly stereotypical portrayals of various character types within the realm of Dungeons and Dragons fiction never seems to appeal to me, especially when I can go out and gather up a group of meganerds and play my own game of Dragonlance with far more interesting circumstances and the pleasure of interactivity and Doritos and a musty basement lair. Even playing the D&D Nintendo games back in the early 90s was a fairly excruciating exercise in running through rooms as fast as one could, brandishing completely ineffectual weapons against a ridiculous cadre of enemies, and standing around for eons while your party’s healer replenished you enough to bolt through another room of bugbears and rust eaters and whatnots. Dungeons and Dragons should be kept to the core game… and maybe the tangentially-related cartoon show. And perhaps delicious breakfast cereals.

As a sponge for all things nerd, I usually accumulate entire boxes of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks when they’re donated to the library. I quickly purchase these collections without properly observing the contents, mostly because I need to quickly get back to informing the patrons that you don’t send an e-mail by gnawing on the keyboard. As an unrelenting cover-judger, Dragonlance gives me every opportunity to cringe, recoil, and return the books sheepishly to the library’s book sale. Here are a few reasons why, without mentioning the names of the well-respected fantasy artists who’ve cobbled these covers together. Which is not to call these men bad artists - but artists who seem to have stumbled a bit.
If you look at them technically, these are pretty solid covers, but as far as doing the job of sparking interest in the story inside, they fail abysmally - especially when I can only hear the following conversation in my head :

Homely dwarven girl : Even though we’ve clearly been traveling together for quite some time, I have only just now realized that you’re a wizard! You know, despite being a detail-by-detail clone of Gandalf. Because of this, I’ll observe you bemusedly, as if I would a silly party clown, because the artist who painted me couldn’t get a decent photo reference of what an appropriate emotion would look like.

Gandorf : Please hush while I conjure us some delicious spaghetti and catch the brim of my hat on fire, all while I conveniently turn away from the direction we were traveling to gaze towards the prospective reader of this book. For some reason.

See? It just doesn’t work. And nothing detracts from a medieval-type fantasy story more than a cover featuring a 1980s hairstyle. I remain unconvinced that this disco queen is also a skilled warrior lass, what with all of the time she’s spent inventing aerosol styling mousse, using the vast expanse of medieval magic-science at her disposal. No more than a brief browse through the book and I stop at chapter thirteen, entitled ‘The Walking Trees’. And you know what’s in there? Walking trees.

We’ve been calling them Ents since the days of Tolkien. When he invented them. Originally. Without typing such painful phrases as “Hey! The tree hit me!”

So, not only am I a nerd, but I’m an embittered one - which is the worst kind. Give me books emblazoned with three-letter names of strange lands, like ‘GOR’ and ‘ZAL’ and ‘URT’! Give me wizards, but put them two thousands years into our future! Give me anything, but please shift the paradigm. Please don’t regurgitate the same fiction that’s already been written by more talented authors, decades ago. Please don’t expect me to swallow 15 different foreign character names, all of them poorly described, and all beginning with the letter K. Because I’ll write scathing blog posts about you, and then you’ll be ever-so-sorry.

And please, no more disco hair.

===============

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In addition to being a collector of all kinds of boardgamery, our old friend Eric recently attended GenCon. Let us live vicariously through him as I needle him about his experiences there.

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Collin : You recently got back from GenCon! Tell me, as someone relatively uninitiated, what GenCon is.

Eric : GenCon is North America’s largest gathering of gamers. It focuses on roleplaying games, but was originally for miniature wargames. In recent years, boardgames are growing faster and faster. Many of the big publishers hold their big releases and announcements for GenCon.

Collin : Kinda like toy companies with ToyFair and SDCC.

Eric : Pretty much. This year, the big announcement was D&D 4th Edition and the big release was White Wolf’s Changeling: The Lost. WizKids had a HaloClix pre-release tournament.

Collin : Plus their Galactus tournament!

Eric : True - I forgot about that. I’m not really a Clix player these days.

Collin : They lost me at Clix 2.0. I think that’s how they killed MageKnight too. WHY WON’T THEY LEARN?

Eric : Because they’re still making money.

Collin : Do you think that in ‘perfecting’ game mechanics over a long period of time, it ultimately hurts a lot of games by alienating oldschool players?

Eric : It depends on how you go about it. “Over a long period of time” is fine. You take what you have and tweak the rules slightly with an expansion or two, or “errata” on your website - that can work. Making new stuff and old stuff incompatible is bad and alienates players, no matter how much better the new stuff is. It’s not limited to collectible games, either.

Collin : Would you rather have ‘perfect’ and ‘accurate’ game mechanics, or fun ones? Or do they have to be mutually exclusive?

