Sunday, July 3, 2022

Enter a world of ABSOLUTE Adventure

I used to be like you: a young lad, enthralled by the promise of Old School Renaissance (OSR) gaming with a veritable buffet of retroclones laid out before him. Starting with Labyrinth Lord, I amassed a collection games and systems from the weird and vulgar to the staid and carbon-copied. 

I also slowly collected copies of the original AD&D books, thinking them only as conversation starters since my unfortunately smooth brain balked at the idea of parsing out all the arcane text. 

Round segments? High Gygaxian? Weapon speeds? Who needs all that? I'll stick to my nice and simple B/X knock offs, thank you very much. At least that's what I first thought. 

I eventually came across a series of tweets by Jon Mollison in which he began with simple, yet controversial premise: "You can win at RPGs!" 

Despite this going against everything I had every heard or read in this hobby, I was taken in by the powerful rhetoric and bodybuilder gifs. It also helps how much of a contrarian I already was at that point (and still am, really). I liked what he had to say, and pretty soon I was telling my friends how they too can win at RPGs. 

A couple months later, I was reading Jeffro Johnson's early foray into AD&D, and soon encountered another controversial idea: maybe even my tiny brain could grasp it. Maybe all the talk about its complexity and impossible rules were just talk. Maybe I too can run AD&D the way Gary Gygax intended it to be played. I quit Twitter for two years and mostly forgot about Elite Powergaming as it was then called- but I never quite got over that itch to run AD&D rules-as-written. Two years have passed, it is now 2022. Those Elite Powergamers have a new name, the #BROSR. There's a whole new- or, more accurately, newly rediscovered style of play.

Strict time records for meaningful campaign play. Faction play with patron characters. Chainmail. Memes. Total Player Autonomy. These are the ingredients to playing the crazy awesome games Arneson and Gygax were up to in the 70s- or so the #BROSR claims. 

Reading about all the games these folks are getting up has convinced me to give it a fair shake. This what this blog is about. A bunch of friends playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules-as-written with all the best practices a collection of /fit/-posters on twitter discovered at their own tables. Seriously, it's all pretty damn cool, and I want to replicate that success myself. 

I want my players and I to WIN AT RPGS! 

Enough OSR theory, enough highfalutin' ludology. Time to play the damn game and reach ELITE LEVEL GAMING.

Next time, read to find out what happens when a magic-user, a cleric, an assassin and a fighter meet up in a bar and decide to go plunder gnomish artifacts.

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