I Hit it With My Axe!

    I want you to imagine your most favorite hero from your most beloved book, movie, or television show. Next I want you to think of the villain that is your hero's nemesis, the bad guy who time and again puts the protagonist in untenable situations, only to have them narrowly survive and thwart their plans. Now Imagine that upon their very first meeting, without any dialogue or prior understanding of the villain's crimes, the hero offs the guy (or gal) as they enter the room. Wouldn't make for a very interesting story in my opinion. Sure, the hero may have saved countless of innocent lives, but we'd have no way of knowing because that's where the tale would have ended.
    

Take that, whoever you are!

     We all role-play for a myriad of reason. For some it's a release from the day to day stresses of life, for others it's a way to play out parts of their personality that otherwise remain hidden in civil society. After all, you can't just walk down the street, armed to the teeth looking for a fight. At least not if you live outside of Texas. The point is, we all secretly want to be bad-asses, and that's hard to do when your TPS report is missing its cover sheet.  The problem unfortunately comes when that is the only aspect of our characters we focus on.
    How often has this happened to you? It's Thursday night, your boss has been up your ass all week, and now it's game night. Your last session left off  just as you were about to get some answers from a shadowed creature regarding your mother's murder. The GM sits down, and as you run through in your head the conversation you've been planning all week, your buddy rolls some dice. "I hit it with my Axe!" he yells, blood lust dripping from his voice. Perhaps you sit dumbfounded by your friend's idiocy, or maybe, you frantically try and convince the GM to restrain your simpleminded buddy and his quest for carnage. Either way, the role playing experience you were hoping for is now shattered.

 At least let me roll initiative!

    This is, in my opinion, the MMO mentality seeping into our role playing lives. Many gamers have been so accustomed to logging in, getting a few quests they never took the time to read, running to the places marked on their mini-map to kill the indicated creatures, and handing in said quests for xp and phat loot. The NPC could have asked you to collect the items he needed to slay a school full of orphans, and your paladin happily complied. After all, the quest giver was in need of help... and damn those boots he was offering were amazing.
    I don't mean to sound like a broken record, decrying what MMOs have done to the role playing experience as a whole, but this blog is about old school gaming, and you can't have old school without there being a new school. Let's take a look at Dungeons and Dragons, perhaps the most wide spread and best known of all RPGs. The original game was complex, and required nothing short of an advanced math degree to calculate what you needed to roll in order to successfully tie your shoe. Subsequent editions have tried to simplify the game in order to obtain a wider audience. However, its current edition is nothing short of an MMO in paper format. A wizard is no different than a fighter in that each simply has a set of powers that are usable under the correct circumstances, some coming with their own built in "cool down" times. Gone are the days of spell memorization, and arcane study. Each class has been assigned a role such as controller, healer, or tank. Hmm... where have I heard those terms before?

 4th edition D&D in a nutshell

    I must take a moment here to breath, as I've just re-read what I wrote and suddenly feel like I've transformed into the comic book guy from the Simpsons. My words are thick with sarcasm and artificial authority. I'm not here to convert you to Scientology, I'm simply looking to examine a hobby dear to me. If what I've described above is what you want from a game, then more power to you. Sometimes it's fun to just slay some orcs, and revel in the insane numbers your character can generate when rolling damage. I know I've been guilty of this feeling as much as the next guy. But there has to be something more right? After all there was something other than rolling damage that made us play these games in the first place.
   That brings us back to those heroes I had you imagining at the beginning. It was their stories that inspired me to play, and I'm betting you're in the same boat. But they were selfless, acting from a complicated background and history that made them who they are. Could you imagine if Mal picked up another guys gun after he killed him and simply tossed his own away because the new one was better? Or if Drizzt was concerned with amassing piles of wealth instead of saving the innocent. These wouldn't be the heroes we loved, and certainly not the stories we followed so closely.
    So next time, when you're skimming through your favorite core rulebook, looking for that uber combo that will slice four ninjas to ribbons with one swipe of your No-Dachi, ask yourself if that's all that matters to you. The answer may be yes, and if it is, so be it. I hope though, that this was at least food for thought.

