I’d played Zork III a lot as a kid. I solved several puzzles in it, but assumed that somehow it was supposed to be impossible. I loved to play it anyway… just to do stuff in it and be in the story. In high school, I picked up a copy of the entire Zork trilogy. I got a lot further in Zork I, but still got stuck. Ten years later I picked up Zork I again and and played the heck out of it. I solved many of the puzzles and finally got aggravated at it. Upon reading the hints to a few remaining unsolved puzzles, I was enraged because of the extreme unfairness of them. To “punish” Infocom, I went through Zork III with a walk-through, but was disappointed with what I found out: I was really much closer to solving the game than I had thought and pretty much wasted it. About that time I spoiled the spaceship entrance puzzle in Starcross and the famous Babelfish puzzle in Hitchhikers… also the locked door and the robot puzzle in Zork II. I did manage to beat Wishbringer without any hints, though.

(Spoiling a puzzle with a hint could really mess up a game– much more than someone ruining a movie. Generally there’s just more puzzles behind the ones that are bugging you. It’s kinda the point of the game.)

Anyways… about Enchanter. I played through it the first parts of it about 8 years ago or so. I solved most of the easy opening puzzles and got stuck. A few years later I started again and solved a hard puzzle that had stumped me before, but still got stuck despite my progress. Last weekend I worked on it again and was surprised at how obvious some of the solutions were. I could just see things and a new light and solved some really hard stuff that I had decided was impossible. I think reading– actually reading– all of the text with a fresh eye was the key. The game is packed with hints and clues, but if you play based on your assumptions, you’ll just stay stuck. You’ve got to let the game help you.

(I did need one little hint to finally complete the game this week, but I don’t feel bad about it because the problem was essentially a hinky sort of guess-the-verb type thing. I think I had actually solved that particular puzzle years ago, but the way I was phrasing the commands just wouldn’t work this time through. Ah well.)

Many critics in the post-Infocom “Interactive Fiction” community criticize the Infocom games for allowing the player to put the game in an unwinable state. Modern games that avoid this are missing some realism, but yeah, avoiding this does reduce some of the tedium. In Enchanter’s case, they are at least fair about it: they give a very clear hint that you’ve screwed things up. It took me a few hours to decipher the hint… and then a few more to set things straight, but this problem was really the most satisfying part of the game. I’m not convinced that a game written according to the modern standards can have quite the same sort of depth that Enchanter has.

I love this game. Enchanter and Wishbringer really are two of the best games ever written. Their text-only format give them a timelessness that other games lack. Text adventures at their worst can be more like debugging a computer program than anything else– especially when your hung up on a finicky noun/verb syntax issue, but these classic Infocom games cause you to engage with the fantasy world in a way that rarely happens in other mediums. I especially like the way that hints for the game were translated into the theme and setting of Enchanter. Nothing breaks mimesis quite like having to type the word “hint” at the prompt or having to go to some “Invisiclues” type screen.

I heartily recommend Wishbringer and Enchanter for those that haven’t done a lot of text games like this. They are entirely fair and manage to simultaneously be great games and great stories at the same time.

Phil Reed’s office is well-furnished.

Here’s my winning team from game 5 of our team amateur night series of games. (Only nine more to play!)

Alonzo Swartz
Prestige: 3
Kills: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Notes: 3/21/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Took out an enemy Killer Kart by blowing throw the front Machine Gun and setting the power plant on fire, but was “killed” a couple seconds later by a ram from behind.

Wayne Hertz
Prestige: 5
Kills: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Vehicle: Killer Kart with 15 shots left, no side armor on either side, and one point of damage to the power plant.
Notes: 3/21/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: After having his side armor blown off with a lucky shot from a badly damaged opponent, he narrowly survived a 2-on-2 hairball. When he drove to the other side of the arena to make a high speed pass against the remaining vehicle, his opponent missed– but he made his winning shot with a natural twelve!

Anita Valdez
Prestige: 3
Kills: 1
Driver Skill Points: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Salvage: Killer Kart with no armor except the 3 points on the back.
Notes: 3/21/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Anita focused fire on a single enemy for the first seven seconds of the game. On the 7th second, she took power plant damage from his prey just as she killed him. Another opponent closed in for a T-bone and Anita had no choice but to turn it into a head-on at the last moment. The damage rolled was exactly enough to give both drivers two hits of damage. Anita nearly died in the flames, but narrowly made her survival roll. (Technically, she should have been toast. My opponent generously declared that medical teams could quickly reach her because the battle had moved to the opposite side of the arena at that moment.)

