Arduin Eternal Review

Well, since I actually had time off from the office rather than spending 18 out of every 24 there, I figured it was time to put that time to good use and post something.



A while ago, I wrote up that Arduing Eternal would be shipping "soon." Well, soon turned out to be measured in months when it came to the playtester copies, but they did finally arrive about two weeks ago.

I was excited about getting this book. After all, I had been part of the playtest, so I was chomping at the bit to see the finished product. When I opened my copy of Arduin Eternal, I was sorely dissapointed. First, I should say that, when it's boiled down and we get past the issues, I still think that AE is an excellent system that contains rules that could cover just about everything (a real draw to some) and what I feel is a true inheritor to the original Arduin. I do like the game.

However . . .

The artwork and layout of the book is subpar in many instances. Not all the art, but frequently the illustrations in the book made everyone in our group do a doubletake, especially one particularly infamous illustration on page 98 that has an unfortunately anatomical appearance. Arduin has never been known for innovative or incredible art, but it was always evocative and interesting. This time, though, it invokes mostly a bit of headscratching and laughter. At the same time, even those illustrations that were quite good got crammed into corners and had proportions distorted to force them to fit where they didn't need to be, presumably in an effort to avoid orphaned text giving some of the art a squashed look. And in the meantime, too much of the art looks . . . well . . . the only description is "wrong" that it's distracting. This includes the cover that has what we presume to be a rune weaver but who looks more like a barbarian and whose proportions are so odd that it looks biologically impossible. You can see it there at the top of this post.

The greatest offender here, though, has to be the general editing of the book. It seems that during the assembling of the book and the final work that, in order to keep the book as a single volume, a great amount of material had to be cut. We understand this, after all, the book is already over 800 pages long and any longer would have made it practically unusable. The problem arises when it turns out that a significant portion of what was cut was neccessary to understand how things work, such as something as basic as how a thief picks a lock. You can check out a partial list here that just our group has been compiling based on a day or two of character generation. There are more than these, and a quick dip into the other topics at those fora will show a few of them.

Compounding this problem are numerous editing mistakes such as gramatical and spelling errors and references in the text to versions of other sections of text as they were in either the alpha or beta playtest versions of the game that didn't get updated to the new, finalized version. Readers are forced to hunt through the text hoping to determine where soemthing is, or go to the forums begging for enlightenment. Sometimes, the material is well and truly missing, promised in a forthcoming set of books to include a Culture book and a Bestiary (we hope they make an appearance soon) as well as reworkings of the excellent adventure White Roc's Inn. But for the time being, they're conspicuously absent. And that includes the index of the book which is available for download on the Emperor's Choice website.

In this day and age, and especially in an instance when many of the plyatesters were offering their time free of charge to assist with the editing, or merely in exchange for a copy of the book or two. It smacks of unprofessionalism. We understand, of course, that the author is not a full time RPG author and that his real life has interfered with the execution of this massive project, but there were options that could have certainly alleviated the issues that many have noticed. In the end, this book looks like a strong mid-draft rather than a finished book, and that is unfortunate.

At its core, one supposes that one of the central conceits of the Old School Rennaisance is simplicity. That a core rules set can and should be contained to a mere 100 pages or less and that the rest is entirely up to the GM and players to expand upon. I agree with this model to a certain extent, though I'll allow for more comprehensive rules when they work towards the concept effectively. The problem with Arduin Eternal is that it is so massive that it's daunting even to players who have been at the game for more than 20 years. Character generation is an extensive process that can and does take days of effort if you know what you're doing. I can only imagine what it takes the uninitiated. Here is something that the Compleat Arduin books had in spades. At every step in character generation there were text boxes set aside with examples of the process, and they helped immeasurably to comprehend an otherwise complicated system. They are sorely missing here, and I can only hope that we see something like that in the future, either as a free PDF, or as a fan released document.

