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Year in Review – 2023 – Gaming Against Science

Not dead but dreaming. Welcome to the fourth year in review of this blog and the first post in over nine months. (Previous annual reviews: 2020, 2021, 2022.)

As the title suggests, my duties to science prevented me from blogging and, at some point, even from playing for the better part of the year. The heavy lifting on my Ph.D. thesis is now behind me, so I hope to reactivate the D&D campaign and become at least a bit more active here in the coming year.

But before all that, here’s the customary year-in-review post, with an overview of what we played, some play statistics specific to the current D&D campaign, games acquired, books read, the state of the blog, and a look ahead.

What We Played

Planet Karus

We played ten sessions of Planet Karus. This is my fully homebrewed sword and planet campaign, which we play with my also fully homebrewed classic D&D ruleset, Hackbut.

The campaign has a dedicated website, which should give you a sense of the sources I am tapping into and some of our house rules. Recently, I have also begun posting play reports. These are less fleshed out than those I used to do for Castle Xyntillan and contain no referee commentary. They are very much written for the players’ benefit and my own. But maybe some of you will still get something out of it.

Maybe in the future, I will share some bits from the campaign here, like I previously did with the wilderness monster and treasure method I developed to populate the campaign hex map. We will see.

In any case, this has been a lot of fun to run so far. It is a different experience from running published materials. It is more freeing on the one hand. Anything I fancy goes. At the same time, it is more daunting because I sometimes wonder what, if anything, to prep beforehand, particularly when it comes to wilderness locales. How much is enough? For this, I am always on the lookout for models to emulate. The constraint is that any examples I look to for guidance need to operate within classic D&D rules assumptions.

Boardgames

This year, we enjoyed eleven board game nights.

Across those, we played Skull (4 plays), Inis (4), Mission: Red Planet (Second Edition) (3), Quantum (3), Tigris & Euphrates (2), Cosmic Encounter (1), Kemet: Blood and Sand (1), and Power Grid (1).

This year’s new favorite has to be Mission: Red Planet. It scratches that dudes-on-a-map itch while remaining streamlined and, best of all, accommodates up to six players. It’s as if Cathala and Faidutti sat down to design a game specifically for our group’s needs.

A game of Cosmic Encounter in progress.

Play Statistics

Sessions

We played eleven roleplaying game sessions. One to finish up the MOTHERSHIP: Bloom and ten sessions of Planet Karus, using my classic D&D homebrew ruleset Hackbut.

We basically stopped playing after June. That puts us at an average of a little under two sessions per month in the active period of play.

Attendance

The number of players ranged from 1 to 3 (M = 2.3, SD = 0.6).

We added two new players to our group. So we now have a pool of nine players total. It is nice to have some fresh blood in the mix. The new players shake things up because they bring in their own assumptions, interests, and playstyles.

The top three players were responsible for over 70% of the attendance. That’s even higher than in previous years. I believe this may point to a narrowing interest in joining our group’s RPG sessions. But maybe it also indicates folks have other things going on that prevent them from playing.

Chart of player attendance.

Character Deaths

We had no PC deaths, only retainer deaths (four in total). Deaths per session ranged from 0 to 3 (M = 0.4, SD = 0.9).

The deadliest single session was #13, in which three heavy footmen succumbed to a swarm of giant plague rats while covering the retreat at the end of a very fruitful foray into The Balok.

The MilliWhack rating of the Planet Karus campaign’s 2023 sessions ranged from 93 to 174 (M = 125, SD = 26). Things are becoming way less deadly after a spiky beginning (see the chart below), probably mainly due to more careful play and a more capable party.

Chart of MilliWhack rating of the Planet Karus campaign to date.

Experience Points

The XP per session ranged from 0 to 4,847 (M = 1,120, SD = 1,357).

The most gainful session was also #13. As mentioned, three footmen died, but the party did abscond with many riches from the treasury of the late gremlin king Zaiden on the first level of The Balok.

We currently have a stable of nine player characters. Their levels range from 1 to 4 (M = 1.9, SD = 1.3). These characters have, between them, now acquired 20,644 XP.

Game Acquisitions

All of the below were either direct purchases or Kickstarter reward deliveries.

PDF Game Books: The Monster Overhaul, Mike’s World: The Forsaken Wilderness Beyond, X1 The Isle of Dread, Blackmarsh, Echoes From Fomalhaut #03: Blood, Death, and Tourism, Echoes From Fomalhaut #08: Welcome to Castle Sullogh, HYPERBOREA Ready Reference Sheets, Gathox Vertical Slum, Monster of the Week.

Most of the above were acquired to pilfer game content from for use with Planet Karus or as models to emulate, particularly for the wilderness section of the game. The Monster Overhaul was a Kickstarter delivery. An impressive GM tool, but not one I will be using because it has drifted too far off from classic D&D.

Physical Books: AD&D First Edition Dungeon Masters Guide (Easley cover), Vaults of Vaarn, The Scourge of Northland, TROIKA!.

