Let me start by saying that I did not create nor design Castles & Crusades and the mechanic that powers it, the Siege Engine. That honor belongs to Mac Golden (one of my oldest and most trusted friends, the number of times Mac has picked me up in strange places is a testament to his patience with me) and Davis Chenault (my brother, who I have had many a strange and unexpected encounter with over the years). They created the Siege Engine.
Pic note: from left to right, that is Lady, Gary, Dale, The Emperor Napoleon III, Spencer, Charlie, and Mac. I'm behind the screens. circa 1986.
In the early days of TLG’s history, after Mac had stepped down as CEO and Davis had returned from his archeological digs, we were all watching the d20 market implode. Some prepared for it better than others. And though the stark nature of that collapse caught the three of us a little off guard, we were not completely flat-footed. Warnings from more experienced friends of ours had already set us on the road of creating our own RPG, though as it turned out, much too late to avoid a year’s financial pain and suffering – though that is another story.
Aside from the financial concerns looming from the soon to be all too real d20 collapse, three key elements drove the motivation that eventually gave us the Siege Engine. First up, was Mac and Davis’ desire to create a role-playing game. Both designed games from the very outset of TLG’s history and they enjoyed collaborating. It didn’t hurt that they were neighbors and after they put their various children to bed would sit on each other’s porches and pass the time in game design. The second motivating factor was to find a place for Gary Gygax to land his Castle Zagyg creations. I had talked to him a great deal about this, directions to take using the OGL and after exploring many options, he opted to leave it to us, he just wanted oversite to make sure we did not make something that would wreck his legendary dungeon. The third factor lay with me. As we were discussing d20 and what TLG’s future held, Davis posed a question to me: “You find d20 hard to sell for whatever reason. What can you sell? What kind of game do you want to sell?” I remember this exchange well. We stood in the midst of the office where Todd’s, mine, and Davis’ desks all collided with the very tiny mail room (in those days it was a one-office roadshow). My response was quick and to the point, and I’m paraphrasing all this as it was back in 2002 or 2003. “It has to use the OGL and it has to be simple. Rules light. Like AD&D. Like my AD&D games. Simple. Then I can get behind it.” That was it. I don’t remember any more discussion about what type of game. I’m sure he said “Done” or some such as Davis really doesn’t discuss things unless he really cares about it, and he doesn’t care about a lot. And rules light or rules heavy, he didn’t care. But the upshot was, the game must be simple. Like I played AD&D.
I’m not going to dive into the discussion that fueled so many battles of the Edition Wars, and argue whether AD&D was/and/or/is a simple game or not. There are mountains of rules to the game, and yes, of course, you can keep and discard what you like, but the fact is there are mountains of rules. For me, the riddle becomes, why did I, so very early on in my gaming history adopt a rules-light approach to the game?
Pic note: That is me behind the screens and Dean Suzuki. Hew as a great player! circa 1981.
There are many reasons for this. The fact that I hate to read rules is probably the main one. I love reading. I read all the time, right now I’m re-reading the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft and The UFO Experience A Scientific Inquiry by J. Allen Hynek (Hynek was the astronomer who the Air Force hired in 1948 to work on studying the UFO phenomena for Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book, fascinating stuff). But what I cannot stand to read, are rules. I might, if I’m lucky, very lucky, make it a few sentences into a paragraph before my mind checks out and wanders around whatever mental corridor it finds less tedious… which is just about every corridor one can imagine from watching cardboard discolor in the sun to Fury Road. Though there are other reasons for my love of rules-light games, a more recent revelation caught me a bit off guard. The AD&D Screens.
We are running a Kickstarter on the latest version of the C&C Screens and I got to thinking about them last night and that led me down the nostalgic road of all the many games I played and ran in AD&D and that got me to thinking about the screens I used so much back in those long-ago days. It occurred to me, that those AD&D screens, the 4 and 2-panel screens I used, spoiled me on using the AD&D DMG. They were an almost perfect presentation of the bare-knuckled rules that made up the core of that game. I didn’t actually need the DMG.
Sidenote: As I typed that last statement a certain irony struck me, something only Mac, Todd, Chris, Mark, and Charlie would understand. About the only reason I ever opened the AD&D DMG was to look at the hand-to-hand combat rules.
Pic note: from left to right, Charlie, me, Mark and Mac. Todd is taking the picture. Those were not my favorite screens. They were probably Todd's. I was so particular with my screens I'm surprised I agreed to run the game without them! I had two sets, the 4 and 2 panels, and the 3 and 3.