Rodney Fischer
Prestige: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 1
Notes: 3/21/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Rodney was shot up early on in the game, but instead of leaving himself open to SMG attacks while focusing on an opposing vehicle, he decided to take down a pedestrian. On two separate damage rolls he rolled ones… while the pedestrian was able to set his car on fire. The fire was just enough to knock Rodney unconscious and the pedestrian pulled him from the flames.

We had such a good experience with Armadillo Autoduel Arena that we decided to try another event there with random starting positions for the 8 vehicles. In the previous game, I’d had doubts that we were being completely consistent tracking damage, so I decided to track all damage scored in the game on a single page without any vehicle record sheets on it. I asked my opponent to pay attention to any duelists that had handling statuses drop below zero so we could keep track of their recovery correctly as well.

Rules wise, we decided to keep everything the same. The previous duel was so good that we didn’t feel the need to change anything. I think we might have been a little lax in keeping track of to-hit penalties due to maneuvers and hazards this time around, though. We kept our house ruled speed/range penalty chart, lenient survival rules, and our stingy skill award system. (We did end up dropping our gentleman’s agreement to do all movement for the phase first, then give everyone an option to fire after that. We also had some hinky fire at the very beginning of the turn before any movement at all. It’s probably time to reread the sequence of play rules again….)

Before we began, I suggested to my opponent that we be really fastidious for the first second of the game and pay extreme attention to the movement order due to the reflex rolls. He did not heed my request and moved most of his vehicles before me. This gave me the opportunity to react to his moves, and each of my pairs of vehicles on opposite sides of the arena ganged up on one of his cars.

On both sides of the arena we successfully took out our initial targets, though one took an especially long time to kill. By the grandstands, one of my cars lost its back and left armor and could not foil the following vehicle even when he dodged behind a TV bunker.

The other fight on the opposite side looked like a cakewalk until the nearly dead enemy lashed out with 6 points of MG damage to the side of one of my cars. That damaged car could no longer get in position without risking exposing a bare side, so the driver panicked and made a U-turn. He just couldn’t get his guns in position anymore after that even against the other closing enemy vehicle. That car’s “wingman” (my other car on that side of the board) got off a killing shot about that moment, but the other opposing vehicle was closing in for a T-bone. At just the last moment I turned in—converting it into a head-on collision. The damage rolled was exactly enough to do two hits of damage to each of the drivers. Body armor doesn’t protect from ram damage, so they were both knocked unconscious.

Meanwhile, over by the grandstands the hairball had shaken out so that we each were down to a single vehicle over there. Being very irate about the pedestrians from the last game, I said, “throw down your SMG, or I’ll kill you!” The pedestrian refused and responded with hand weapon fire. (The other opposing car was going too fast to bring his guns to bear for the next couple of seconds, so I thought I had time to take care of this. In any case, my lack of side armor on the car sort of forced me to target the ped anyway.)

I think I missed the pedestrian once, hit him for one or two points of damage on the next shot, and then did a single point of damage as I rammed him against his abandoned car. On the other hand, he managed to hit my power plant through the exposed facing. My car caught fire and the flame damage was exactly enough to cause my driver to go unconscious. To add insult to injury, the pedestrian pulled my driver from the flaming wreck—scoring a rare 3 point prestige bonus in the process for the sheer audacity of the act. The television crews at the event ate it up.

That left both sides with exactly one car each. My car’s left side was gone, but his car’s front armor was gone and he had only one DP left on his MG because he had taken down one of my cars already with a deadly rear-end ram. We took several seconds to accelerate and get into position. As we closed for the final pass, we traded shots. He missed, but I had rolled a natural twelve to take out his MG and set his power plant on fire. Even a parting sideswipe couldn’t even things up at that point, so he conceded.

The Armadillo arena has turned out to be an excellent location for our team events. It’s large enough that going any particular direction generally commits you to being in a particular sector for ten seconds—an eternity by Car Wars standards. Also, the randomized start positions in an already asymmetrical environment ensure that each pitched battle is subtly different as well.