Eric : I don’t think there IS a perfect mechanic. My primary question with games is, “is it fun?” There ARE fun games with great mechanics. There are fun games with very little in the way of mechanics. Again, I reference “No Thanks!” - very few mechanics. Very quick-playing game. Lots of fun. “Ca$h’n Gun$” is another very fun light game.

Collin : Have you ever found yourself abandoning a game because of the rule changes, or how they were brought about?

Eric : I don’t play collectible games anymore - Mechwarrior and Pirates of the Spanish Main being the ones I spent the most on. I’ve dropped most Games Workshop games, too.

Collin : What turned you off?

Eric : With Mechwarrior, it was too many rules changes with too little a difference in play. The goal of the changes was to provide some customization and control. What it did was wound up making sure that the same three or four pieces were highly sought, as they were useful out of proportion to their point costs. For Pirates, it was too little change. The game went through too many sets that didn’t have any sort of uniqueness or flavor to them. I dropped Warhammer 40k because I was tired of every army having to be rebuilt for the new rules every three years. And the newest army released was always the most powerful.

Collin : Back to GenCon! What capacity did you attend GenCon in? Player, or… more?

Eric : I attended as an Exhibitor with Asmodee Editions - I’m a member of their demo team.

Collin : What did you demo there?

Eric : Dungeon Twister, Wicked Witches Way, Mall of Horror, Mission: Red Planet, Jungle Speed, Mr. Jack. Age of Gods, Frontiers, Ave Caesar, Iliad
Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow and Ca$h’n Gun$.

Collin : So you pretty much got to play all day!

Eric : From the time the Exhibit Hall opened on Thursday morning until the time it closed on Sunday. It was 10-6 daily, though the days all kinda blur together, with more gaming out in the open gaming areas after the hall closed.

Collin : Did tedium ever set in, or was it amazing?

Eric : I cannot imagine ever getting tired of good games.

Collin : What’s the general atmosphere of GenCon like?

Eric : GenCon is the single most amazing social event I have ever been a part of. Everyone there is a gamer. Or is dating/married to a gamer. Or is the parent/child of a gamer.

Collin : So there’s a real feeling of community? As opposed to the itchy, sweaty feeling of say, a Comic Con?

Eric : Gaming is a community. It’s a small one, but it’s growing.

Collin : Any kind of crowds?

Eric : I say “small” but GenCon is usually in the 25-30k range. That’s people, not dollars.

Collin : So, you could walk around without becoming way too familiar with everyone around you?

Eric : Very easily. There are familiar faces - people you’ll play games with every year.
I have a friend who is a podcaster - I only ever see him in person at GenCon.

Collin : You can’t say that about a Comic Con.

Eric : So I hear. Something we’re seeing more and more at GenCon is actual females! It’s still not even close to a 50/50 split, but it’s improved.

Collin : How did you become an exhibitor? Your involvement with gaming as a hobby became something more professional?

Eric : My local game store owner introduced me to a man who was running demos for Days of Wonder. We helped him out at a couple of local game stores, as well. He worked for both DoW and Asmodee Editions, and they needed someone to help out with their translation. I don’t read French, but my English is passable. They sent me a set of rules for Dungeon Twister, and there were some unclear parts - I cleaned them up. They responded by inviting me to Origins and GenCon to help demonstrate the game.

Collin : That’s an awesome way in! Do you ever see yourself doing gaming as a career or full-time thing?

Eric : I’d love to, but as much as I love the industry, I don’t know that I could. It’s a small industry, and profit margins are very slim.

Collin : That said, how much profit did they make offa you at the Con, when you weren’t demo-ing?

Eric : Not too much, actually - I’m a firm believer in supporting my local game store.
I use GenCon as a scouting run. I’ll pick up things which don’t have distributors or which are difficult to find/out of print. This year, I bought Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game, Torg Revised and Expanded, and the new Battlestar Galactica RPG.

Collin : Is GenCon more about new games, or are their vendors with older games too?

Eric : Both - it’s more about the new games than the old, but the old games DEFINITELY make their presence known. Especially at the auction. I’ve only ever watched, but it’s a great place to find rare and out-of-print items. By “rare,” I mean, “frequently one-of-a-kind.” Frequently, you’ll find autographed copies of games. Or games with people’s notes scrawled in them. I’ve seen copies of Dune or Talisman expansions - sometimes, still in the original shrinkwrap. I’ve read about one of the ping-pong guns from one of the early GenCons being auctioned off.

Collin : Ping pong gun?

Eric : Ever played “Killer”? Or “Assassin”?

Collin : I have not.