This leads to another issue, at least an issue that I have and I'm told it's not universal. To create a character, one is forced into that loathsome concept of "the build." Creating a character is a careful balancing act of weighing pro's and con's of each choice, playing each benefit and drawback against your character's central theme and abilities, always with a plan in mind of where he's going. It's a process that is virtually impossible to avoid a strong current of meta-gaming if you're looking to create a mechanically effective character. Now, I'm told that not everybody feels that this is a drawback. The D20 crowd are certainly no strangers to this and even I will admit right here that it can be fun to spend your time building a character in this way and truly become attached to him from the beginning. But in this instance, it's so antithical to the old school mindset that it seems injurious to one segment of Arduin's core audience. The grognards and neckbeards still playing with the little brown books or the clones of the white box won't find the original Grimoire volumes that were a grab bag of whacky and zaney goodies for their games and if that's what they want, they'd do much better picking up copies of the re-edited and republished Grimoire from Emperor's Choice and calling it well done.

What should have been made clear from the beginning and is not is that this is absolutely not an introductory RPG. This is not a way to cut one's teeth either on gaming in general (I'd recommend sticking with S&W/LL or OSRIC on that regard) or even the idiosynchratic world of Arduin for that matter (better I think to grab up a copy of the World Book of Khaas). A great deal of the game relies on a strong and confident GM who is willing to take the material and work with it until it resembles the shape he needs for the game. Things left unsaid or entirely open (glaringly, the function and nature of lycanthropy, or the entire bestiary) have to bee worked up on a case by case basis to the satisfaction of the individual players and it requires players as well who are strong and on the game. Novices and neophytes will be frustrated and lost.

While D20 players might feel more at home - after all, the secrets and skills are a strong D20 influence I think - they will undoubtedly be daunted by the preliminary inellegence of the game. As clunky and poor as many of us find the 3.x versions of D&D (not to mention 4ed), those games run like a well tuned Ferrari in comparison to this without a strong and sure guiding hand at the wheel. There is no strong advise on how to run the game, no Game Master's guide except for a few pages at the back of the book. There's no advice on how to run a distinctly Arduinian game and we are left to either intuit that or to import what we already know from our old Arduin games and make it so.

All together, I think the game itself is strong and excellent. I look forward to getting into our upcoming campaign and may post a few after action reports. However, I find that this particular book is not quite up to market snuff and that it needs a bit of help in terms of editing and presentation, as well as at least a few planned supplements at least one for the GM exclusively comprised of advice and guidance, in order to feel entirely complete.

Pick up a copy if you are an established Arduin fan, or if you're an experienced gamer looking for a challenging but very rewarding game.

Don't pick it up if you're looking for a book in the style of the Old School Rennaisance, or if you're looking to introduce yourself or somebody else to gaming.

How Fantastic is Fantasy?

I know I shouldn't, but it's a bit like a dog worrying at a bone. On those dull days in the office when no actual work seems to happen, but a lot of "station keeping" goes on, I typically surf over to the forums (usually at Giant in the Playground since they're terribly entertaining and infuriating at times and the Kenzer & Co. boards since Dave and Jolly and their crew are just so damned cool for refusing to be just "another turd in the pot" company) and pick on the New School folks. It's a bit hypocritical, I know, since I'm not really and Old School kind of guy, but sometimes they just tickle me.

Today and yesterday, though, they actually got me to thinking on a couple of things. Primarily, the discussion of what level of the fantastic is "right" for a game. Just how strange, fantastic, or downright odd do things get before one draws the line? As things on the internet go, there was no real room for moderate views in this discussion. You were either for, what was termed, dull and "Tolkienian" fantasy, or you would permit anything and everything (specifically, everything and anything that a player wanted, but that's another argument entirely). The example that got dredged up from the fevered recesses of somebody's mind was that you could either be playing Greyhawk with nothing but the core Human, Elf, Dwarf etc. core races and classes, or you would play in a game where the players could create a sentient squirrel wizard riding in the "cockpit/wand turret" of a constructed flesh golem mobile platform.