Tactically, things were a wash. The Killer Karts are egg shells, but they can still take six seconds or more to kill even under heavy fire. Because we don’t reset handling status each turn, I drive much more conservatively. With our stingy skill point awards, that means I don’t pick up driver’s skill points in the games now. (We only give the usual driver skill point award for an event if the duelist makes a successful control roll.) My five mph pivot maneuvers leave me open to be rammed by my opponent, but the rams are risky and can cripple the attacker even if they are successful.

We were very pleased with the combination of solid Compendium 2e rules, the Armadillo map, and the minimal number of house rules. Sure, I have won three matches in a row now (and my opponent was nearly irate about that), but I’m not sure that Car Wars is a particularly good game to attempt to play competitively with only two players. There’s too many opportunities for serious mistakes to be made, and a lot of trust is required without a referee. We knew that going in, so the main purpose of the campaign was to generate interesting background for an ongoing alternating-refereeing type troupe style rpg. As far as that goes, my opponent is killing me. The flame damaged insane female from the last game is clearly a Daredevil with a High Pain Threshold. The minister that rescued my driver from the flaming wreck this game clearly has Enhanced Dodge, Luck and some sort of Code of Honor.

There’s a lot less salvage being generated in our games now because so many of the cars catch fire ever since we remembered to apply the 2 in 6 chance of fire for MG damage on power plants. Our slower speeds and larger arenas seem to cause a lot more vehicle losses as well. Winning a Killer Kart duel is worth some prestige, but the real money is going to be in the later Joseph Special and Hot Shot rounds. We’ve now played 5 of the 8 Killer Kart rounds—those high end events just aren’t that far off anymore. I wonder how much the dynamic will change when we switch Stingers… but we won’t have much time to adapt because the vehicle types will change pretty quickly at that point.

Anyways, this is great Car Wars…. Definitely some of the most fun I’ve ever had with the game….

Here’s the stats on my winning team from the event. Note that only one of them got to keep his car. Of the three kills scored by the team, only one was salvageable for anything beyond a few spare tires.  (It’s those flaming power plants, as usual….)

Coyotito Alvarez
Prestige: 3
Kills: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Salvage: Killer Kart with 1 point of damage to the right and 5 points of damage to the back. 8 rounds of ammo left in MG.
Notes: 3/20/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Killed an opposing Killer Kart in a close range pass. (Took a D1 maneuver after the opponent’s D2 and traded shots.) Turned around to battle the remaining Killer Kart with a teammate, but took was killed by relentless fire from two pedestrians with SMG’s.

Amadeus
Prestige: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Handgunner Skill Points: 1
Notes: 3/20/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Began event randomly placed in the middle of three opposing cars. Weathered 6 seconds of combined fire power; barely survived event with emergency medical attention.

John Turing
Prestige: 3  [This was marked as 5, but I think it should be a 3.  -- jeffro 3/28/08]
Kills: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Notes: 3/20/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Passed a little too close to a “killed” burning vehicle which fired a surprise shot through his armor and set John’s power plant on fire.

Odysseus Deloatch
Prestige: 5
Kills: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Vehicle: Killer Kart with 1 pt damage on the right armor and 16 shots left in its MG.
Salvage: A ruined hulk of a Killer Kart with intact tires, 3 points of back armor, and one remaining point of armor on the right side.
Notes: 3/20/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Started far away from the action. Made a pass against one car that got killed by his “wingman,” then turned and took down the last car while his buddy succumbed to SMG fire.

Note the complete lack of driver skill point awards. It’s much more risky now to push that handling status down below zero, so I avoided putting myself in situations where I needed a control roll. Unless we lower the number of skill points required to get Driver-1, these guys won’t be improving their driving ability any time soon. Of course, with driver skill being added to what you get back on your handling track each turn, those skill levels will be worth all the more.

A duelist can pretty well expect to get to Gunner-1 by the time that he’s been in 5 duels and scored 5 kills or so. That’s not so with Driver-1! Perhaps under our house rules we should award Driver-1 at 6 skill points, Driver-2 at 14, and Driver-3 at 24.

