I've played Dungeons and Dragons since 2nd Edition (also known by its nerdier title, "Advanced Dungeons And Dragons"). I've mucked around in loads of other roleplaying games as well, and enjoyed most of them, but D&D has a special place in my heart. It's always provided me with the most entertaining characters and memorable moments. I know certain people have a real hate-on for d20-based games, and I understand why- the ubiquity of that rules system led a lot of companies to simply produce new contexts for the d20 rules rather than design something new and innovative. This is sad partially just for the loss of new stuff that might have been, but also because d20 isn't a good approach for most settings or genres. But does a better job than anything else I've tried at telling heroic Tolkeinesque fantasy stories, and that's what D&D is about.

When Wizards Of The Coast (WOTC) released the game's fourth edition last year, there was a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of nerds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Said nerds had spent hojillions of dollars on books for the previous edition of the game, books that had superseded and outclassed each other to the point that very little of the game's original material was relevant or competitive any more. The game was a bit of an unwieldy mess of addendums and exceptions, and dozens of sourcebooks with different design approaches meant that hundreds of new rules could interact with each other in some truly stupid ways. This isn't to say that there wasn't fun to be found in the game's third edition (and its bastard stepchild, 3.5), it's just that as players you had to work to find that fun. In any case, the concern upon the fourth edition's publication seemed to be that WOTC would be coming to nerdly burrows everywhere and pilfering the now-obselete books, which clearly hasn't happened. Lots of folks are still happily playing 3.5, and many others have moved on to Fourth Edition. Like me.

I'm currently running a game for a group of my friends, and I honestly believe the new edition is the best thing that's happened to the game. This is for lots of reasons, but most of them come back to one thing: the game, for the first time, has been approached by the designers as a game rather than a simulation. As much as roleplaying games are about group storytelling, they don't need to match up to reality as long as they're internally consistent. As the Dungeon Master, I don't care about verisimilitude, I care if my players are having a good time. With the new edition, we've yet to have to forage through sourcebooks and crunch heady rules in order to find the fun. Moreover, everything the player characters do has the feel of epic fantasy heroics, in which realism has very little place. That sounds like good game design to me.

Last weekend, I had a brief meeting with a group of gamers who were looking for another player for their D&D 3.5 game. I still own the relevant books, and I don't dislike the system- and in any case, the most important thing about a roleplaying game is the people playing it. Good gamers can have a great time with a mediocre system, and socially inept pedantic nerd-tards can ruin anything if they try hard enough. This particular group had a firm handle on the latter. Without boring you with too many obscure details of in-game rules mechanics, they seemed to get off on ranting about how unrealistic the new edition is. Heck, even 3.5 required a number of extremely odd house rules to bring it up to their standard of verisimilitude. I bowed out, for two reasons: Firstly, I'm irritated by the notion of adding more and more context-specific rules in order to model reality more accurately in your roleplaying game- it makes the game less like a game and more like a simulator, which isn't fun for me. And secondly, I was about to turn bright crimson and break out ranting until cartoon steam shot out my ears. Because:

-If you want a game that's realistic, why play a heroic fantasy game at all? Someone has surely published 'Houses And Humans', in which you struggle through a day job before returning home to your family. Someone has to change little Bobby's diaper? Roll for initiative!

-D&D gets lots of the details wrong when it does attempt to model historical stuff. Splint mail and banded mail armour were of limited historical relevance, but they show up all the time in D&D. Rapiers had no martial combat application- NONE. There's no such thing as 'plate mail' armour. The list goes on, but even the mundane details don't support a simulationist approach.

-Who even cares if the goblin warrior's armour is historically cromulent? IT IS ON A FRIGGING GOBLIN. Any arguments about what would be 'realistic' stop right there.

-Fourth edition, unlike 3.5, supports balance- a twentieth-level wizard, for example, is exactly as powerful in his own way as a twentieth-level fighter, simply because the players have more fun that way. Complaints that a wizard should 'obviously', in a realistic system, be more powerful than a swordsman of comparable experience, simply because wizards are magical and fighters are relying on talent and skill, are ludicrous. You want realism? Great. THERE ARE NO GODDAMN WIZARDS.

The list goes on, but the long and the short of it is this: why do some nerds give us socially functional nerds a bad name? Why the condescension towards gamers who 'just' want to have fun, tell a cool story, or enjoy a game for what it is?