Vaults of Vaarn I acquired for Planet Karus inspiration. Scourge of Northland and TROIKA! were Kickstarter deliveries. I continue to enjoy Fleming’s publications’ structure, art, and production qualities. TROIKA! was mainly purchased for completionism’s sake. It has really nice paper.

My Easley cover AD&D 1e DMG. I managed to grab a copy in a decent condition for a somewhat reasonable price. Now my three-book set is complete.

Board Games: Sidereal Confluence, Mission: Red Planet (Second Edition) and Modern Art.

Sidereal Confluence is a beast, and I have yet to bring it to the table. As mentioned, Mission: Red Planet is a new favorite. Modern Art we have yet to play as well.

Kit: ZucatiCorp Holmage Dice, DriveThruRPG Game Master Screen (landscape), Chessex Polycarbonate Dice Boot, selection of Mini Meeples.

The above was acquired mainly for use with our in-person marathon session, which I had to cancel. I now have snazzy custom referee inserts for the screen. The mini meeples were long on my list after reading this Reddit post.

The Holmage dice were a birthday gift. I have an actual set still in shrink wrap in my vintage Holmes box. These are for actual playing with. Although I think I still prefer my selection of Gamescience dice more.

My ZucatiCorp Holmage Dice before receiving the classic crayon treatment.

Books Read

Here I introduce a new section where I review the sci-fi and fantasy fiction I consumed over the year. As you will notice, I am, for the most part focusing my reading on the science fantasy and sword and planet genres. The idea is to immerse myself in the genre that best matches the feel I am going for with Planet Karus. I have found it is beginning to pay off in my ability to spontaneously improvise genre-appropriate content on the spot.

Novels: Swordsmen in the Sky, The Jewel in the Skull (History of the Runestaff, #1), While the Gods Laugh, Bazaar of the Bizarre, R.U.R., Servants of the Wankh (Planet of Adventure, #2), The Serpent (Atlan Saga, Volume 1 of 5), The Mad God’s Amulet (The History of the Runestaff, #2), The Dirdir (Planet of Adventure, #3), The Pnume (Planet of Adventure, #4), Red World of Polaris: The Adventures of Captain Volmar, The Sword of the Dawn (History of the Runestaff, #3), The Runestaff (History of the Runestaff, #4), The Eyes of the Overworld (The Dying Earth, #2).

If I had to pick a single book from this list to recommend, it would have to be The Dirdir. The extended sequence set in the alien hunting ground of the Carabas is one part Predator, one part Roadside Picnic, and a hundred percent terrifyingly awesome. (Close contenders were The Mad God’s Amulet and The Eyes of the Overworld.)

My copy of Red World of Polaris. Not CAS’s strongest stories, but of interest to those who are intrigued by his take on sci-fi.

Comics: Het Geheim van de Nitronstralen (Storm, #6), De Legende van Yggdrasil (Storm, #7), DEN Volume 1: Neverwhere, Stad der Verdoemden (Storm, #8), The Adventures of Red Sonja Vol. 1.

Here the pick is easy. DEN is a remarkable feat of psychedelic picaresque storytelling and mind-blowing art. I wish I could find more sword and planet comics in a similar vein.

My copy of DEN, which I managed to find at a reasonable price after long scouring the internet.

Blogging

Blogging basically stopped after March. After the previous year in review, I posted once on how I determine the presence of monsters and treasure in the wilderness, and once on how I handle experience in Hackbut. I stopped making the time for posting because I needed to complete my Ph.D. thesis, which I did. So maybe things will improve on the hobby front in this new year.

Views

The blog received 3,379 views (down by 517 compared to 2022) and 948 visitors (down by 159). A clear decline, likely due to the lack of posting and sharing posts.

The top posts were Wilderness Monsters & Treasure (163 views), CX Session #0 (140), CX Session #1 (112), CX Downtime (93), and CX Magic Swords (93).

Referrers

After search engines (324 views) and Reddit (106), Beyond Fomalhaut (60), Seed of Worlds (31), and A Distant Chime (21) generated the most traffic to this blog. The usual thanks go out to them.

Looking Back and Ahead

Let’s finish by reflecting on last year’s resolutions, and make some new ones for the year ahead.

Last Year’s Resolutions

We did indeed finish MOTHERSHIP: Bloom which ended suitably grimly.

We played Planet Karus online, but as already stated, at some point, we basically stopped.

Our group continued to play board games once a month, pretty religiously. This has been, for a very long time, the backbone of our group, the thing that keeps us together, and I value it greatly

Blogging basically stopped as well.

Finally, the last resolution was to play an extended in-person game of D&D. We were all set to play a marathon Planet Karus session in mid-November, but I had to cancel at the last moment due to illness.

Upcoming Year

In closing, some resolutions for the new year. I will reactivate the Planet Karus campaign. A weekly game appears to be too tall an order, so we will try to convene once a month instead.

