Post by mister frau blucher on Jul 3, 2012 13:02:10 GMT -5
Hey all,
These are some thoughts about LAW's specific place in the RPG spectrum.
As you all know, Role Playing Games are games where you assume an alter ego to go adventuring in a fantasy world, or outer space, or in search of uncle Chthulu, and so on. The phenomenon was started with the publication of Dungeons and Dragons, the three little brown books. Supplements followed as its popularity exploded, and then revisions and other role playing games also followed in the few short years since D&D appeared in 1974.
That is the short version, and most of you know the rest. If not, it is easy to track down - try wikipedia!
Melee and Wizard appeared in 1977, written by Steve Jackson. Now these were tactical games, rather than true role playing games. But these two games took on their own lives and many treated them as RPG's, adding their own house rules or adapting them to D&D (as I did when I first got them, but as a 12 year old punk I did not know any better).
Very soon they were expanded into a full-blown role playing system, under the blanket name of The Fantasy Trip. In addition to Melee and Wizard, three more volumes showed up - Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard (which ostensibly replaced the earlier, smaller games) and In The Labyrinth, which was essentially the Dungeon Master's Guide for TFT, containing most of the information for running campaigns.
Also published were the Microquests. These were programmed adventures that could be played solitaire. (If you are reading this on these forums, you don't need me to explain what programmed adventures are!) The first two were straightforward, survive-the-dungeon scenarios. Things changed with Grailquest. While your identity was fixed - you were a knight in king Arthur's court, looking for the Grail - everything else was wide open and non-linear. You had to explore the countryside, gaining knowledge and righting wrongs, while fighting off bandits and other knights. Eventually, if you proved youself worthy, you found the Grail. Other microquests followed,including Search for the Silver Dragon and the Unicorn Gold, which had aspects of role-playing about them, but I think Grailquest was the high point. A few years later, circa 1982, Metagaming folded, and TFT went out of print.
Now one thing that set TFT apart from other games was its emphasis on tactical play. Role playing was absolutely a strong part, but at its heart, combat on the maps were what drove the game. Advanced Melee cemented this. I loved both D&D and TFT, but for the sword-and-sorcery feel where any swordthrust could be the last, TFT was it for me.
Our company, Dark City Games, was founded by George in 2005 to publish more programmed adventures. Originally, more or less, it was for TFT, and the LAW rules were just a simple distillation to use in case you did not have the originals. Since then, LAW has been refined as playtesting demanded it, but it was kept puposefully simple, for each judge to house rule as they saw fit. About 4 years ago I switched over to LAW completely - with house rules, of course! These days it would be called a retro-clone, but those terms (and examples like OSRIC or Swords and Wizardy, both for D&D) did not exist.
But, as in the TFT microquests, tactical play is the heart of our adventures. Roleplay is difficult to fully implement in programmed adventures, particularly because you don't want to bog the player down in extended conversations that by their nature are dictated rather than participated in. I think we have found some nice ways to do this, keeping things light and with a variety of npc's to interact with in each adventure. Acquiring plotwords open up other aspects of the adventure. Plot is something we believe in, and it manifests in several ways in our games.
Over all of it, though, is tactical play on the map. Not because that is how it used to be and so that is how we must do it now, but because that is how we enjoy it. It is Dark City Games' signature, and why we extensively playtest our games before you see them. We don't want you to flip endlessly around the book from one point to another, we want you to experience it on the playing field, as well as the literary passage. When you win the right to speak to the renegade mage, it is sweeter than just turning to that instruction. And more fun to run through it on the map, when your skill and tactics make the difference between moving on or failing.
OK, I've rambled on a bit. This is not so much a mission statement, but just a reflection on what we are and what we do, and the roots we trace to the earliest days of the hobby.
Thanks for reading!
Bret
These are some thoughts about LAW's specific place in the RPG spectrum.
As you all know, Role Playing Games are games where you assume an alter ego to go adventuring in a fantasy world, or outer space, or in search of uncle Chthulu, and so on. The phenomenon was started with the publication of Dungeons and Dragons, the three little brown books. Supplements followed as its popularity exploded, and then revisions and other role playing games also followed in the few short years since D&D appeared in 1974.
That is the short version, and most of you know the rest. If not, it is easy to track down - try wikipedia!
Melee and Wizard appeared in 1977, written by Steve Jackson. Now these were tactical games, rather than true role playing games. But these two games took on their own lives and many treated them as RPG's, adding their own house rules or adapting them to D&D (as I did when I first got them, but as a 12 year old punk I did not know any better).
Very soon they were expanded into a full-blown role playing system, under the blanket name of The Fantasy Trip. In addition to Melee and Wizard, three more volumes showed up - Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard (which ostensibly replaced the earlier, smaller games) and In The Labyrinth, which was essentially the Dungeon Master's Guide for TFT, containing most of the information for running campaigns.
Also published were the Microquests. These were programmed adventures that could be played solitaire. (If you are reading this on these forums, you don't need me to explain what programmed adventures are!) The first two were straightforward, survive-the-dungeon scenarios. Things changed with Grailquest. While your identity was fixed - you were a knight in king Arthur's court, looking for the Grail - everything else was wide open and non-linear. You had to explore the countryside, gaining knowledge and righting wrongs, while fighting off bandits and other knights. Eventually, if you proved youself worthy, you found the Grail. Other microquests followed,including Search for the Silver Dragon and the Unicorn Gold, which had aspects of role-playing about them, but I think Grailquest was the high point. A few years later, circa 1982, Metagaming folded, and TFT went out of print.
Now one thing that set TFT apart from other games was its emphasis on tactical play. Role playing was absolutely a strong part, but at its heart, combat on the maps were what drove the game. Advanced Melee cemented this. I loved both D&D and TFT, but for the sword-and-sorcery feel where any swordthrust could be the last, TFT was it for me.
Our company, Dark City Games, was founded by George in 2005 to publish more programmed adventures. Originally, more or less, it was for TFT, and the LAW rules were just a simple distillation to use in case you did not have the originals. Since then, LAW has been refined as playtesting demanded it, but it was kept puposefully simple, for each judge to house rule as they saw fit. About 4 years ago I switched over to LAW completely - with house rules, of course! These days it would be called a retro-clone, but those terms (and examples like OSRIC or Swords and Wizardy, both for D&D) did not exist.
But, as in the TFT microquests, tactical play is the heart of our adventures. Roleplay is difficult to fully implement in programmed adventures, particularly because you don't want to bog the player down in extended conversations that by their nature are dictated rather than participated in. I think we have found some nice ways to do this, keeping things light and with a variety of npc's to interact with in each adventure. Acquiring plotwords open up other aspects of the adventure. Plot is something we believe in, and it manifests in several ways in our games.
Over all of it, though, is tactical play on the map. Not because that is how it used to be and so that is how we must do it now, but because that is how we enjoy it. It is Dark City Games' signature, and why we extensively playtest our games before you see them. We don't want you to flip endlessly around the book from one point to another, we want you to experience it on the playing field, as well as the literary passage. When you win the right to speak to the renegade mage, it is sweeter than just turning to that instruction. And more fun to run through it on the map, when your skill and tactics make the difference between moving on or failing.
OK, I've rambled on a bit. This is not so much a mission statement, but just a reflection on what we are and what we do, and the roots we trace to the earliest days of the hobby.
Thanks for reading!
Bret