I swear on all that is holy that I'm not making that last bit up. See for yourself.

My first reaction has got to be . . . why the fuck would you want to play such an absurd character? What possible interest would you have in it? I mean that seriously. What connection could you make to even access such a concept as anything other than a monster? Why would it not simply be swarmed by folks the instant it stepped into public and slain for the abomination that it is? And of course, the opposite would be just ye olde boring D&D campaign right?

Now that the thought's been rattling around in my brain, slowly eating at my sanity (if it weren't for my horse, I would not have gone back to school that year . . .), I have to ask myself at this point whether there's a real difference between such a . . . thing . . . and the concept of wizards conjuring fireballs from thin air and giant winged reptiles with terminal halitosis hoarding coins and magical items? I like to say often that there's a difference between suspending your disbelief, and hanging it by the neck until dead, and that this clearly falls on that side of the line, but why is that on one side, and the dwarf on the other? Huge metropolitan campaigns where everybody plays as their favorite monster race on that side, and the race preference charts on the other? I mean hell, I'm in the middle of working through some material for Thylia, and I stumbled across a line where I traced a particular artifact to extra-terrestrials, and I'm OK with that, but still something that wierd as even the sentien necromantic rodent sticks in my craw.

James has talked about this in passing over at Grognardia (and I'm not throwing up a link because I'm far too lazy and if you read this you're most certainly familiar with his work) as it concerns that notable module about and Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Gamma World. He termed it Science Fantasy, and I think it's fair to say that in its original inception, D&D was, as much as Gamma World, a science fantasy game rather than a strict fantasy game. In the end, I find myself much more comfortable on the Fantasy side of that equation, even so far as to prefer fantasy literature that reads less like fantasy and more like medieval period pieces - A Song of Ice and Fire as case in point.

Am I wrong to sit here and strip out such things from "my" game? Am I hammering D&D into a mold that it doesn't really entirely fit? The answer is, I don't know. What I do know, though, is that the more strangeness (specifically, the more breaks from our own reality that we are forced to make) in a game, the harder it becomes for the players and the DM to insert themselves into the world and interact with it. It becomes less about exploring, and more about constnatly trying to keep your feet and learn about the next thing that's been changed. The wierder things get, the more quickly I, as a player, get thrown out of immersion.

And I suppose that I'm a real fuddy who should just hang up his dice because in browsing through a PDF of The Savage Frontier supplement for the Forgotten Realms, I'm forced to admit that, while the background material is excellent, most of the interesting locations that they call out to attention just drive me creatively up the wall. The stronghold of Ascelhorn, now fallen after its occupants had dealings with Hell in order to preserve their power, now known as Hellgate Keep (or something like that): good. It's interesting, and provoking. It then goes on to say that the keep is now ruiled by a type VI demon with hordes of minion demons and undead and that it is a terrible place on the brink of conquering the entire North: not so good. As much as I like demons and devils, and I really do, for some unidentifiable reason, this just . . . ugh. And it's largely the same for much of the Forgotten Realms. It seems that magic and "fantasy" are just leaking out of its pores, every page screaming D&D adventure. If anything, the best way I can describe it is that the Realms are just too . . . well . . ."too D&D." They're too heavily influenced by the way the game works, allowing mechanics and rules books to shape the realm than letting the rules serve the world setting, as I see Greyhawk doing for the most part.

I honestly have no conclusion here, other than to say that this is bothering me with some absurd shame about not being fantasy enough. Am I wrong here? Where do others draw their line between what does and does not make it into a D&D, or any other system's campaign?

The Problem With HD and Blu-Ray

This is completely and entirely off topic, but I felt like complaining about it here.

Why the hell is it that every time I try to watch a Blu-Ray movie on my fancy new player that the sound effects and music volume is turned way up (deafening really) but the dialogue is turned down so much that I can't actually hear it at all and have to rely on captions.