We will also continue our monthly board game night, of course.

I want to run that in-person marathon and have already sent out a new date picker. Fingers crossed that no act of god will prevent it from occurring this time around.

Finally, I hope to return to the occasional spot of blogging here. Monthly is probably still the best target. Less than that is equal to basically no target at all. More than that is very unlikely to happen.

That’s it for this year in review. Happy 2024.

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Notes

Year in Review – 2022 – Having a Normal One

Another year, another annual review. This marks the third full year of publishing on this website. Let’s hope there are many more yet to come. (Previous annual reviews: 2020, 2021.)

The previous two years were marked by the global pandemic. This year was characterized by our collective emergence from that strange and challenging time and the resumption of what I guess can be called normalcy.

Most COVID measures in this country were lifted by the end of February. I was worried that increasing competing activities would end our weekly roleplaying game. This was luckily not the case, as will become clear. We settled into what I think is a “new new normal” or the old normal, one with fewer plays but still enough to sustain a satisfying campaign.

Table of contents:

What we played

Castle Xyntillan

We played a fourth and final season of Castle Xyntillan from mid-January to mid-April numbering seven sessions in total. These are all written up here on the blog. (See the index.) It was a very satisfying conclusion to a very memorable campaign, one that taught me a lot about how to run classic D&D and also gave me the insight and the confidence to start creating my own material. This brings me to the next thing we played.

Planet Karus

We went on a bit of a hiatus as I finalized preparations for a new campaign named Planet Karus. Its setting is homebrew sword and planet inspired by other planets, including Eternia, Skaith, and Pandarve. For the rules, we continue to use Hackbut, with some setting-specific tweaks sprinkled on top. My ambition is for this to be the campaign world where I can run classic D&D games until the end of my days. So one goal was to keep it compatible with baseline classic D&D, to make it easy to develop things using stock tools out there (like the original book’s treasure tables). But to use a setting that resonates with my younger self’s first encounters with fantasy, which is not EDO, but decidedly more science-fantasy, horrific and weird. (This approach was inspired, among other things, by this great now-gone blog post by Robert Parker.) The idea is to just reskin classic D&D where necessary. To basically reinterpret classic D&D’s implied setting through a sword and planet lens. (More on Planet Karus can be found on the campaign’s site.)

Anyway, we played seven sessions of Planet Karus from early September to early December. Let’s call it Season 1. I have not written those up on the blog here, contrary to my stated intentions in the previous annual review. Writing up CX was fun and useful but also quite a bit of work. The posts found an audience because they were about a published module. The same does not apply to my homebrew campaign even if I at some point publish the materials here (as was previously suggested by commenter DC.) I am keeping notes, of course, if only for my own reflection and analysis. But those are too rough for public consumption. It will probably stay that way. It makes running the game more sustainable, and I can focus my blogging energies on other types of posts.

MOTHERSHIP: Bloom

We concluded the year’s roleplaying with frequent player HB taking over the game-mastering reigns from me for another MOTHERSHIP miniseries. This time we used the latest preview versions of the first edition rules and the module BLOOM by Daniel Hallinan. I’ve enjoyed playing through this so far. The module gave me some good underwater sci-fi vibes in the vein of The Abyss (and, I am told, also Underwater) as well as bio horror along the lines of Annihilation (novel, film).

We played two sessions in December and will pick it up again in January to finish up in another session or two.

MOTHERSHIP as a system is fine. The changes made to the classes for the new edition are definitely improvements over the original version. But I continue to feel like the skill-tree design is a poor fit for a game that purports to be “old school” in its sensibilities. I notice players tend to look at their character sheet when they are faced with a problem, looking for something they can roll against to solve it rather than engaging with the fiction directly. Also, at character creation, choosing skills is still a significant speed bump, as it invites planning ahead and offers a large number of choices at the outset. Better to randomize them, like we do with magic-user spells in classic D&D.

Boardgames

We sat down eight times this year for face-to-face board games on the last Friday of the month. BoardGameGeek tells me these were the games we played in order of the number of plays.

  1. Galaxy Trucker (8 plays)
  2. Quantum (4)
  3. Inis with Seasons of Inis (3)
  4. 7 Wonders (2)
  5. King of Tokyo (2)
  6. Skull (2)
  7. Dragomino (1)

King of Tokyo and Skull are quick games that we like to break out at the end of an evening when we are too tired for the big stuff, but we do not want to go home just yet. “Tokyo” is always a riot, and Skull is a great shortcut to some of the bluffing kicks one also gets from games like poker.

Dragomino is a kids’ game I acquired for my boys (who are now getting into tabletop gaming themselves, an exciting development.) It is surprisingly appealing even for adults as well.

7 Wonders mainly sees table time when we have a big turnout, and some of the other meatier games’ player limits are exceeded. I have a love-hate relationship with this one, I find the engine-building aspect of it kind of tedious, but I have yet to find a satisfying replacement.

This brings us to the top three.