Fact: I have a cat now. His name is Thac0, and he was the resident wacky stray at littlehoudini's place. Now he lives with me. He is adorable and cuddly and does funny cat things, though his catulence is beyond belief. His butt, as we frequently tell him, is possibly the worst place in the universe. The rest of him is great.

Fact: I am toiling away on a production of Romeo And Juliet with the Tempest Theatre Group, playing Benvolio and doing the set and prop design. It is a very exciting approach to the play, full of turn-of-the-century style and vintage music hall panache. It runs next week, and I'd be delighted to see you there.

Fact: I recently got to do the voice work for a very cool game by the talented hopping_v called Night Of The Cephalopods. I think it is awesome. You can play it at Spooky Squid Games. Be prepared for spectacularly overwrought dialogue.

Fact: it is nearly six in the morning, and I haven't slept because I know if I do I won't wake up for my 10AM rehearsal. Going to bed early was not an option, as there was (and still is) far too much to get done on this set design.

Whoa... so it looks like the Fringe show I'm doing scored five stars at Eye and four Ns at Now. Ridiculous! It's called "It's Just A Phase", it's at Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, and it is Super Gay. Come and see me sparkle, friends!

Bloggy blog blog. Here are some tidbits!

I'm drooling heavily over Nerf toys lately. There may be a ridiculous steampunk six-shooter in my near future... given spike20's wacky steampunked Tommy gun, I have a challenge to meet. What an odd sort of keeping up with the Joneses, yes?

I'm in my third production of Macbeth with Tempest Theatre, in a slightly exciting new role. I'm playing Macbeth's head goon Seaton, who in this production is also the Bloody Sergeant and the Doctor. It's a very dynamic, very violent take on the play, and I think you should come and see. We run from May 12-16 at the Danforth Music Hall, with erratically-timed shows that you're best to check the website for. In any case, if you enjoyed Duel Of Ages at last year's Fringe Festival, I think you'd enjoy this Macbeth.

Extra strange: in order to seem older, meaner, and uglier for Macbeth, I opted to shave my head for the role. I can't stop touching my meaty noggin! It is all weird. I'm looking forward to having hair on the top half of my head again, though feeling the breeze on my naked scalp is kind of nice on these hot summer days.
( Care to view my newly-nude noggin? )

There's more- there's always more, of course- but I'm damned tired right now and a bottle of port beckons. Here's hoping I can get to using this thing as regularly as I used to, but I always say that.

Wow, was last night ever good. redknot is older now, and I got to hang out with a pile of excellent people, and shenanigans were had, and I didn't get home until four in the morning. Everything is awesome!

Before the partying, I saw Lars And The Real Girl with littlehoudini. Aside from being the most outrageous example of constant boom-mike-in-frame that I've ever seen, it's a lovely film. I was expecting something in the vein of a smarter Weekend At Bernie's, which was way off the mark. It's well-written and spectacularly well-acted (how does one play a scene opposite a Real Doll without a hint of irony or self-awareness? I'm not sure I could manage it). It's also a wonderfully human film: characters are awkward, complex, desperate, and inarticulate at inopportune times. I heartily recommend it, particularly if you can mask off the top few inches of the screen to hide the microphone.

Tonight I'm going to see some friends in Sansanus Production's The Compleat Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged). Tonight and tomorrow afternoon are the final shows, and it's well worth seeing. A pile of 37 plays and 154 sonnets crammed into two hours is not graceful, but it is hilarious. Oh, how I love my Willy.

There needs to be a DS night before the end of the month. Any preferences for which night of the week we do it? This dunderbus ain't gonna ride itself, you know.

Additionally, ( I stole this from dunderbug )

I assume that you all know that I play pretend for a living (supplemented by bartending, but that's Canadian theatre for you). 'Actor' is my official job description, but it often feels like I'm getting paid to play the same game of make-believe that I enjoyed when i was seven. I regularly can't quite believe that I'm making a career of such shenanigans.

This week, it's even stranger/awesomer than ususal. Casa Loma is, for the duration of the March Break, hosting a crazy pirate event for kids. There's a pirate magician, a pirate juggler (he juggles cannonballs and knives at the same time), and my pal Adrienne Kress reads from her recently-published (and very very funny) novel, Alex And The Ironic Gentleman. Jolly Rogers flap in the breeze of comically enormous electric fans, and a pirate ship seems to have moored in the basement's unfinished swimming pool. To extend the piratical atmosphere to the entire building, a gang of actors have been hired to lead treasure hunts. So I, ragged map in hand, lead gangs of children on a meandering quest for the Lost Pirate Treasure of Casa Loma. Just to reiterate, I get paid to do this stuff.

