Advice for new referees, Part One

I'm writing a short essay for people who are new to Old School gaming, but who are considering running an Old School campaign.  There's lots of good advice out there about doing that directly, but not as much about how to think about it - Matt Finch's excellent Quick Primer is good, and if there are other examples, I would like to know about it.

What follows is a sample from what I've written so far - constructive comments welcome!

Some Advice for New Referees

By Victor J Raymond PhD

Copyright 2011

This short essay is not about how to set up your campaign but rather some principles and reminders about how to think about what you are doing as a referee.

There are no “Edition Police”, except in your head.  Occasionally, I’ve heard gamers with less experience than myself say things like “why would you want to play an older edition?  That’s so – backward!”   Sometimes, referees new to Old School gaming will have this misconception, as well. It is a fallacy to think that successive editions of the game have been wholly agreed-upon improvements on previous versions – or that paid game designers automatically know better than you what you should be playing. It may come as a surprise, but Wizards or Paizo do not have patrols going around issuing citations for playing older versions of D&D – except possibly in the peer pressure you might experience from other gamers who want to justify their ongoing 3.x or 4e spending habit.  It’s probably more accurate to say that each edition of D&D represents a different style of gameplay, which may be why there are people still playing every edition of D&D ever produced.  At last count, there were retro-clones (a game which reproduces the mechanics of an older role-playing game) for all editions of D&D ever produced.  The important point, though, is that new doesn’t always equal better.  What you’re playing isn’t outdated – it’s different.

Take the game and its rules on their own terms.  This is mostly a matter of unlearning things you’ve picked up from the games you’ve played already.  From an outsider perspective, most versions of Original D&D have fewer defined features, a much more abstract combat system, and a lot of things that “everybody knows” don’t work.  But like so many things of this sort, what “everybody knows” isn’t necessarily true – and this is particularly the case when it comes to roleplaying games.  The relatively “bare bones” approach of many Old School games isn’t a lack of definition or “crunch” (a term I dislike, along with “fluff”); it represents an opportunity for you to add in your own ideas and make the game your own.  For that to happen, you need to play the game figuring it out as you go, setting aside your preconceptions of what works and what doesn’t. Rather than immediately house-ruling everything to make it closer to what you are used to, start off playing the game as it is written, and see where that takes you.

Random dice rolling is not a flaw – it’s a design feature.  Random character generation is often singled out as one of the “bad” things about Original D&D – particularly the idea of “roll 3D6 and write ‘em down in order.”  It supposedly short-circuits the creative process.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Consider: how often have you observed another player generating the same “sneaky assassin Dark Elf” or “aloof, stand-offish mage” or “mighty-thewed barbarian” over and over again?  That’s the “creative process” supposedly being subverted?  I think not.  To be fair, sometimes people do have interesting and worthwhile character conceptions – but not all the time. What random dice rolling does is give your imagination a chance to try something different – to come up with something you might not have thought of in the first place.  Sometimes people object that their rolls were “too low” – which really means that they think they can’t do well with that character, conceding defeat before starting game play.  Sometimes people simply don’t like what they have rolled.  In either case, there’s nothing saying someone cannot roll again – but don’t blame the dice; blame player preconceptions of what they are “supposed to” get.

(more to follow)

Thinking You're On The Same Page (But Not)

Noisms' comments about games he's wanted to run, and Jeff Rients' Shatnerday collided in my brain to remind me about my own love affair with Star Trek. I also reminded me of the last time I had tried doing something with Star Trek as a role-playing campaign.

This was about six or seven years ago. I had run some D&D 3.0 and found it overly-engineered and my players were something of a mixed bag. So I decided I needed something different - something that would bring the group together. And then I decided that Star Trek would be a good way to do this. I had always wanted to run a Star Trek campaign. It would be fun – everybody knows the background, the language, and it would provide a sturdy frame for a kind of dramatic role-playing that could be really engaging for the players and for me as the referee. Or so I thought.

What – or more precisely, who I forgot about were Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. Berman and Braga were largely responsible for the evolution of the Star Trek franchise, and having been brought up on the original series (TOS), I hadn’t really paid much attention to what they were doing with Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. To be sure, Gene Roddenberry had made changes right from the beginning of Next Generation, but Berman and Braga had carried that much further after Roddenberry’s death. By the time Deep Space Nine came along, I had lost interest in watching the various shows in the franchise.