Quantum I acquired second hand late 2021. I have been looking to add it to my collection ever since my game design consultancy days when I was acquainted with its designer. It is quite good and strikes a nice balance between quick-to-play and crunchy. The way it uses chunky six-sided dice is elegant and satisfying.

Galaxy Trucker I received for my birthday in spring. Another one that had been sitting on the list for a long time already. Ever since playing Space Alert, I have been a Vlaada Chvátil fan. Galaxy Trucker has recently had a revamp, and the components are all very nice. I also love how, as is usually the case with Chvátil games, the how-to-play is integrated with the rulebook. This game was an instant hit with the group. It is very funny and plays really fast, but it still has a satisfying amount of crunch. It feels like riding a rodeo on a chaos-generating engine that is quickly tearing itself apart.

And finally, my personal favorite, Inis, which we now play with the Seasons of Inis expansion so that it allows for five players. I adore this game. It looks gorgeous, plays really quick, scratches that “dudes on a map” itch in a way that is not obvious, and does not lead to analysis paralysis like its close contender Kemet does. Highly recommended.

Play statistics

Moving on to some data and analysis of how often we played, what the attendance was like, and the two most important data points in the D&D resource economy: character deaths and experience points. What follows is limited to our classic D&D roleplaying sessions, which continue to take place online.

Sessions

We had a total of 16 sessions in 2022 (down from a whopping 37 in 2021). That is an average of 1.3 sessions per month (SD 1.2). In 2021, by contrast, the average was 3.1 (SD 1.5). This can be explained for the most part by the long break between the final Castle Xyntillan season and the new Planet Karus campaign kicking off. If we removed the months when no plays happened from the data, we get an average of 2 sessions per month in 2022 (SD 0.8) versus 3.4 in 2021 (SD 1.2). Still lower, but not as dramatic a drop as it would first seem, and it can largely be explained by the fact that one Friday a month is now devoted to face-to-face board games.

Attendance

Our group still consists of seven players (eight, if you include the undersigned). Two players did not participate in any of our roleplaying at all (they did join in on the board games occasionally). This year we had an average of 2.6 players per session (SD 0.7). That is down from 3.7 (SD 1.4) in 2021. However, in the last season of 2021, that number is 2.6 (SD 0.7). So things are staying pretty stable. Barring significant life events that impact the ability to participate, this looks like the “new new normal” for our group for the foreseeable future. As in the previous year, the top three players are once again responsible for 66% of attendance, but players did trade places.

Chart of player attendance.
Chart of number of players.

Character deaths

And now, for the statistic that all classic D&D referees care about the most: character deaths. It is interesting that I now get to compare a module written by someone known for their grasp of classic module design, and my own home campaign, in terms of deadliness (as well as XP, for which see the next section). Just to reiterate, rules and procedures have remained basically the same: My homebrew rules Hackbut, which largely has parity with OD&D, B/X D&D, and its retro-clones.

Castle Xyntillan season 4:
Seven sessions, zero player-character deaths, and 11 retainer deaths, for an average of 1.6 deaths per session (SD 2.1). The single deadliest session was #37 in which five retainers died when the company breached the Crusaders’ Tomb, went head-to-head with undead crusaders, faced off against the Giant Snail Guardian, and pilfered the treasury.

Planet Karus season 1:
Seven sessions as well, four player-character deaths, eight retainer deaths, for a total of 12 deaths, and an average of 1.3 per session (SD 1.5). The deadliest single session was #4, in which the same player lost two characters, and two retainers died as well, during a foray into The Balok (the campaign’s current tentpole dungeon). One fighter was killed by a volley of gremlin javelins. (Gremlins are Planet Karus’ equivalent of kobolds.) As a result, a porter failed his morale check and fled back out of the dungeon, triggering a trap on the way out. The same player’s second fighter later stepped on a large venomous snake while heading back out of the dungeon and failed his save versus death. The last retainer also failed their morale roll at this incident and fled into the dungeon’s darkness to be captured by boogieman slavers (read: hobgoblins). (The party later declines to pay the ransom.)

So, it looks like Planet Karus is about as deadly as Castle Xyntillan, but we see more PC deaths on Planet Karus. This can be explained by the fact that the number of monsters and their deadliness is about equal, but PCs in Planet Karus are just starting out and so have far fewer hit points to rely on when things go south.

Chart of character deaths.

Experience points

Moving on to the flip side of character deaths: The sweet rewards reaped for braving danger in the form of experience points. I should point out that I only reward XP for treasure recovered at the traditional rate of 1 GP = 1 XP. (Although in Planet Karus, we use a silver standard for flavor reasons, the game is balanced accordingly, basically as Delta recommends here.)

