Wandering DMs Season 05

With the launch of the Fearful Ends Kickstarter imminent, Dan and Paul discuss roleplaying impossible situations. How do we maintain player autonomy when the deck is clearly stacked against them? What does it mean to “play to fail”, and how do we enjoy games when there is little to no hope of success? Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined autonomy by three themes regarding contemporary ethics. Firstly, autonomy as the right for one to make their own decisions excluding any interference from others. Secondly, autonomy as the capacity to make such decisions through one’s own independence of mind and after personal reflection. Thirdly, as an ideal way of living life autonomously. In summary, autonomy is the moral right one possesses, or the capacity we have in order to think and make decisions for oneself providing some degree of control or power over the events that unfold within one’s everyday life. Fearful Ends is a horor roleplaying game about existential tragedy. Existentialist philosophy encompasses a range of perspectives, but it shares certain underlying concepts. Among these, a central tenet of existentialism is that personal freedom, individual responsibility, and deliberate choice are essential to the pursuit of self-discovery and the determination of life’s meaning. However, because of the world’s absurdity, anything can happen to anyone at any time and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the absurd. This is what gives meaning to people’s lives. To live the life of the absurd means rejecting a life that finds or pursues specific meaning for man’s existence since there is nothing to be discovered. This description uses material from the Wikipedia articles “Autonomy” and “Existentialism“, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Without magic, how fast does a character heal in D&D? It may surprise you how much the answer has changed over the editions! Dan & Paul debate which rule is best. And what are hit points, anyway? Wound healing refers to a living organism’s replacement of destroyed or damaged tissue by newly produced tissue. In undamaged skin, the epidermis (surface, epithelial layer) and dermis (deeper, connective layer) form a protective barrier against the external environment. When the barrier is broken, a regulated sequence of biochemical events is set into motion to repair the damage. This process is divided into predictable phases: blood clotting (hemostasis), inflammation, tissue growth (cell proliferation), and tissue remodeling (maturation and cell differentiation). Blood clotting may be considered to be part of the inflammation stage instead of a separate stage. The wound-healing process is not only complex but fragile, and it is susceptible to interruption or failure leading to the formation of non-healing chronic wounds. Factors that contribute to non-healing chronic wounds are diabetes, venous or arterial disease, infection, and metabolic deficiencies of old age. This description uses material from the Wikipedia article “Wound healing“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Assassins were prominently available for hire in the earliest edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and they became a core character class of their own in 1st Edition Advanced D&D. Where did they sneak off to since then? What’s the best way to handle PC’s wanting to run a solo assassination mission? Some famous assassination victims are Philip II of Macedon (336 BC), the father of Alexander the Great, and Roman dictator Julius Caesar (44 BC). Emperors of Rome often met their end in this way, as did many of the Muslim Shia Imams hundreds of years later. Three successive Rashidun caliphs (Umar, Uthman Ibn Affan, and Ali ibn Abi Talib) were assassinated in early civil conflicts between Muslims. The practice was also well known in ancient China, as in Jing Ke’s failed assassination of Qin king Ying Zheng in 227 BC. Whilst many assassinations were performed by individuals or small groups, there were also specialized units who used a collective group of people to perform more than one assassination. The earliest were the sicarii in 6 AD, who predated the Middle Eastern Assassins and Japanese shinobis by centuries. In the Middle Ages, regicide was rare in Western Europe, but it was a recurring theme in the Eastern Roman Empire. Strangling in the bathtub was the most commonly used method. With the Renaissance, tyrannicide—or assassination for personal or political reasons—became more common again in Western Europe. This description uses material from the Wikipedia article “Assassination“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Dan and Paul dive into character sheets! Between edition changes and advancing technology, how have they changed throughout the years? And what’s the best way to keep tabs on your character’s most important details now? Original Edition Dungeons & Dragons (1974), did not include a character sheet. The first one ever published was in the Haven Herald fanzine of Stephen Tihor published on May 3, 1975. One month after, another character sheet was released in the APA magazine Alarums and Excursions. Since then, most tabletop role-playing games use a character sheet for information about the player characters. What is considered relevant can vary by game and personal preference—one player may consider his character’s eye colour or personal background relevant while another might not, but both may be required by the game rules to note down on their sheet if their character suffers an injury. Character sheets for a game are usually found within the game’s main rulebook, and permission is almost always given for players to photocopy this sheet. Some publishers sell preprinted sheets separately. Many offer PDF files with character sheets for the players to print out themselves. It is not uncommon for players to create custom character sheets, to their own design, rather than use the publisher’s “official” offerings. This description uses material from the Wikipedia article “Character Sheet“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Join Dan and Paul as they discuss the use of mazes in D&D adventures! They will explore the twists and turns of these navigation puzzles, and try to discover the line between captivating challenges and maddening exercises in frustration. The word maze is used to refer both to branching tour puzzles through which the solver must find a route, and to simpler non-branching (“unicursal”) patterns that lead unambiguously through a convoluted layout to a goal. The pathways and walls in a maze are typically fixed, but puzzles in which the walls and paths can change during the game are also categorised as mazes or tour puzzles. Some maze solving methods are designed