I had thought before this that the Armadillo Autoduel Arena looked fairly lame at first. It’s just a large open map sheet with a gigantic mall in the middle. I didn’t take time to make up a new arena like I had meant to, so I figured we could give it a try. If anything, Armadillo is asymmetrical like I had wanted….

With only a few exceptions, we tried to play by fairly strict Compendium 2e rules for the game. For simplicity’s sake, we did play that each phase everyone conducted their movement… and then everyone had a chance to fire weapons. We tried to be conscientious about using reflex rolls to determine who moves first when two vehicles were going the same speed, and over all we were quite pleased with the effect of this on game play. There was just a lot less to argue about.

We also tried to remember to apply penalties to fire if you had maneuvered during that phase. Also, we marked vehicles that had been hit so that we could apply a to-hit penalty to vehicles that had taken hazards from enemy fire. (Cars making passes at each other tend to fire in the same phase, so this doesn’t tend to be as fiddly as you might think.) We also moved the useless top and underbody armor to the much more critical left and right locations.

(Our homebrew speed/range chart seems to be holding up, though neither of us are entirely happy with how we’re accounting for relative movement. For now the main use of high speed under the chart is to maybe gain an extra -1 to be hit and to deny enemy’s their point blank bonuses.)

We chose to randomly determine starting gates for variety’s sake. There’s a long tunnel in the middle of the map that we used as an impromptu eighth gate. One of my cars started the game surrounded by all of my opponent’s cars. My poor driver only lasted 6 seconds of their combined fire, but dealt enough damage to his target that it wasn’t a complete loss. Another of my cars tailed an opponent that was speeding in to join his buddies in ganging up on my lone duelist. My opponent ignored the tail, and that driver got a kill even though I’d forgotten to roll to-hit one turn. That left two of my cars on the opposite end of the action– they kicked it up to seventy in order get in on the fun.

Things were looking pretty good for my team in spite of the rough beginning. In our previous session, pedestrians generally left their vehicles as soon as they caught fire. One car that had caught fire was sitting harmlessly by the grandstands. My car that had gotten a kill sped by it in order to turn back into the fray. (This was difficult to do quickly because we were playing that our handling status only recovered 3 points per second.  You just can’t execute consective D6 maneuvers with that rule in effect!) The supposedly “dead” flaming vehicle then lashed out and set my driver’s power plant on fire with a lucky shot! This was very hard to bear. The insane woman driver in her flaming wreck had stayed in the flames so long she was taking serious physical damage!

This left us with my two pristine cars facing two damaged opponents, but my opponent also had two pedestrians right in the middle of the hairball. My two cars each made a pass against a single opponent. The second one was interesting because we both chose to take a maneuver just as we’d closed for a point blank shot. My opponent moved first because of his high reflex roll and did a D2, while I only needed a D1. He missed his shot while I nailed his driver.

The glory wouldn’t last. In the final confrontation, my car that had just scored a solid kill lost his car when he turned and fought too near to the enemy pedestrians. I’d focused all my fire on the last remaining car but I just couldn’t take him down. Finally my last car (practically untouched) pivoted and dealt the killing blow. That last remaining driver got to keep his near-perfect Killer Kart, but got little salvage from his kill because he’d destroyed the power plant with his last shot.

The only person in the duel in danger of dieing was the driver of my first car that had gotten surrounded. He’d gone to -3 DP, but fortunately made his “health check” on 3d6 by rolling a ten exactly.

We were pleasantly surprised at how well the Armadillo arena worked out. Also, we were both pleased at how fair the rules worked out whenever we applied the Compendium 2e rules to the game. While we do play a little loose with the sequence of play sometimes, use house rules for hospitalization and speed/range modifiers, and also are extremely stingy with our extra restrictions on skill points, we admit that even the most fiddly looking rules in 2e make for a much more realistic and flavorful combat.

We played the third of our series of 14 planned Amateur Night games this weekend. Last session, in the first round of the 4 on 4 Killer Kart events, we’d disliked the way that the teams drove in formation for the first several seconds. In the second game we’d disliked the way that ramming became the key tactic.  By taking note of several easily missed rules and moving to the Amex Proving Grounds arena, we hoped to get a more interesting and cinematic event. It turned out that the rules changes would overcompensate somewhat, resulting in surprisingly large impacts on the tempo and tactics of the game. But even with power plants getting set on fire almost every turn, the game would still take almost 3 full hours to play out.