It's the same, though to a slightly lesser degree on HD television channels.

Is this a common thing across all HD sources? Is there some special fix that I don't know about? Or is this an example of stupid movie studios who assume "louder is better" and "people don't really care about what's being said on screen anyway"?

A Discussion: The Commodification of Fun

This is meant to be the introduction to a discussion. It's hardly original, I guess, as James Mal over at Grognardia has talked about this before (he called it "brandification" if I recall and I'm a little too lazy to go digging through his prolific writings to find the exact articles while I'm supposed to be earning a paycheck) and James Raggi over at LotFP has his truly infamous I Hate Fun article that links in here, and I'm sorry if I missed others as I know it's been a topic of discussion around here for a long time.

I suppose that this concept is at its most prominent in the WOTC advertisement and talking points about their new 4th edition, though as far as I can tell it's been somewhat pulled back lately, but it was very prominent with 3rd edition and 2nd edition as well. The powers that be at TSR and then at WOTC realized that selling modules to 1 out of 7 gamers (or, lets be generous and say 1 out of 4) just wasn't a good way to "grow the brand" and make money hand over fist. If only 25% of your targeted audience was going to be shelling out cash for your product, then you were essentially doomed to a niche of the niche market that is gaming. Not only that, modules have somewhat limited replay value: once you've played through The Tomb of Horrors once you won't be too surprised by the sphere of anihilation in the devil face.

The solution? Well, the solution for TSR/WOTC was two-fold. First, and most famously, was to publish books aimed not just at the DM, but at every player at the table. "Holy shit a complete book about elves with two hundred pages of elf specific mechanics and material?! I have to get one of those!" I don't, honestly, have a problem with this. Whatever your opinion of the quality of the material, I don't think anybody would begrudge the publishers the desire to sell something to more than just the DM. Not only that, it's this, I would argue, that kept D&D alive for some time and propelled it to being even more acceptable today than ever before even to the point of a prime time commercial advertising D&D.

Second, and this is where I take umbrage, there arose a trend towards "official" materials for games. Official expansions to already existing worlds, the thing that utterly destroyed Forgotten Realms, almost in a literal sense as WOTC had to rain down an apocalypse on the setting in order to divorce itself from what had come before. Official expanded rules, officialy sanctioned methodology, and on and on until the coup de grace came when it seemed that WOTC attempted to convince us to buy official fun by convincing us that previous versions of the game were truly "unfun" (a word I have grown to absolutely despise over the years).

Lest I paint myself into a rhetorical corner here, I'm going to say now that I don't think that this is a phenomenon unique to those money grubbing bastards at T$R or the Coastal Wizards. If anything, it started with the Gary himself. I remember a Sage Advice column (I think it was Sage Advice at least) where he responded to a letter about alternate rules or house rules or something saying that anybody who wasn't playing AD&D according to the letter of the rules set down in the three core books simply wasn't playing the same game. Somebody, I'm sure, will remind me of the exact verbiage at some point. What I remember most about the whole thing was thinking what a pompous jackass the man was and if this guy was really the same one who had written about taking the rules and making them your own.

I suppose, in retrospect, that I understand what he was getting at in less than politic language, and even agree with him to a certain point, but it sparked a moment of worry that here was the creator of the game engaging in delineating the difference between official D&D/AD&D and "that other stuff" and going so far as to say that alternate rules not printed by him fell into the later category. In a strange sort of way, I think that Gary spelled his own doom at TSR in that way.

So now comes the question. Has D&D, the enjoyment of that game . . . has "fun" . . . become commodified? Become dependent to a greater or lesser extent upon continued purchasing of official published material? Is it to the detriment or benefit of the game at large? Where do these lines get drawn?