to be used inside the maze by a traveler with no prior knowledge of the maze, whereas others are designed to be used by a person or computer program that can see the whole maze at once. Mazes containing no loops are known as “standard”, or “perfect” mazes, and are equivalent to a tree in graph theory. Thus many maze solving algorithms are closely related to graph theory. Intuitively, if one pulled and stretched out the paths in the maze in the proper way, the result could be made to resemble a tree. This description uses material from the Wikipedia article “Maze“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Paul & Dan chat about the huge influence that tales set on Mars (Burroughs’ John Carter Barsoom stories) had on the design of early Dungeons & Dragons. Did you know that original D&D had a built-in table for Martian encounters in the core books? That Gygax released a “Warriors of Mars” book almost simultaneously with D&D? We’ll delve into the ancient sands to find lost treasures! Warriors of Mars is a 1974 miniatures wargame rule book, written by Gary Gygax and Brian Blume and published by Tactical Studies Rules. It simulates combat in the fantasy world of Barsoom, originally imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his series of novels about John Carter of Mars. It is a 56-page booklet in the same style as the original Dungeons & Dragons books, even sharing the same artist Greg Bell. Gygax and TSR published the rules without permission from Burroughs estate and soon after its release they issued a cease and desist order and the game was pulled from distribution. Because only a few copies were sold the book is now rare and sells for a high price. The same year Warriors of Mars was published (and then un-published), Gygax published the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons, where he paid homage to Burroughs in the last paragraph of the “Preface”: “Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don’t care for Burroughs’ Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits.. will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste.” This description uses material from the Wikipedia article “Warriors of Mars (game)“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Dan & Paul chat about using the world around them to create D&D and other TTRPG scenarios. They share personal anecdotes of times they stumbled upon real places that sparked their creativity, reinforcing the notion that the real world is a goldmine of inspiration for game masters and storytellers.

Dan & Paul chat about different weather systems for D&D they’ve seen over the years. Do you prefer yours simple, or very detailed? Dice-based or DM narrative fiat? And why is it so important for wilderness adventures and wargaming? Numerical weather prediction (NWP) uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of computer simulation in the 1950s that numerical weather predictions produced realistic results. A number of global and regional forecast models are run in different countries worldwide, using current weather observations relayed from radiosondes, weather satellites and other observing systems as inputs. Mathematical models based on the same physical principles can be used to generate either short-term weather forecasts or longer-term climate predictions; the latter are widely applied for understanding and projecting climate change. The improvements made to regional models have allowed for significant improvements in tropical cyclone track and air quality forecasts; however, atmospheric models perform poorly at handling processes that occur in a relatively constricted area, such as wildfires. This description uses material from the Wikipedia article “Numerical weather prediction“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Fresh from playing the Paranoia Mandatory Bonus Fun Card Game, Dan and Paul discuss their experience with various editions of the Paranoia RPG. Stay alert, trust no one, and keep your laser handy! Paranoia is a humorous role-playing game set in a dystopian future along the lines of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Logan’s Run, and THX 1138; however, the tone of the game is rife with black humor, frequently tongue-in-cheek rather than dark and heavy. Most of the game’s humor is derived from the players’ (usually futile) attempts to complete their assignment while simultaneously adhering to the Computer’s arbitrary, contradictory and often nonsensical security directives. Originally designed and written by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, and Eric Goldberg, and first published in 1984 by West End Games, since 2004 Paranoia has been published under license by Mongoose Publishing. The game won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1984 and was inducted into the Origins Awards Hall of Fame in 2007. Paranoia is notable among tabletop games for being more competitive than co-operative, with players encouraged to betray one another for their own interests, as well as for keeping a light-hearted, tongue in cheek tone despite its dystopian setting. This description uses material from the Wikipedia article “Paranoia (role-playing game)“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Paul’s acquired an ancient treasure: A copy of M.A.R. Barker’s 1975 “War of Wizards” game, still in the shrink wrap, from Gary Gygax’s personal collection no less! This is the first-ever publication set in Tékumel, the world of the Empire of the Petal Throne. Inspired by the D&D spellcasting system, it features two opposing wizards cast a barrage of spells at each other across an arena. What does these elder rules look like? Can Dan & Paul make sense of them within an hour? War of Wizards is a board game published by TSR in 1975. It was TSR’s first publication for M. A. R. Barker’s world of Tékumel. David M. Ewalt, in his book Of Dice and Men, described how University of Minnesota professor M. A. R. Barker “made his game-design debut at TSR. A scholar of ancient languages, Barker had spent decades crafting a fantasy world called Tékumel, writing thousands of pages of histories, describing its culture, and even constructing its languages. He served as adviser to the university’s wargaming club, and after Michael Mornard showed him Dungeons & Dragons, Barker wrote two games based in Tékumel; a tabletop role-playing game, Empire of the Petal Throne; and a combat-oriented board game, War of Wizards.” Originally published by TSR in 1975, it was reprinted by Tita’s House of Games in 1999. War of Wizards predates TSR releasing Empire of the Petal Throne by a few months, making it their first Tékumel publication. This description uses material from the Wikipedia article “War of Wizards“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.