The Amex Proving Grounds is a single map sheet sized arena with four corner sections and a central cross shaped area with a TV bunker in the middle. We agreed to enter in pairs in the four gates with each vehicle heading into a corner. I thought this would result in four separate dog fights in each corner, but what happened was that all four pairs kept driving right past each other to meet up with a second head on pass against a second vehicle. (I actually made a silly error on the first turn– I ended the round with two of my cars unable to target their opponents. This essentially gave the enemy drivers a free shot; this didn’t turn out to me significant, though.) Because of this style of opening, we essentially had a dry “die rolling competition” during the first few turns.

One of my opponent’s cars took a tremendous amount of damage in these first few seconds and caught fire due to power plant damage. Lucky shot! On the other side of the arena, two cars met at 30 mph. (Under these rules, the sweet spot for any weapons fire is the sides of the cars. With only three points of armor there on the Killer Karts, you have a chance of taking out the car with a single hit!) The two cars traded shots to the sides at point blank range. I turned to the right sharply to head towards the TV bunker and the other cars. My opponent immediately turned the same direction and pulled right next to me. I think the very next turn he went ten miles per hour or so and ended up half an inch ahead of me. I went 5 mph and pivoted toward him, getting a chintzy free shot in with some slightly heated discussion about how exactly this should have played out. The next second, I stopped while he pivoted. The second after that, I went in reverse and got in another free shot in.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the arena, two high speed passes were going down. All four vehicles took power plant damage and we all had to check for vehicular fire. Each of us lost a car because of fire! I angled two of my surviving cars against one of the survivors and did minimal damage while taking a lot stray hits. Our SMG armed pedestrians left their flaming wrecks after taking a point or two of fire damage to their body armor. They braced themselves against the arena walls and fired at enemy vehicles. These were essentially free shots doing a point or two of damage– the peds weren’t worth targeting if an actual car was in arc. (My opponent said several times that he actually felt safer out of his car!)

My pink Killer Kart (the one that scored the first lucky kill) hurtled across the arena and took a point blank shot at the enemy vehicle that had been pinned early on in the game. A point blank hit through the side resulted in another vehicular fire. The single point of fire damage at the end of the turn was enough to knock the driver unconscious. We agreed that the driver had somehow managed to throw himself out of the car even though it didn’t make much sense. Other than him, the event was fairly safe. (Playing some of those overlooked rules makes for amateur night events with much higher survival rates.)

This left three vehicles on my team to take down the remaining car. A lucky shot by even the pedestrians could kill one my cars, though, so we still had to carefully play out each phase for a few more seconds. I regrouped and repositioned for the final shots. The yellow Killer Kart that had gotten tangled up in the low speed dog fight got the lucky shot that knocked the last driver unconscious. This would be the only kill that was not caused by vehicular fire.

The rules changes had a tremendous effect on the game. We’d agreed not to reset handling tracks each turn. This eliminated the annoying D6-right-angle-maneuver-every-single-second approach that we’d seen in our second Amateur Night event last session. We also drove slower– and as a result, no one died due to a wipe out on the crash table. Any time we did an extreme maneuver, we had to go straight for a full second afterwards in order to get back in full control. This leads to combats that are less like a WWI dog fight and more like a series of high stakes “jousting” engagements.

The other big rules change was to play the 1 in 3 chance of vehicular fire each time the power plants took machine gun or submachine gun damage. This ruling would obscure all other tactics in the game. At the same time, it actually increased the chances of the duelists to survive the event. If your car caught fire, you simply got out of your car. This led to many a pedestrian picking up a prestige bonus even after effectively being taken out of the game.

There were a few minor rules that we still managed to mess up this time. We were probably adding back the reflex bonus to handling status each turn when we should only have been adding back the HC of the cars. Also, it’s -2 to hit the side of a vehicle when you’re not in that side’s arc. (We’d been playing just a minus one penalty.) Finally, to prevent the argumentative simultaneous action type arguments like the one we had this game, we should move vehicles going the same speed in the order of their reflex roll results– with ties being broken before the beginning of the event. (Oh yeah, and we need to fix that infamous missing column five on our speed/range chart.)