Frankly, I really didn’t like some of the changes they had made in the Star Trek universe – the Ferengi were painfully close to negative stereotypes of Jews (right down to the exaggerated facial features), the Klingons were changed from an implacable but honorable foe to a band of “Vikings in space”, the Romulans took the place of the Klingons, and I never found the Cardassians to be all that interesting. But if those things were the only major problem, I wouldn’t have had much difficulty. Telling my players that Voyager was in a different timeline so they ought not to expect to encounter the Dominion, the Jem’Hadar or the Kazon (or anything from "fluidic space") would likely have been met with cheerful relief on their part.

What I hadn’t expected was that we would have radically different ideas of what, exactly, the “Star Trek universe” was. To me, the Star Trek universe was the wild frontier of TOS, in all its four color simplicity. James T. Kirk was a Jack Aubrey in space, with Spock and McCoy as his Stephen Maturin stand-ins. Star Bases were not unlike Gibraltar or Ascension Island – occasional oases in a vast ocean of stars. And even if there was a Starfleet Command, they wouldn’t be questioning every single command decision made by the Captain of the USS Brilliant (a Surya-class frigate, not an Enterprise-class heavy cruiser).

My players, however, had different ideas.

My first clue we might be operating asynchronously came when one of my players said to me rather emphatically, “yeah, I don’t like the later shows, either. I prefer the classics – you know, like Next Generation.” I knew that was a danger sign, but I figured that since I was busily retooling various minor details of the universe, such a perspective could be easily bridged back to my own. But the second clue came about when I mentioned wanting to set the campaign in the period after Star Trek: Wrath of Khan and just before The Search for Spock. I had intended to play with the Star Trek movie “continuity”[1] just a little – I liked David Marcus as a character, and thought that his immediate elimination in Search for Spock was more expedient than warranted. And I definitely wanted to preserve the Klingons as antagonists, so I wanted to bypass Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country altogether. (The Undiscovered Country, with its dubious premise of a moon explosion somehow crippling an interstellar empire, was profoundly unsatisfactory structurally and dramatically.) One or two of my players became visibly uncomfortable with an “alternate universe” cast to the campaign. “So what happens afterwards?” one of them asked. “You’ll have a chance to figure that out” was my answer, which was accepted with deep hesitation.

But when it came to considering the start of the campaign, there were more problems. Which rules set to use? I had thought about GURPS, as a system I knew and liked – but the Star Fleet Universe offerings were geared more towards Star Fleet Battles and a decidedly militaristic cant to any campaign. I looked at, and invested in, the Last Unicorn RPG – lavishly produced, but lamentably out of print, and focused more on Next Generation than TOS. I had then settled on the Decipher line, as it was fairly balanced and not (quite) out of print. The straw that broke the camel’s back and sent the campaign back into the editing room was the discussion I had with my players.

They simply did not like the original Star Trek series. What I saw nostalgically as a brightly colored background just aching for the interesting fine detail work of an unfolding campaign story arc written by the players themselves, they saw the TOS setting as cartoon-ish and corny. While they thought Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were fascinating and full of background detail, I found them to be largely complicated without being really interesting (particularly DS9), and suffering from attempts to over-use the “double-talk generator” as a substitute for maintaining dramatic continuity.

Past that, my players (or at least, the group of people I was gaming with back then) were dubious about a different rules set than the D20 system they knew from D&D 3.0. And the idea of a home-brew rules set struck them as tinkering with the very fabric of the universe (okay, in a sense that's true - but they weren't happy with the idea).

When these differences in perspective surfaced, I realized I needed to rethink the entire basis for wanting to run a Star Trek campaign. I'm still thinking about that. I love my Star Trek, but oh, you kid.

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[1] I am almost embarrassed to use that term in relation to Star Trek – a show infamous for the cavalier attitude shown to continuity by the production teams of the various series. Even so, while there might not be a precisely-definable continuity and “history” there is certainly a commonly-held (and defined) sense of what that might be. I knew I would have to wrestle with that in whatever game I ran.