Castle Xyntillan season 4:
The company gained 14,800 XP, all in a single haul in the very last session when they ransacked the suite of the countess. That amounts to an average of 2,114 XP per session (SD 5,594). By comparison, in the previous year’s gaming, they collected 132,796 XP, on average, 5,533 XP per session (SD 5,281). A pretty big drop which can be explained by the fact that by this point, they had cleared out most of the easy-to-reach treasure. The campaign ended with the company on average at level 4.4 (min 1, max 6, SD 1.9). Between the active characters, they had collected 126,926 XP.

Planet Karus season 1:
Here the picture is quite different. So far, the party has collected 7,071 XP in total, averaging 780 XP per session (SD 1,830). Am I being too stingy? I know there are big hauls tucked away in the tentpole dungeon, but players have been repeatedly repelled by the gremlin tribe that has made the first level their home base and appear to have lost interest in making a concerted effort to oust them. This dungeon has been set up more as a classic assault-style scenario in the vein of the original G series of modules. It is something the players are less accustomed to, and it is certainly a very different approach compared to Castle Xyntillan.

The single biggest haul (5,000 XP) was actually from a wilderness adventure where they cleaned out the treasury of a clan of swinelings holed out in a somewhat remote swamp. (Swinelings are the Planet Karus equivalent of hobbits. Don’t ask.) This may have taught them the “wrong” lesson.

The current total XP for the party is 5,631. The average level is 1.3 (SD 0.5), although 2 out of 7 characters in the active stable have managed to reach level 2. I guess I will not change anything about the treasure distribution for now, but if I place new treasure, I will err on the side of making it easier to reach.

So much for play statistics. Let’s move on to the games I acquired and then wrap up with some blogging numbers.

Game acquisitions

I will not account for every acquisition that sits in my DriveThruRPG account. When I went through the 2022 purchases, I was kind of shocked by the volume. I will call out some notable items instead.

I collected more than a few game books for science fantasy elements to steal for use in Planet Karus. Not all of them I ended up actually using anything from, but they were all useful to skim, at the very least. These included, in no particular order: Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells, Mutant Future: Revised Edition, Planet Eris Gazetteer, Echoes From Fomalhaut #04, Bloody Basic – Weird Fantasy Edition, and Blood & Treasure 2nd Edition Rulebook.

The book I actually pulled things from, technological items in particular, is Hyperborea 3e. I love the vibe of the items in this book, and they can be transplanted easily into any classic D&D rules framework.

(I should also mention Warriors of the Red Planet, Xuhlan and Carcosa; three books that I have drawn significant inspiration from for Planet Karus, but which I had already acquired some time ago.)

I also got the Hill Cantons Compendium II specifically for the white wizard class in there, which I adapted for my own Planet Karus “celestial wizard” NPC class (there are no clerics in this setting, so I needed an alternative source of magical healing).

And then, on the physical front, I was very pleased to acquire both Dungeon Geomorphs Set One to Three and Monster & Treasure Assortment Sets One-Three to add to my very nice Holmes Basic box. I also decided I wanted to own the core three books for AD&D 1e, and managed to acquire a Players Handbook and Monster Manual, both with the Easley covers, which I have a particular fondness for. All that’s left is to find a reasonably priced Dungeon Masters Guide.

Dungeon Geomorphs and Monster & Treasure Assortment.
AD&D 1e Players Handbook.
AD&D 1e Monster Manual.

I also received some physical books from kickstarters I backed. Knock! Issue Three was once again fun to leaf through and sits nicely next to the first two editions. Through the Valley of the Manticore I liked for its solid art and compact yet comprehensive design. And Into the Odd Remastered is a refreshing example of what can be achieved by a formally trained graphic designer when they take a stab at a game book.

On the board games front, I managed to limit myself to two acquisitions, one for my birthday and one for Christmas. My shelf space thanks me. These were the aforementioned Galaxy Trucker, and Power Grid, another game I have played in the past but was still missing from my collection of classics.

Blogging

I did way less blogging this year. Seven Castle Xyntillan reports and two entries into the new “Running Xyntillan” series (on magic swords, and on downtime). That’s nine posts versus 33 in 2021. A big drop. A lot of my creative energies went into completing Planet Karus materials instead. The first note I wrote towards this when I was still following the Gygax 75 framework that I would later abandon dates from 29 August 2021.

My writing energies were otherwise pretty depleted by a lot of heavy lifting on my Ph.D. labors. I will have to complete my thesis in the upcoming year, so it is unlikely I will have a lot more room for blogging. But I will try to hit about a post a month.

Views

On to some readership statistics: The blog had 3,896 views and 1,108 visitors. In 2021 the numbers were 3,519 and 1,188, respectively. So about the same despite way fewer posts. This can be explained by those Castle Xyntillan play reports being of enduring interest to people who are (considering) running it themselves.

I have expanded the promotion of my posts beyond Twitter and the OSR Discord to also comment on the weekly r/osr blogroll curated by u/xaosseed on Reddit, and my new-ish Mastodon account.

The top posts were all Castle Xyntillan play reports: the first two, the last one, and weirdly, session number 17. The only other post that did well was the one on magic swords in Castle Xyntillan. An overview of the numbers is in the table below.