Having roughly laid out the route that the treasure hunt would take, our employer gave us supplies and had us craft our own treasure maps. Most of the others made something abstract, cartoony, and usable only as a prop. Their treasure hunts are performances, where the kids follow along and watch a pirate sort through the clues on his/her map. Which is fine, but not enough for me. My map is a top-down map that combines elements of all four floors of Casa Loma into one layer, littered with rhyming couplet clues that direct the reader to the next point. I really enjoy showing kids the map and letting them figure it out, which they're usually able to with only a bit of help from me. Yesterday, I had a group of teenagers who insisted on going on the hunt, and I took them as a separate group as an experiment (they were all dressed in highly snappy pirate costumes, and seemed very willing to play along). I swore them in as pirates, gave them the map, and told them to figure it out for themselves. They were able to take my map, and with some scheming, find the treasure on their own. All I did was follow along, mutter snarky things to throw them off their game, and activate the animatronic skeleton that gives the final clue. Yay, I designed a thing that works!

Most wonderful are the kids. Some of them are shits, of course, but I meet many children each day who leave me smiling for hours. One girl, perhaps three years old, asked if I was married (I wear my grandfather's big gold ring on my right ring finger, and it's blingy enough that I leave it on when pirating). When I explained that wedding rings go on the other hand, she checked the placement of her mother's ring and confidently imparted that her mommy was married. I asked to whom, and the girl pointed at a nearby man and said, in the utmost seriousness, "that guy". She went on to identify 'that guy' as Daddy, but her initial candour was hilarious.

Another little girl- about five years old- came along on one of my treasure hunts and spent the entire time tugging at my coat and sharing Important Facts: she likes ponies, has three princess dresses, and planned on buying a boat and becoming a pirate when she grew up. When the tour was over, she came up and told me in her most grown-up voice that the adventure had been great, that she loved her shiny pirate coin (the giveaway at the end of the hunt), and that she wanted me to have something. She then took a shiny red plastic ring off her biggest finger, and wedged it onto my pinky. I initially felt bad taking it, but she insisted very eloquently, and I couldn't possibly turn her down. I told her that I was honoured and would take very good care of her treasure, and she smiled a huge smile. What I love about all of this is that it never occurred to her that I'm anything but a Real Live Pirate, taking her into my confidence as a trusted accomplice. I guess that's why I revel in playing pretend for a living: it's the closest I can get to seeing the world through eyes like hers.

There will be pictures when I remember to bring my camera to work. We've taken to sitting around the various levels and ledges of the Great Hall staircase, creating the impression of (according to the event's producer) a 'big crazy pirate brothel'. We look pretty sharp, and swaggering about a big old mansion makes me feel like a real pirate raiding the Governor's home. I have the coolest job in the world.

It seems that Gary Gygax has passed away. I'm sure that most of you, being of the nerdly persuasion, have heard this a dozen times today already. I don't care.

I didn't get into D&D until I was eighteen, and it was my first experience with a roleplaying game. Prior to that I had spent years immersed in Warhammer and its spinoff games, all of them designed around a structure of one player attempting to trounce another at all costs. Second Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (in all its blue-and-black-inked glory) redefined my paradigm of gaming. Even now, playing mostly wacky European strategy games, I still look for interesting ways for players to interact before I look for ways to win. Anyone can crunch the numbers of a game and steer it towards victory, but it takes a particular approach to find the excitement of a well-told story in a jumble of hex tiles and funny dice. Without the work of Gary Gygax, I'm sure I would never have found the passion that has kept me gaming. So thanks, Mr. Gygax, for the gift of imagination. Enjoy eternity in the plane of your alignment of choice.

Rich Burlew has made a fitting eulogy in his excellent webcomic, The Order Of The Stick.

Hey friends,
It's that special time again. Thursday the 26th, we're doing another DS event at the Victory Cafe. I will be there at 8PM, and the awesome will proceed from there. Bring your DS, games, your boozin' hat, and friends.

Woo!

So, the reviews are in: Now Magazine rated us NNNN (out of five), and Eye Weekly gave us a big two, but look at the feedback.

I am so very proud of Duel Of Ages. I hope you get to see it.