The only tweaks I’d suggest for the next game would be to possibly a) Move the useless top and under Killer Kart armor to the vulnerable sides, b) Give the drivers the use of a portable fire extinguisher (along with their BA and SMG) for the duration of the event, c) Use a larger and asymmetrical two map-sheet sized custom arena, and/or d) Possibly switch the ammo to just ten shots of high density rounds. We should also comb back through the Compendium 2e for any other obscure rules that we should try to remember. We should test out the entire set of rules one more time… and then we should lock it all down for the next four duels. These radical changes from one game to the next have to stop!

We are steadily moving our game to a more-or-less “by the book” Compendium 2e approach. The only real difference is that we’re using a GURPS style combined speed/range modifier. (We feel that the official 2e rules for this give way too much of a bonus for high speeds. Our rules give more of a flavor like the original pocket box rules: -1 per full four inches (more or less) but with an extra -1 or -2 due to higher speeds. The biggest difference in the new rules is that you don’t always get a sure hit anymore on those point blank shots– unless your target is a “turtle”….) The only house-rule that came up for discussion during this game was to change the d6 roll to check for fires to a 2d6 roll with different targets for each weapon in the game: MG’s should be less effective than 33% and should certainly be less effective in starting power plant fires than, say, an RR. Also, Lasers should be less effective than flame throwers.

Here’s the results for my four winning characters which all have base level skills in Driver, Gunner, and Handgunner:

“Green”– Elroy McKnightridge
Prestige: 3
Gunner Skill Points: 1
Handgunner Skill Points: 1
Notes: 3/7/08 Amex Proving Grounds (KK)– Vehicle caught fire after two high speed passes against enemy Killer Karts.

“Yellow”– Arnold Schlamer
Prestige: 5
Kills: 1
Driver Skill Points: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Handgunner Skill Points: 1
Vehicle: Killer Kart with 1 hit to power plant, 1 hit to front armor, 1 hit to right armor, and 2 hits to left armor.
Salvage: Killer Kart with 2 DP left on MG, 1 DP left on power plant, and no front, left, or right armor left.
Notes: 3/7/08 Amex Proving Grounds (KK)– Through devious rules lawyering and general sliminess, Arnold managed to “pin” an enemy Killer Kart. He effectively got two free shots at his opponent, even though it was a teammate the put in the killing blow. Arnold did however get the final lucky shot in that ended the event.

“Blue”– Buck Lescynski
Prestige: 5
Kills: 1
Driver Skill Points: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Vehicle: Killer Kart with 3 hits to power plant, 14 shots left in MG, 2 hits to right armor, and 3 hits to left armor.
Notes: 3/7/08 Amex Proving Grounds (KK)– Buck set an opponent on fire during his second pass in the event. He failed to get any decisive hits in for the rest of the event.

“Pink”– Marla Zuckerton
Prestige: 7
Kills: 2
Gunner Skill Points: 3
Vehicle: Killer Kart with 12 shots left in MG, 3 hits to front armor, 1 hit to right armor, and 2 hits to left armor.
Notes: 3/7/08 Amex Proving Grounds (KK)– Scored first blood in the event by setting an opposing car on fire with a lucky shot. Crossed the arena at high speeds to nab a kill out from under her teammate, Arnold Schlamer.

The whole Gygax thing is surprisingly depressing to me. Mostly because I’m surrounded by people that wouldn’t understand. I imagine that I would have shrugged it off if I’d gotten just a little bit of sympathy the next day… but somehow… feeling misunderstood is draining and tiresome.

My first exposure to Dungeons and Dragons came while I was in elementary school. I was in a YMCA type summer camp and a Dungeon Master guy was there. He was a few years older than me and had the hard cover AD&D books by Gygax. I thought it was really cool and got a chance to play with one other kid. We were both really little and this guy was a few years older than us. We had official type character sheets on the neato parchement paper. All those numbers on it were just intoxicating. We were walking through some sore of dungeon and we came to a hideous statue built into the wall. It was a hideous face. The kid that was with me decided to crawl into the mouth of the statue. The DM said the the stone teeth began to chew his character to pieces.

I remember the DM being very angry that one of his characters had gotten killed.

