The triple threat of parenthood, pandemic, and pedagogy (technically graduate school but I can’t resist alliteration and am stretching for a third ‘p’ word) relegated me to being more of an “armchair” RPG enthusiast these past several years, but I’m pleased to announce I’m finally back at the gaming table! I decided it was time to roll some dice again back in December and jumped in on a short D&D 5e mini-campaign/adventure at my local shop. It was nice to get social and be out in the world again in a non-professional/academic setting, but when that adventure wrapped up at the New Year, I decided that life was too short to spend my time diving into a system that just didn’t have much curb appeal for me, and staked out an open table and started running an old-fashioned OSR dungeon delve at the store.
We just had session 11 this past Wednesday, and it’s been a lot of fun. So far the main obstacle has been building a player base, which I surmise is pretty common for virtually any non-5e game. We’ve made it work, though: I’ve got two steady players, and had six on one occasion! I confess it’s a little hard on the ego when players don’t come back for another session, but I also know and recognize that we’ve all got our own stuff going on. Sometimes work schedules change, maybe it’s just too hard to get across town, or maybe the play style just doesn’t quite click.
The potential play style mis-match is perhaps what I’m most conscious of—I’m trying to run an open-table newbie-friendly game at the shop, so I know I’m the scruffy off-brand game compared to the shiny flagship on the shelves. If you’re looking for the experience of getting to play a planes-walking Sha’doobee Warlock multi-classed into Glimmerstep Duelist to maximize your Shadow Spirit Scion background, playing a two hit-point thief that almost gets killed by a centipede in a crypt might not be a satisfying substitute. And that’s alright—I’m not sure I would’ve been into an old school game back in my 4e days either. It’s kind of like music preferences, I suppose: some folks only listen to arena pop that gets radio play, some folks only listen to the scrappy bands of their preferred subgenre in equally scrappy local venues, and some folks prefer mining crates of old vinyl for disappeared artists of yesteryear. There’s room for all sorts, and sometimes (or often?) we grow into other tastes.
And we don’t have to leave old tastes behind, either. I poke fun at the “Sha’doobee Glimmerstep Warlock” above, but last weekend I played in a one-shot of Age of Sigmar: Soulbound as a “Duardin Kharadron Endrinmaster,” which is exactly the sort of deliberately opaque anti-trope that made me roll my eyes at the premise of the Soulbound setting when I first looked into it. Still, there was something intriguing about this high-fantasy Planescape-meets-Warhammer Fantasy descendant, so I gave it a try. And you know what? Playing a mechano-punk dirgible-dwarf artificer that smashes Skaven with a big techno-hammer was fun. I would happily continue to play that character in an on-going campaign to see what kind of trouble he gets into as the party wanders around “the Mortal Realms.”
But I digress… the current game is what I’ve been calling an Old School Dungeon Crawl. I’ve been wanting to run one for years, but as a somewhat impulsive observance of the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons back in January, I decided to run it using Original D&D, as organized and restated by Swords & Wizardry. I’m also “running a module” to keep things nice and simple for me, and selected Frog God’s Lost City of Barakus as the baseline adventure. Barakus isn’t an “adventure” in the modern sense where there’s a series of plotted events wherein the party must eventually uncover the nefarious plots of Cult of the Big Bad in order to stop Big Bad’s Diabolical Machinations, but it more of a sandbox with a bunch of prewritten (and sometimes interlinked) scenarios. It has a multi-level dungeon of course (the titular Lost City), but also details the surrounding wilderness area, which has a handful of “single session” side adventures—the party tackled one such side adventure the other night when they assailed an old wizard’s tower full of goblins to retrieve a tome of lost/forbidden lore for a wizard back in the city. The book also contains details about that city, as well as a few possible adventures within it. It’s been keeping us busy!
I’ve been having a great time too. The last time I ran a regular game was back in the 4th Edition days, and I was a lot more pre-occupied with “building” encounters, along with the attendant concerns of battlemaps, challenge level, and plot/pacing. This time I’m being much more improvisational, and doing my best to channel my inner Rients. In that spirit, I tend to roll a d6 to determine if a screwball suggestion by the players will work/is true. Sometimes the roll is just a 50/50 even or odd roll, sometimes it’s “it’ll work on a 5 or a 6,” or sometimes it’s simply “as long as we don’t roll a 1.” This makes it a nice game for me too, with uncertain outcomes. Will that orc that you charmed still be in the cave this visit? <Roll> Yep, there he is. Now we have to figure out if he’s going to immediately attack you in retaliatory rage after being “bewitched” by magic, or if he’s feeling a little more ambivalent about it since he did enjoy slaying some foes while he was following you around last time. <Roll> Good news: he’s not very happy to see you, but he’s also not immediately attacking!
I’m also not being “precious” about the set-up. Sometimes the dice are hot and they clean out a group of adversaries without much trouble, or bypass an obstacle entirely through scheme, spell, or roleplaying. And that’s the point! We’re literally playing a game, so if we’re getting laughs and high-fives out if it then it’s a successful session. Besides, the easy stuff often gets counterbalanced by something that proves to be unexpectedly challenging. When the players keep rolling low, even a couple goblins can give them a run for their money!
So anyway, I’m back at the table and I’m having a ball. It’s nice to be in a weekly game again, and nice to be social!