My inclination is to say that, in regards to the current incarnation of the "official" D&D game (i.e., fourth edition), the answer is yes most assuredly. More strongly so because WOTC's "expanded core" concept. It was just as true in 3.x when, in order to accord with whatever character concept somebody had, new material was continualy published to further refine and define these concepts to the point where a knight and a samurai weren't just variations of fighters, but were unique and individualized classes and, in the case of the samurai, several unique classes.

Is it a benifit or a detriment? This I don't have a real answer for. On the one hand, I will decry the vast majority of the schlock published over the last several years by WOTC as exactly what it is: bird cage liner. However, at the same time, I seriously doubt that D&D would have survived today in a continually published form if not for the books we today call crap and the money grubbing bastards that distribute them in expansion pack games.

Or am I just a lunatic?

Your thoughts?

Polyglotism

Language is difficult to learn. Not just those weird, foreign languages, but even our native language. Hell, I've been speaking, writing, and reading the English language for near 28 years now, and I still haven't got it down 100%. None of us has. That's why it bothers me that adventurers in many FRPG's seem to be flawless polyglots, able to speak a number of languages without difficulty that would give even the most skilled linguists today pause. Worse yet, literacy seems to be nigh universal in those intelligent enough to learn it in the first place (or, for that matter, in games who even make a distinction between them).

That's yet another reason that I like 2nd edition non-weapon proficiencies. They offer me, as the DM, to limit the polyglot issue. Learning to speak a language takes up a full slot. Learning to read/write said language take an additional slot. That's a slot taken away from other things, like fire starting, mountaineering, riding, etc. So, yes, you can create a character who knows twelve dialects of elfese, but you're going to have to devote a great deal of study to it.

Of course, that doesn't even approach my general dissatisfaction with the whole "common" language idea, or alignment tongues, but that's another issue.

Why Can't We Have A Decent Fantasy Show Part Duex

Earlier, I lamented the fact that our latest concesion to fantasy entertainment was Krod Mandoon and afterword, I felt that I'd given the show short shrift. After all, I'd only ever seen one or two episodes (hard to tell whether that premier was two episodes pasted together, or if it was actually a double length episode). It's bound to get better right?

So I decided that the least I could do was give it another shot and see if it wasn't worth following. So, I watched last night's episode hoping for something to move beyond what the pilot had given us, and I'm impressed to say that it succeeded in going well beyond what it was, just in the wrong direction. Such stunning lines as the "mage" talking about his companions "little brown starfish" really set the tone early on as the "plot" was a thinly veiled excuse for an extended encounter with a so called "bi-clops" (a pansexual cyclops that is) and the entire episode devolved into a running series of sex jokes about Aneka and her . . . ahem . . . experience culminating in her riding off with the rival love interest carting a 2 quart gourd full of lube.

I will say, though, that Dongalore's little side trek to "rescue" the woman he had abducted only a few days earlier out of love was relatively good in comparison.

This all makes me uneasy about the upcoming (hopefully by Christmas) A Game of Thrones television series produced by HBO who did a marvelous job with Rome. Hell, if this series can do for fantasy literature what Rome did for, well, Rome, then I at least will be very happy. I worry, though, that this will end up junked and destroyed by the fact that it's an unpopular genre that seems to play better as parody than straight.

All that, and judging by what HBO did to True Blood, a by all accounts decent novel series, it's possible and even likely that this might turn into plot with porn. Or, for the less charitable than me, porn with plot.

One good rumor about the whole project, though, is that Peter Dinklage is the most likely to play Tyrion Lannister, which is a good thing.

One can only hope.

Why Can't We Have A Decent Fantasy Show?

Well, in watching Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire over on Comedy Central here in the US, it's clear that the show is a shallow parody of a genre that its creators don't enjoy or are even particularly familiar with beyond the basest elements. Don't get me wrong, it was amusing in a puerile sort of way - tastless gay jokes, sex jokes, gay sex jokes, and the occasional slapstick prevail throughout - and I will probably end up watching at least the next few episodes if only to see what they do to abuse poor John Rhys Davies and Eliza Dushku.