Not too long later, I bought (at a Teacher’s supply store no less) the purple boxed set with the Green Dragon on the cover that came with the Keep on the Borderlands module. Later on, I found a real gaming store and discovered a whole realm of weird games like Toon and Burrows and Bunnies. I bought a Car Wars pocket box with expansion sets four and five and I also picked up the offbeat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rpg from Palladium. (This was back when TMNT was a trendy black and white comic book and before the market saturation had set in.)

It was a really awkward time to grow up. The computers we had were about to obsoleted by 16-bit Macs/Amigas/STs just as we were getting the hang of programming them. There were no clicky-base games, collectible card games, or shops holding Warhammer competitions every week. The RPG’s we had often spent very little space explaining how to actually run a game and often could not be played exactly as written anyway.

We were so young, we didn’t really understand the stuff we were buying. We just thought they were cool. We got a lot of play value out of computer games like Zork, Ultima, and the Bard’s Tale. Choose-your-own-Adventure books like Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons were more our speed, though. The Middle Earth Quest game books were much more interesting from a game mechanics standpoint, though I’d later learn that licensing issues had nearly destroyed the company that produced them. And Dungeons and Dragons… it wasn’t really something we played. We thought those hard backed AD&D books were the height of cool (and we loved playing with the dice), but we really did not know how to get a game together. Other role playing games would be designed to capitalize on this phenomenon: unplayable games with loads of supplements for people to use to spend time “not playing” the game! This is the hobby’s strangest secret.

But let’s face it. These people going on about how much Dungeons and Dragons meant to them and how it “saved” their childhood…. Maybe we just grew up in different places or something. What I remember is feeling effectively locked out of society. I couldn’t understand how regular people could be so taken up with the whole football player - cheerleader - prom thing. People were mostly mean and petty in middle school, but there was all of this time spent waiting: homeroom, on the bus…. And tinkering with these too-often broken and not-so-playable games was something to do while were being sorted and shuffled from one box to the next.

But the people that really got into it? I remember this little kid in my scout troop. He got hooked on D&D in a scary way. Bought literally everything for the game and had it in some sort of little shrine. He’d do completely random frightening stuff on camping trips… and as he got older, he got into drugs. I remember seeing him shuffling around down town, completely toasted out of his brain and with some doped up hippy-looking chick hanging off his arm. D&D was the thing he’d latched onto just as he’d begun his downward spiral into self destruction.

Then there was the dregs that still played it in when we got to college: the scary geeks, like the overweight dude that got addicted to MUDS and flunked out of college. I remember this other guy with a closet full of martial arts weapons drinking tea and babbling about his character. He always played a girl and the other characters would “hit on” his female elf girl thing. And he was so into it. Years later (and with the help of an operation) he would actually realize this deep fantasy of his.

I guess that after a lifetime of being influenced by Gary Gygax, I just have to look back and laugh at myself a little. We spent so little time playing D&D and spent so much time tinkering with it. We got a real kick out of criticizing the rules, breaking the balance of the game, and making fun of the premise. We thought the whole class/level thing was stupid, and spent immense efforts searching for the “right” way to model character development. And then, when we finally got around to actually playing these sorts of games as young adults, we soon realized that the simple rules and cliché driven themes were actually a big part of what made “real” gaming work. I don’t know. Being a gamer… even if you don’t actually play Dungeons and Dragons… a lot of what you do is to “fix”, refine, or extend what Gary Gygax helped create. And even if you’re not involved with role playing in general, a lot of game design is about taking some aspect of the D&D phenomenon and making it accessible to a new or different cross section of people.

I don’t know what to think. I’ve got mixed feelings, I guess. Thinking about Gary Gygax… this game… this entire oddball hobby. This is the point where I’m supposed to come up with some sort of pithy resolution to these ramblings, but nothing quite captures the melancholy I feel right now. But I do know that most of the stuff I see being written about Gygax misses it.

I guess I feel out of sync with regular people because they have absolutely concept of this gaming subculture I spend so much time getting wrapped up in. I feel out of sync with the people praising Gygax because the reality of it was that things didn’t quite play out the way they should have… and those hard back books mostly stayed on the shelf instead of on the gaming table. (I think we were about six years too late to unselfconsciously enjoy the phenomenon.) And I feel out of sync with Massively Multiplayer Online crowd because even though what they do looks really similar to D&D on the surface, I still feel they’re missing the most critical aspects of the game. (They’re missing out on, among other things, the ability of the players to define and redefine rules… and they’re missing the collaborative and improvisatory aspects.)