#PostViews
1Castle Xyntillan – Session #0193
2Castle Xyntillan – Session #1177
3Castle Xyntillan – Session #17106
4Running Xyntillan: Magic Swords104
5Castle Xyntillan – Session #4383
Table of top 5 posts of 2022 by number of views.

Referrers‌

The top sources of traffic are search engines (329 views) and Reddit (191). These are followed by a bunch of classic D&D blogs: Beyond Fomalhaut (run by Melan, the designers of Castle Xyntillan, 91 views). Twitter has yielded a mere 23 views. The final referrers I will mention are A Distant Chime (home to a great Castle Xyntillan campaign write-up, 16 views), Tales of the Rambling Bumblers (Joshua was kind enough to link to an old post of mine about ability checks, 11 views), and DIY & dragons (11 views).

Looking ahead

Okay, let’s wrap this thing up with a reflection on last year’s resolutions and make some new ones for this year.

Last year’s resolutions

2022’s notable achievements include bringing our Castle Xyntillan campaign to a satisfactory conclusion and starting up the new Planet Karus one, which, as planned, is indeed so far 100% homebrew.

I also did manage to get Quantum to the table, but not my other acquisition from back in 2021, Tigris & Euphrates, which I will have to amend soon.

Blogging-wise, I did not continue writing play reports and also did not continue the series on Hackbut. Reasons for the former, I have already addressed. I might revive the Hackbut series, but probably not by continuing to go through the rules section by section.

Finally, we ended up not adding any new players to our group, although I did ask around and got some enthusiastic responses from potential candidates. This year I hope to actually get them to join in.

Upcoming year

And finally, here are some new year’s resolutions: We will finish up the MOTHERSHIP: Bloom miniseries. Then we will pick up the Planet Karus campaign again, and I hope to run 2-3 seasons this year. One in winter, one in spring, and one in the fall. Maybe we can hit 20+ sessions this year? That would be great.

We will obviously also continue our last Friday-of-the-month board game nights, of course. Those are always great.

Blogging-wise, as already mentioned, I hope to post maybe once a month this year. Who knows if I will actually manage that. But this monster-size annual review is at least a solid start.

And finally, a “dream” I’ve had for some time is to get together physically with the group and play D&D for more than a few hours but do one of those marathon sessions we used to always do over the weekend when we were teenagers. Maybe rent a holiday home? It would be great to play face-to-face again sometime. Roll physical dice, scribble maps, and stain character sheets with crisps-soiled fingers.

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Notes

Year In Review – 2021 – Spitting in the Face of the Bat Plague

The second year of blogging has come to a close, time to take stock. Contrary to my hopes and expectations this time last year, 2021 turned out to be the second year of playing in times of a global pandemic. In spite of this, we managed to continue our gaming.

What we played

So what did we play? Most notably, I refereed two seasons of Castle Xyntillan using my homebrew classic D&D rules, Hackbut. Season two ran for 14 sessions, from late January to late April. Season three lasted 10 sessions and ran from mid-September to mid-December. In between these, from early May to mid-July, one of our players stepped up to “warden” a season of Mothership. We played one session of The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and 10 sessions of Gradient Descent. Over summer I ran a two-shot of The Coming of Sorg, again using Hackbut. When circumstances allowed for it, we managed to resume our monthly face-to-face boardgame night. To celebrate, I acquired Kemet Blood & Sand, which according to many is the pinnacle of Matagot “dudes on a map” games. We managed to play this three times between late July and late October.

With regards to our ongoing Castle Xyntillan campaign I kept pretty extensive records. What follows is some data on attendance, character deaths, and experience points. Just for kicks.

Attendance

Like last year, our play group numbers 7 players, not including me. Most sessions had 2-3 players attending, with average attendance being 3,6. Season 2 had an average attendance of 4,4, season 3’s average attendance was 2,6. This drop in attendance is probably the result of a number of factors, including big life events for at least one of our players, and perhaps also some fatigue with online gaming setting in for a few others.

Attendance

The top 3 players were good for 66% of the attendance. This was 56% in the previous year. This shift can be explained mostly by one of our group not participating at all this year, and another only playing in the beginning of the year.

Number of players

Character deaths

Ah, killing player-characters, the thing every classic D&D referee enjoys doing the most. I am kidding of course, but still, deaths is a good indication of how hazardous my game is. Seeing as how a key distinguishing aspect of classic D&D is that it is a game of challenge for the players, character death serves as a reasonable proxy for it.

Deaths

In total, 10 player-characters died in the dungeon. That’s an average of 1,7 per session. The most PCs killed in one session was four, which happened during session #18 when the company had an ill-fated run-in with a bunch of ghouls.

Retainers were unluckier still, with a total of 27 perishing across this year’s two seasons, for an average of 2,3 per session. The most retainers killed in one session was five, during session #33, when the company got lost in a pocket dimension forest.