That had to feed the fires that burn in me every time I shout about the “Tyranny of Rules.” (What does it say before the gates of Aufstrag, Hell, “The Yoke Shall Set you Free). Those screens, those 4 panels (as I rarely set up the smaller 2-panel screen) undoubtedly helped solidify patterns in my gaming philosophy. They had to. What math I needed, what combatants need to hit one another, was right there. The saving throws too. Everything else, I either had to look it up and read a bunch or just make it up on the fly. I began making it up on the fly. It was easier than reading.
These rules, the few that I made, eventually settled into the game as house rules.
Another Side note: These rules were so rare, that we never wrote them down. Things like a natural 20 inflicts maximum damage plus a d4, just became part of the oral history of the table. But what is really cool, to this day, when playing, if some archaic ruling has been forgotten we turn to Todd or Mac, who have more keen memories than the rest of us, and the oral history of the rule is recounted and we plunge on.
All this is to stay, that this philosophy of mine, which is a cornerstone of Castles & Crusades and the Siege Engine, this idea of rules-light and run it from the fly or the hip, was no doubt reinforced by a seemingly simple product that old TSR put out: the screens. Those screens reinforced patterns of behavior that became a lifelong philosophy.
I suppose that all this ruminating goes to tell us that the road we are on is often decided by roads we’ve traveled and all those chance encounters along the way.
Yet Another Sidenote: Mac prefers rules light as well, primarily I think, because of fast play. His philosophy and mine dovetailed nicely when they created the Siege Engine. Davis prefers more complex forms and rules when he designs as he prefers a more realistic outcome of events… play in his world of Inzae at your own risk.
Don't miss State of the Troll Blog Post or the How I Traveled 1600 miles for Cheeseburger.
1 comment:
Its the 1980s and my AD&D DMG would automatically fall open to the matrix tables, because that was pretty much all you needed to play the game. Later, in college in the 1990s, I heavily used the percentile dice to adjudicate outcomes. Through it all, and at the core of the game, and something C&C does right--were the Attributes.
For the first 20 years of playing the game I didn't associate with anyone outside my close friends when playing, mostly because they probably played the game too much "like a game". In fact, it was the feeling most of us had that anyone actually using the detailed rules in the books "didn't really understand the game".
I ran games out of my dorm room 24-7, that is... friends would knock on the door saying, hey we want to play. Then after the game, the bar crowd arrived and I'd start another game for them. It was always about infinite creativity, story, fantasy, but it was never really about the mechanics. If a good DM understood the attributes, really understood them, the rest of the game system rules were treated simply as more examples of how to use the attributes in specific circumstances--and we didn't need rules. I knew we didn't need them--at least not written ones anyhow. A good DM, I felt, intuited the game. A good DM "had a feel for the rules" and that was way more important than the actual written rules themselves. I always felt the written rules, and all the books were filled with rules for the DMs "who didn't get it".
There were rules in my game--hundreds, thousands, infinite rules, but they were all intuited in-the-moment when needed by me, because I understood the attributes, and by extension the saving throws, and I will confess to turning to the "Turn Undead" table--there you got me. Even today, if a good DM "gets it" they can run the game fine without any books. That said, this secret is not good for the game publishing industry, and... because I wouldn't trust more than perhaps 3 other people including you to run a game without books, I invoke the tongue-in-cheek phrase Gary once said, "We must never tell the game master that he doesn't need any rules."
In short, armed with pretty much the same philosophy as Stephen Chenault, I went about living a parallel DM's life. And oh yeah,... pummeling, grappling, overbearing sent me to the books as well.
Now, in every modern sense I run the game using every rule in the books. Irony? No, not really. Rules have come a long way for players who need that sort of stuff in order to be creative or to feel they've contributed to their fullest. I also use every rule in the books because, frankly, after 39 years of gaming I know them and its no bother for me to just tell my players we're using the rules as written as well as "rules as intended". In any modern game, the work around to the rules is for the game master to be the final arbiter, and again--doesn't it all come down to that bare-knuckled approach of staying present, being-in-the-moment, being in flow-state, and letting the game rip synergistically from the creative side of the brain, not the rules-laden math-lawyer side? Yep--flow state games are the best as long as the Castle Keeper "gets it", has a good handle on attributes, and is willing occasionally to check out a turn undead table. That's the game. It always was "Rules Light" as you say, just as Gary intended it--the books, well, people always need books, more rules, new monsters and new shiny things! -Tom Grzep (Cleveland Ohio)
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