-End-

    (Wow... I think I need a hug after that. It made me feel all squishy inside, like a moist overstuffed burrito. I hope you are all enjoying my articles, and I intend to keep them coming. For now I have a few shout outs. The title to this blog, I Hit it With My Axe, is a reference to another blog that I follow about porn stars who play D&D. You should check em out. Next, remember to support your friendly local gaming store. I would be lost without Myriad Games, and their friendly and helpful staff. You may be able to find a better price online, but you'll never beat the personal service you get at a local store. Plus most of them will let you game in store, so it gives your basement some time to air out. More on that topic to come. Lastly, I want to thank all my friends who've been spreading this thing around the interwebs for me. You guys are the best! Except you Eric.)

First!

    Lets be honest with each other from the beginning. I'm writing this blog because I'm thirty years old now, and I feel the slow inevitable chill of age creeping into me. Not in my joints or bones, but into my mind. I have begun to look at things and think to myself "In my day things were better". And I have to wonder, were they? After all, when I first entered the world of gaming, we did things with pencils and paper, with cards and miniatures. We had imaginations back then. Now, I can sit down at my computer, hack away at the corpse of my enemy until... well.... until I have to get up to pee really.
    An imagination is no longer required. I know what every monster and magic sword from here to Meridian looks like because it has been rendered for me in glorious and for some reason slightly cartoonish fashion. Where once I looked forward to descending into my buddies basement to roll some dice and drink Mt Dew until the sun crested the horizon, now I simply plop into my computer chair and repeatedly mash my action bar (four arcane blasts and then my missiles should have proced). I don't need to interact with another living soul to get my game on. Some nights my wife and I will be mere feet from one another, but will communicate through online whispers. Have I lost my mind.... My sanity?

He's clearly lost something

    No, I've just forgotten my roots. Lets face it, to be a gamer today is to exist as a member of a prime marketing demographic. Companies have caught on that gamers spend money, and they devote much of their time to churning out products for you to tear through your disposable income like Charlie Sheen in a meth lab.
In the dark days of the 80's, when Dungeons and Dragons was something your parents still feared, we were filled with glee when a new book was finally released, months if not a full year after the last. There was no web page to hype it's production. Hell, if you even knew about the books release before you saw it on a dusty hobby store shelf, it meant that you either had some connection deep inside the gaming underground, or you had used the last wish from the ring that old man gave you for rescuing his daughter from the Githyanki. Now, however, we are virtually guaranteed a new release every month from a slew of major companies all fighting hard for your dollars. Let us get back to the 80's, where it was socially acceptable, and completely normal to dress like this:

This photo was described as a costume

If I wanted to jump over turtles and shoot ducks while a dog laughed condescendingly at me, I turned to my trusty Nintendo game console (after blowing into its game cartridge) and tapped away at A and B. But if I wanted an adventure, my options were investigating that odd smelling smoke coming from my neighbors sweet van, or getting together with my friends, rolling up a druid and seeing where things went from there. We were creative back then, and we had it all. From maps neatly drawn on lined graph paper (that we stole from my older brother), to elaborate histories detailing our character's undying fear of unicorns.

And that's when shit got real

The point is, with all the hack and slash mmo's out there, the goal stopped being an immersive and imaginative experience. Now we obsessively grind for gear score and track our dps output. It is with that in mind I move on to the true point of this blog. I have taken a bold and frightening step backwards, towards what gaming once was. Today I have deleted every RTS, FPS, and MMO from my desktop. This may sound like a trivial thing, but if you truly believe that than by all means, go and type DELETE on the load screen of your tier 12 level 100 Beastmaster, I'll wait.... No takers?

I wish I knew how to quit you

This is how I shall chronicle my journey (and inevitable withdrawal symptoms) of rediscovering my imagination. Old school gaming, nothing but books and dice. I'll paint some miniatures and maybe inspire some of you to do the same along the way. Though to be fair, you can just order a fully painted replica of your toon in her epics.... that's probably way easier.