Overall, 37 characters were killed by the dungeon, for an average of 1,5 per session. I don’t have a baseline to compare these numbers to, so I really can’t say if I run an extraordinarily deadly game, or if I am soft-pedaling it. I guess over 1 PC killed on average every session is kind of rough, but I don’t go out of my way to try and slaughter them. In fact I often feel bad about not giving the players the challenge they deserve. Maybe this number is an indication I should relax a little on that front.

Experience points

In any case, was all that dying good for anything? I would say so. The players brought back 132.796 XP. This breaks down to 84.754 XP in season 2, and 48.042 XP in season 3. That is an average of 5.533 XP per session (6.054 XP in season 2, 4.804 XP in season 3). I think it is safe to say Castle Xyntillan is a pretty generously stocked dungeon, but not overly so. I think this nicely offsets its lethality. Yes it is easy to die in the dungeon. But it is is also easy for players to get back into the game reasonably quickly, and level up past those first fragile levels.

Experience points

All of this XP is from treasure recovered, at a rate of 1 GP equals 1 XP. I award no XP for killing monsters and in case you are wondering, magic items also do not yield any. Another important thing to note is that players get to divide XP between all player-characters that participated in an expedition as they see fit. I do not enforce shares for player-characters.

The highest single haul was 15.900 XP, in session #21 (in season 3, the biggest score was 11.660 XP during session #34). In general, it is those wine barrels in the cellar that are the real money makers.

The seven currently active player-characters between them have acquired 106.393 XP. The average party level is 4.

The lowest level character is Guillemette, a level 1 thief, with 432 XP collected over 4 sessions. But this character saw no action this year. The next lowest-level character is Robert, a level 2 cleric, at 2.529 XP, all of which was acquired in one session.

The highest level character is Hendrik, a level 6 magic-user, at 36.000 XP, collected over a whopping 24 sessions of careful, diligent play. Level 6 is the highest level in the game and the magic-user is of course the class that requires the highest amount of XP. Getting there was quite an achievement, well-earned.

Closely following Hendrik is Jürg, a level 6 fighter / level 1 thief, at 31.600 XP collected over 14 sessions. Jürg is the only multi-classed character in the game. I wonder if more will follow now that some of them are plateauing and have no use for XP anymore. It’s also worth noting Jürg began life as a retainer (and husband) of this player’s previous PC, Bartolomea.

Blogging

Moving on, what happened with the blog? I mostly wrote play reports, for Castle Xyntillan seasons 2 and 3 (see the index), as well as the Coming of Sorg two-shot (a, b).

I also continued to write up commentaries on my homebrew ruleset, Hackbut. This year I covered the four character classes, equipment, encumbrance and retainers.

WordPress tells me I had 3.519 views and 1.188 visitors over the past year. This is of course very modest, and in truth I pay little attention to this sort of stuff. I do promote my posts on the OSR discord server and my twitter, but not anywhere else really.

The best performing posts this year were the first Castle Xyntillan play report, the thief class, and The Coming of Sorg.

I got quite a bit of traffic through referrals from Beyond Fomalhaut (thanks Melan). Most of my visitors are from the anglosphere (US, UK, CA) and also from The Netherlands of course.

Looking ahead

I hope I will be able to keep our weekly online D&D game going. It is definitely something that keeps me sane, and a welcome outlet for my many creative urges. I think we have one more season of Castle Xyntillan in us. I might try to add a new player or two to our group, so that we push the average attendance back up to the 3-4 mark. We are a close-knit group though, so recruiting will have to rely on our immediate social networks.

After Xyntillan, I think I want to try my hand at running material of my own fabrication. I have come to realize that this is the purest form of D&D, homebrewing everything, and I want to experience it first-hand. I have been quietly chipping away at a mid-size dungeon (about 120 rooms across three levels) and am about half-way through completing it. It is strongly OD&D inspired, but filtered through my personal fantasy canon, which is very much in a science fantasy vein and includes things like Masters of the Universe, Storm, and The Incal.

Of course, once we are able to, I look forward to once again playing games face-to-face, but that will most likely mean more boardgames. I recently acquired both a copy of Tigris & Euphrates, and Quantum and I hope to get those to the table in 2022.

In terms of blogging, I will continue to write up play reports for as long as I referee games. I like keeping a record of what happened and most of all reflecting on what went well and what I can improve on as a referee. Occasionally I get a comment saying others are getting some use out of them as well, which is always nice. I also intend to continue the series on Hackbut, although we have now hit the section on running the game, which may lend itself a little less well to the kind of posts I have been doing so far.

In any case, despite circumstances, 2021 was another good year for me for gaming, and I hope to maintain this in the year to come, bat plague be damned.

Categories
Notes

Year in Review – 2020 – Gaming Under the Bat Plague

Some notes on what probably was, ironically, my single best year of playing tabletop roleplaying games since I started in the early nineties.