What is more amusing to me - though also just as disheartening in its own way - is that the show seems to be as much, if not more so, a parody of fantasy gaming as it is about the fantasy genre as a whole. Certain scenes seem to be built around tropes of D&D and its ilk such as Loquasto's firing into melee (and frequently hitting his friend Krod), taking a mulligan (which seemed almost a direct reference to dice rolling in its own amusing way), and the death of General Arcadius (I spent at least 30 seconds there counting off hitpoints from miltiple crossbow bolts and a spear to the chest).

The end result is a somewhat watchable show if you can get past the parts that bother you - and there most certainly will be parts that will bother you whether it's the, let's be kind and call her "promiscuous" Aneka or the over the top Bruce whom just about everybody with common sense will find offensive once he tells you the two ways in which his lover, the General Arcadius, transmitted the prophecy that supposedly will drive the show's plot, and that can be genuinely amusing at times.

But in the end, I have to wonder why we have to settle for this kind of thing. Why is it that the only halfway decent fantasy movie to make it to the big screen since the terrible Lord of the Rings trilogy is Harry Potter? Harry Potter poorly adapted no less. Why is it that fantasy movies made for television are consigned to the likes of the absolute drek that the Sci-Fi Channel (or should I say SyFy?) produces that aren't even watchable when extremely drunk. The Sands of Oblivion springs to mind here.

Why is fantasy reduced to being the ghetto genre of the Science-Fiction ghetto? Why the hell can't we get a decent show or movie made that isn't a shallow parody or just plain old terrible?

Grognard on Grognard Action!

As Noisms put it, "the wailing and gnashing of teeth" has begun at, among other places, LotFP and Lord of the Green Dragons.

Whatever the hell about, it's honestly hard to tell, but it looks like an Old School internecine edition war. So now, not only do we have "Grognards," "3Etards," and "4rons," we must further divide up that first group into whomever sucks at the teat of which clone or even those who refuse the concept of clones in and of themselves and adhere to their moldering copies of Whitebox edition or BECMI or whatever.

And all I can do is laugh.

In all honesty, who the fuck cares whether an old school product says "compatible with D&D" or "compatible with [insert clone of choice here]" or "compatible with whatever the hell game you play"? In the first place, Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry are only a hop, skip, and a fart away from each other. Osric is just round the corner. Hackmaster ain't far behind, and whatever else game you play probably doesn't need a whole lot of effort before that module or supplement or whatever it is works for you, or at least gives you enough ideas to run off and do it yourself, which would be the point in the first place right?

The Old School movement is not system specific. If anything, it has been largely defined, in my view, by what it is not, and what it is not is "not New School." Not about super powers in the Middle Ages. Not about story driven "campaigns." Not about feats, skill points, or daily/per-battle/at-will powers. Not about WOTC's new thrust. That was the greatest strength of the Old School: the realization that whatever system you use was, for the most part, wildly unimportant, it's what you did with it. It was about not settling for pre-processed mass produced pap! And so now we're starting arguments about what should be the standardized system of publishing for the OSR?

Or is this little tempest in the teapot just an argument for the sake of argument?

Oh, and as an aside, "I play D&D" means just what it did 30 years ago. Those of the Old School should recognize more than most that the "common baseline" is largely illusory as the differences between one table and the next are vast enough to make "I play D&D" largely meaningless. It has little to do with what flavor is current today, though yes, most often it will be interpreted as referring to the most recent supported edition excreted by the coastal wizards.

With all due respect to the Old School: stick your shibboleths where your pride goes and remember what's important about this game and this Renaissance.

And you probably won't see a 2ed clone. We don't need one since pretty much every other edition hates us on principle.

Why I Tolerate the Proficiency System

A lot of people rag on the proficiency system for a whole lot of reasons. The Old School takes swings at it because, seemingly, it's that first step on the Path of Doom that leads directly to TETSNBN( The Edition That Shall Not Be Named) and all that idiocy. "We don't need no stinkin' skill system!" they argue, and quite rightly in most respects.