Eric : It’s a game where you have a target. And your goal is to “kill” them. In high school, I put a paper bag in a friend’s locker that said “Bomb” - and ran a string to the door of the locker, just for example. When the friend opened the locker, it “killed” him.
So I then got HIS target. Game plays to last person still “alive”. At one of the early GenCons, apparently TSR staffers were playing the game using ping-pong ball guns.
One of those guns was auctioned off. TSR was the publisher of D&D until they were bought by Wizards of the Coast. They owned and operated GenCon.

Collin : I saw similar things at the Pez convention - memorabilia from earlier conventions was pretty popular.

Eric : My wife wants you to know she’s available to dish dirt on me, if you want.

Collin : …are there any dark gaming secrets that the readers will thrill to?

Eric : Um … we’re not Satanists?

Collin : … but you play D&D.

Eric : I know. It’s such a shocker.

Collin : I dunno. 1980s documentaries would have me believe that the two are irrevocably linked. Gamers have, at least, defeated the stigma of being satanists and murderers and are now just harmless geeks.

Eric : FINALLY.

——————–

And so we have Eric : passionate gamer, and yet, still a married man. Has a steady job. Can hold a perfectly normal conversation. A credit to gamers everywhere.

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I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons. Somewhere in my collection of nerdaphenalia, I have copies of first edition, second edition and signed Monster Manuals. I own an original painting by Tony DiTerlizzi from Factol’s Manifesto. My 20-sided dice are worn at the corners into almost spherical shapes. Role playing, at one point in my development, surpassed even Nintendo and riding my bike. My uncle, as Dungeon Master, provided endless original adventures and drawings to accompany them. Each was a piece of classic, interactive fiction to sculpt me into the person I am today. The good parts… not the lumpy parts that hang over my belt. Those were sculpted by large amounts of bacon and fired in the kiln of despair.

Unfortunately, these interactive fiction games usually require two interested parties to play. One person creates an adventure, another person (or multiple people) make decisions about how to approach the situations presented to them, and the creator reacts to these situations by rolling dice and assigning probabilities to things. It’s all math, except you’re making it do useful things like slaying rust monsters instead of calculating the square roots of numbers that don’t even exist. I don’t try to date imaginary women, I don’t eat imaginary sandwiches, and I’m not much inclined to use numbers that I can’t count on my fingers.

The lonely roleplayer is an unfortunate creature, often unable to make decisions without rolling dice and consulting charts. Scientists came up to a solution to this problem, and genetically engineered a man named Joe Dever to write fantasy adventures, in book form, that would be a stunning simulacrum for actually interacting with a real person. Much more than your typical ‘choose your own adventure’ book, the Lone Wolf series of paperbacks allowed you to equip yourself before your adventure, earn certain abilities and experiences and interact with the story itself. Not only were these books complex fantasy stories to wander through as individual novelettes, but your adventures in previous books in the series cumulatively determined the fate and events of all future adventures, which spanned a formidable 28 books.

The Lone Wolf books were originally printed in the UK in 1984 by Red Fox Publishing, and found their way to the US in 1985 by way of Berkley Publishing. Of the 28 books, only 20 were republished in the states, and of those, only the first 13 were full editions, leaving the remaining 7 abridged. Of course, when you abridge things that have non-sequential pages, you should probably hope for an epic disaster and tragically incomplete reading. Nonetheless, a very loyal and rabid following formed after these books, and the mythos of the series eventually evolved into a full-fledged role playing game, thereby negating the whole ‘play by yourself’ thing. Project Aon has republished a large variety of these Lone Wolf adventures on the internet, complete with clickable links instead of ‘turn to page’ indicators, corrected and unabridged, and with many thanks to the generosity of the original author.

Does this make the books less collectible? I recently happened upon a nearly complete collection of the US editions of these books, missing only volume number four, and I quickly snapped them up, because there’s nothing like a ratty old fantasy novel. A guy with a torn shirt and a sword, clearly thrust into an adventure that he did not expect, fighting off some unusual, mythical horde of beasts, the strange planet’s three moons glowing behind him. It’s classic. Bonus ‘classic’ points if there’s a metal bikini involved somewhere. There’s a lot of benefit to preserving these curious works digitally, but thumbing through a book that you can stick in your pocket is just far more charming. Many of these out-of-print books can be bought for no more than a dollar at places like ABEBooks or eBay, with the odd copy fetching higher prices and the expensive UK editions (especially volumes 21 to 28) being far more desirable due to their complete text. I wouldn’t expect to find perfect editions, and I can’t vouch for the quality of the writing, but they’re fun. The ones that I found had writing in the front pages, but I can’t say I mind.

One wolf was made a lot less lonely with those books. One spectacle-wearing wolf with a penchant for Cheetohs.