Data:

We played 34 sessions, 21 of which using a heavily house-ruled version of The Black Hack (2e) with various modules, and 13 using OD&D (Hackbut) with Castle Xyntillan. The modules we played through were: Prison of the Hated Pretender (1), The Croaking Fane (4), A Single, Small Cut (2), Tomb of the Serpent Kings (5), Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine (3), and Beneath the Windowless Tower (6). (Number of sessions for each in parentheses.)

The chart below shows the number of sessions for each month and the average attendance per session for that same month. Before COVID-19 we played a monthly face-to-face game. When our first lockdown in March happened we switched to a weekly remote game. In June a player took over to run a couple of sessions that are not part of my dataset. In August we had to cancel a couple of games due to low attendance because of people vacationing. In December we skipped the final Friday due to Christmas. Also worth noting is that we started our current OD&D / Castle Xyntillan campaign in the second half of September.

Our group counts seven players, not including myself. The top 3 players were good for 55,6% of the attendance. Most sessions had 3-6 players, with 3 being the most common. Once, we had two, and once we had the full seven.

Reflections:

Although I am eternally grateful for The Black Hack as my gateway to classic D&D, I am really happy we made the switch to OD&D for our current campaign. Black Hack is very accessible, easy to run, and easy to hack, but the roll-under-attribute core mechanic leads to player-characters that are very unlikely to fail. In addition, the armour rules and the out-of-action rules make it very unlikely characters perish. As a case in point: Over the course of 34 sessions of Black Hack, we had 6 player-character deaths, whereas we had 8 character deaths in 12 sessions of OD&D. That’s an 18% versus 67% chance of a character dying in a session between the two systems. Of course, I ran different modules in both systems but I don’t expect the numbers to be that much different. OD&D is ever so slightly less accessible to new players because of the greater variety of die rolls, but several players have expressed really enjoying the fact that the game is more perilous and challenging. On the referee side, OD&D is more constrained in its probabilities so I don’t feel like I constantly need to keep my foot on the brakes. Because of this, ironically, I think OD&D is easier to referee than Black Hack once the basic rules have been grokked.

As those who follow my Castle Xyntillan play reports know, I very much enjoy running this module. Of the modules we played through before that in The Black Hack I think Tomb of the Serpent Kings and Beneath the Windowless Tower were my favourites. Reasons for this included the fact that they are not too small but can still be completed in a reasonable number of sessions. They also have sufficient non-linearity built in to lead to surprising player approaches. Furthermore, they are both quite deadly, which makes for a tense and challenging game. Their vibe in both cases is very much classic D&D as well, with Windowless Tower in particular including some very enjoyable science-fantasy elements.

Playing online took some getting used to, and it’s a poor substitute for playing face-to-face, but the choice between an online game and no game at all is easily made. In addition, even if the quality of the experience is lacking, we do get more gaming in partly due to the fact that logging on after a hard day’s work on Friday evening is just easier to manage than convening at someone’s house. We are all getting older, and many of us have started families. An online game is just easier to fit in.

Our setup is pretty straightforward and probably resembles that of many others. We use someone’s corporate Zoom account for video and voice. I’ve found this to be incredibly stable and easy for everyone to on-board onto. For dice, we prefer to roll physical dice using the honour system. It is by far the quickest, and most fun. If someone does not have dice on hand, or wants to “roll in the open” because the situation is particularly high-stakes, we also have a Discord with a dice-rolling bot. (We tried many bots and ultimately settled on rollem, because it does not require commands to be prefaced with anything.) That’s the core of it.

Now, currently, for Castle Xyntillan, we are also using Roll20 — I loaded up the excellent VTT player maps that come with the module and unveil it using the fog-of-war feature. Players also take notes directly on the map for future reference. I ended up going with this because I did not want to inflict mapping by hand from verbal description on my group for this module — Xyntillan is just too big and labyrinthine. In other games, however, we did to the classic style of mapping. Some of our players really enjoy that part of the game.

Combats we run entirely theatre-of-the-mind, so do not require any digital support. Running combat TotM is by far the quickest and most versatile way of doing it. On my end I do have a little physical setup with tokens and a battle mat when I need to keep track of big battles with many combatants. Overall I am pretty happy with the setup we’ve got going. In general, my aim is to limit the amount of on-screen manipulation I have to do during the game to an absolute minimum because I find it takes me out of the game. This setup lets me for the most part just face the camera and run the game by talking.

With regards to player count, I find it much harder to handle a large group of players online than I do when sitting around a table. Playing online, I think three players is actually the sweet spot. Beyond that, things just bog down. This is also at least in part due to the challenges of group decision making over a video conference. Having the classic D&D role of a caller helps a bit, but does not entirely solve the issue. The absolute maximum number of players I am comfortable handling online is probably five.

In conclusion, although I can’t wait for this global pandemic to be behind us, it did lead to a remarkable amount of very enjoyable tabletop roleplaying game sessions. I hope, around this same time next year, I will sit down to write another report on a great year of gaming, but it will be titled “After the Bat Plague”.