But thanks, Gary. We were young and goofy and the hobby itself was as adolescent as we were. It meant something, though. And it still does.

I ran across a find at the used book store recently: GURPS Autoduel first edition in pretty good condition for five bucks. It even had the counter sheet intact on the back cover flap! It’s got a few standard Car Wars counters, some cardboard heroes, and a bizarre couple of six inch GURPS scale car counters. Alas, it did not contain the insert that has a map of Autoduel America and the unusual scenario premise that explains the origins of the grain blight.

My 4 year old son spen5 a while looking at the beautiful Denis Loubet cover. The next day, the family was discussing what kind of car we should buy. “I want a pink car!” he exclaimed. This color choice surprised me… until he clarified. “I want a pink car with a flamethrower on the back!”

We played Dimension Demons again recently. The last time we played, we took a while to get the hang of the rules and I played a series of painstaking hit and run attacks with the “demons.” A typical situation would be maybe a one-in-six chance of taking a city with similar chances of getting a demon shot to pieces. The humans fire first, though so they get a pretty fair chance to disrupt the attack even if they can’t completely eliminate any attackers. And any demon that lands on another unit (or on a volcanoe when he pops back) is gone– a much more likely event than the others depending on where you pop in. In a steady game of attrition, I ended up losing so many demons that I could no longer attack.

My opponent played much less cautious game. He placed his transports close together and concentrated four demons on a single city. If he targeted his demons on the edge of the map, he had a much better chance of landing in his target square. This resulted in a pretty fair chance of his taking one out, but my sliders reacted fast enough to make such assaults less likely in future rounds. He failed to take the city– and when he popped back his demons landed on each other resulting in an insane amount a casualties. After adjusting his strategy, he tried again. I decided to purchase several “thumper” units instead of the usual mix of defense forces. In three additional games, my thumpers easily chewed up any attacking demons. The demons went from having a low chance of success to almost no chance at all. Thus goes our second session with this reviled game that’s been labeled as being one of the three worst of the old Metagaming line.

The balance of power in the game is extremely fragile. The demons are relatively weak, but have extreme mobility and a chance to produce new units. Humans are powerful, but if they concentrate their forces, they demons will simply attack in the weaker areas. The thumpers are so powerful that they have to be completely eliminated before an assault begins. If the humans can concentrate more than one thumper attack against the demons each turn, then demon casualties will be pretty heavy. Once the thumpers are eliminated, the demons can begin trying for a city. Once the humans lost enough units, they will not be able to cover all of the cities. The humans will have to react quickly to any attempt to establish a breeding program… but if they do, the demons can simply take a city on the opposite side of the board and start another one simultaneously. (Alternately the demons can commit everything to defending the first one.)

Luck plays a large role in this game… and with the exception of thumper units, it’s difficult for either side to concentrate their firepower enough to work around the need for luck. One rule that could simplify the planning of attacks would be to declare that units that teleport on the same turn cannot materialize on top of each other. Losses hurt the demons tremendously as it is… but losing two or three demons to an unlucky phase in may be what’s breaking the game. The demons need to be able to concentrate four demons in an attack without fears of such debilitating losses or else the game just stalls as each side waits for a lucky break. As you resolve each transport of a unit, check to see if it is landing on one of its fellow teleporters. If it is, roll a die to determine which surrounding hex it actually ends up in. If it lands on a unit that did not engage in a transport move, then both units die as they normally do. You might declare that this “bonus” only works with units using the same transport– and if units from different transports phase in to the same place, they’re in trouble. Pop backs might work as if all of the units were coming from the same transport, making them a little safer: then you only have to worry about falling into volcanoes or landing on units that didn’t take part in the attack!

Just based on these few games, the standard Dimension Demons scenario appears to be unbalanced and difficult to “fix.” It appears to be highly suited to solitaire play, however. As long as the rules favor the humans, there’s very little for the human player to do except sit back and repulse demon attacks. It’s only until things disolve into a free-for-all that you really need to players to take the role of either side.