On the other hand, the system catches flak from the D20 and Hackmaster crew for being "half-assed" and not at all sufficient for their needs. Their needs are better served by D20's . . . I'll be nice and call it "complicated" system or Kenzer's positively Byzantine, but still enjoyable system of percentile rolls. I'll be honest, though, and say that both systems feel to me like having the rules of Cricket explained and the net result is the same: the sudden and overwhelming urge to whallop somebody with a bat. They're honestly more trouble than they're worth, and on top of that they betray a myopic and modern viewpoint: specifically that people are, by nature, cosmopolitan and multi-skilled by default.

I was, not too long ago when I still had pretensions at being "Old School," a fan of completely skill-less systems and verged on the point of excising proficiencies entirely from my game. I even started the task of building lists of what could be considered general character knowledge based on class to forestall the inevitable argument about how such and such a character would be expected to know all about The Nameless and Unknown Horror. They usually read something like this: "You're a fighter, and know which end of the spear/sword to hold without hurting yourself . . . you know enough not to eat the red berries unless the trail boss tells you to and not to pitch your tent in the dry stream bed at night." In the end, though, they turned into multi-page documents that nobody would even want to read except, possibly, as a bad joke.

It's at that point that I realized what I really liked about proficiencies. They're a way of inserting a skill system into the game without actually inserting a skill system. The non-proficiency system is not about what a character can do. After all, any boob can ride a horse from point A to point B without falling into the ditch every 10 feet just as all but the densest morons are able to light a fire and cook their supper at the end of a long day's march. And yet we have the Riding, Cooking, and Fire Building proficiencies that make it seem like they confer these very abilities. But in actuallity, they do not. Riding specifically starting with being able to fight from horseback (or unicorn back, or giant lizard back, or whatever) without falling or injuring either yourself or the mount and ranging all the way to performing stunts and tricks that would make the best show stallions in the world jealous. The proficiency description is very explicit in that it does not cover basic riding under average circumstances and, at the rist of sounding like a jackass, anybody who forces PC's to succeed at riding checks in order to mount their horse in the morning and not break their necks at noon are DOING IT WRONG! At the same time, fire building is the ability to build fires in very adverse conditions (rain storms, blizzards, wet fuel, etc.) and cooking is the ability to create gourmet and lavish meals rather than simple home or trail cooking.

In the end, I view the proficiency system as exactly that: a system for determining what your character is proficient in beyond what the average schlub is capable of. Literally, a list of things in which your character is good enough to earn a living through. Thus, somebody with the carpentry proficiency is not just a guy who can fix their front door (any moron can do that) but a true master carpenter who could sell that skill in exchange for money or other recompense. Yes yes, I know that "fire building" isn't a valid career option, even in the pseudo medieval world of most D&D settings, but that's why I said "tolerate" rather than "love." For all its wrinkles, I think the non-weapon proficiency system is the best solution for the issue at hand that's something other than "common sense." In my experience, there isn't a single player out there that has enough common sense to know better than to plunge their hands into the mysterious pool of "water" in order to grab at the copper coins they see on the bottom.

Of course, I've never been entirely sure what to do with things like Omen Reading and Astronomy. On the one hand, I feel like I should be putting in opportunities for said proficiencies to come up in play if the player ever remembers that they have it, but at the same time I feel that the best answer might be to smack the player upside the head and ask him just what it was he was smoking if he thought that they would be useful. I am not in the business of creating situations where the PC's can shine like some sort of convoluted and demented Eigen Plot, but at the same time, I have to be sure not to shut down the players entirely because their choices should mean something in the end, even if it's an NPC mocking them for having useless skills. After all, I am routinely mocked for having the world's only degree that officially qualifies me to say "Would you like fries with that?" and I've learned to live with it. So should the omen readers and astronomers.

This musing and rant has been brought to you by the disturbed workings of a delusional mind. If you're still reading this, then I'm truly sorry for you.

Birthright: A Cornerstone of Changing Sensibilities

I can't say that I don't like the Birthright setting. It's definitely interesting, both in its implied plot (and believe me, there really is a strong hand at work here) and in the ways that it breaks the rules of AD&D 2e to create a unique little experience. The world itself - if you can get past the nigh unpronounceable pseudo-Celtic names that the developers seem so fond of - is quite a nifty little place where dragons are dying out and the mortal races walk the world today infused with the diluted stuff of gods in their veins. It looks like it could be a good deal of fun.

But I will probably never touch it, and not just because I won't find many people in New Jersey who are interested in pulling a campaign together. It's because Birthright, in all its innovative new rules and its shiny boxed intent, represents a betrayal of the core of D&D as I see it, and the enshrinement of all the negative tendencies of storytelling DM's everywhere. It is, more than DragonLance I think, a real symbol of what D&D was to become over the subsequent years.

Ok, that's a bit of a strong statement. It's not like Birthright was the deathknell of tabletop role playing games as we had all grown to love, but it's clear that the assumptions behind the setting were vastly different than those that went into Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms. It was clear that The Grey Mouser had no place in Cerilia as that world was, quite literally, all about the stories of kings and great lords. Handing what was a reward for long and good play 30 years ago to a first level character changed the dynamics of everything. Characters very often have what amount to nothing less than super powers in the form of divine heritage. Such powers range from access to genetic memories at the discretion of the DM (not entirely a bad idea I suppose) to a persistent protection from evil effect all the way up to (and I wish I were joking) shooting laser beams out of their eyeballs. This does not, of course, include the 1st level characters that enter play as literal kings of the realm. Of course, some effort is thrown in to balance things out. It is possible to play a character who is not super, but in order to balance them against those who are, all non-powered individuals are granted a flat +10%XP bonus. Even Joe-Average has special benefits.

It's not so much the fact that the characters are intended to be super powered that bothers me. After all, in Dark Sun - a setting of which I am particularly fond - the characters have ability scores ranging all the way up to 24 and everybody has psionic powers free of charge. It's the mentality that seems to fuel it. In Dark Sun, PC's need those little extra boosts in order to make it through an average day of shopping at the market. In Birthright, it's simply that heroes have powers: end of story. In fact, it's explicitly stated that characters who make due with a mere 10% bonus in XP should be made subordinate to a PC who does have powers and is the ruler of a province/kingdom, or if none of the PC's have such powers, than they become subservient to and NPC of such type as a controling patron. The concept of a patron doesn't bother me overly. They've been a wrench in the DM's toolbox forever, after all. The issue here, though, is that the patron is not so much a gentle nudge from the DM or a usefull tool in guiding the PC's down "the right road," it's an actual superior who gives orders and dictates actions; something that, in my mind, defeats the purpose of adventurers in the first place.

All of that is, in the end, forgivable. After all, who among us hasn't wanted to play a character with special abilities under their sleeves? To play a king or high priest? We're gamers, it's kind of what we do at least some of the time.

However, the big issue is that all of this orbits what we are assured is the core of the setting. Not the exploration of the unknown by rougues with hearts of gold, or the confrontation of evil by relative unknowns, but the game of kings and thrones to borrow a phrase from Mr. GRR Martin. It's a game of political maneuvering, treaties and alliances, and espionage and outright war. It's supposedly AD&D on the macro scale rather than the micro, but in the end, I find that, either by intent or anything else, it becomes dominated by heavy handed plot of the rise and fall of nations more than the individual characters. Even the few modules published for the setting - uniquely bad in their own right - are focused on how to fit them into whatever plot the DM has concocted for the players to follow and that track is, for the most part, laid out clearly from day 0.

This really isn't, in my mind, D&D. It is exactly what it says in the introduction to the source books inside the box: a failed novel by an overeager man graduating with his degree in English Lit.