GameMastery 101: Part 2 - Types of Players

Doing the Deed.

You’ve got everything ready.

You have a stack of notes a quarter inch high.  On your left you have a chainmail pouch full of glittering polyhedrals, with a few artfully spilled out for ease of access.  On your right you have a stack of books vaguely reminiscent of the Plateau of Leng out of mythos… high, insurmountable, and barren of topography.  Before you might be a GM screen full of charts, pictures of bikini clad whatevers and critical hit modifiers… or there might just be a few cans of half-empty Mountain Dew as you frantically scrawl your last concepts (or just vaguely doodle some boobies) as the wall clock ominously ticks down to the final moments of your plan’s life.

Because no plan survives contact with the enemy, er, players.

You wrack your brain… is there anything you’ve forgotten?  You’ve got enough Dew, you have Doritos hidden on top of the fridge for backup snacks, you have the Domino’s guy on speed dial, your mom is at bridge club… you should be ready.  Then the first knock on the door comes.  Your first player is here.  In walks…

The Professional.

The Professional player is always on time.  He doesn’t let down his team mates.  If he’s not going to be there, he calls ahead of time, sometimes a day or more in advance, to inform you of even the slightest chance that he might not make it.  Srs gamer takes gaming srsly.

You promised a +2 to hit if I brought Mountain Dew. It's in the fridge. Remember this note?

The Professional Gamer is the type who waits outside of game stores on release days… not for video games, but for new expansion books.  They download PDFs of expansions you’ve never even heard of.  They know every last in and out of the rules, but they don’t play to win, they play for the love of the game.  The Professional is reliable, attentive, hardcore, and in most respects, completely awesome.  If you’ve never had a Professional in your gaming party, then I mourn for your soul.  It’s a treat.  Most commonly, during generation sessions where the group is making their various characters for the first time, a Professional will sit back and help everyone create, looking for what’s not covered.  They usually end up in support roles like Cleric or Paladin, or wide-spread roles like Ranger or Bard type PCs.  No matter the genre, they’re there to support the other players, and make sure The Game Goes On.

At higher levels, it is not uncommon for the Professional to respec into a Gamemaster, or a Gaming Addict.

Usually paired with the Professional is the Jester… who usually doesn’t have a car.
The Jester.

The Jester, if he or she doesn’t show up with the Professional, will be a fashionable fifteen minutes to an hour and a half late as they try to spange for a taxi, bum a ride from another friend, or hoof it across town.  The Jester shows up not only because they love the game, but because this is their chance to truly ‘kick it’ with people who understand them.  The Jester is typically unorganized, owning not really so much as a character sheet as a character packet.  Each note or scrap of paper is somehow important to the character, and they seem to innately understand the hordes of chickenscratch on snippets of pulped tree, but it would take 15 game masters and 20 cryptographers to figure out what even half of it means.

In addition to the occasional 1d6 puncture damage eradicating some of the information.

Though jokes and levity are very common in a group with a Jester attached, usually they do their best to keep the game rolling.  Of all of the player types, the Jester is the most likely to bring backup Doritos or beverages, the most likely to lend his or her dice out without throwing a snit fit, and the most laid back about losing a character.

Usually close on their heels comes the Wannabe.
The Wannabe.

There’s something just not quite right about the Wannabe.  Maybe they don’t understand the spirit of the game, but they know all the rules.  Or maybe they really, really want to be the knight in shining armor, but they don’t understand that encumbrance counts.  The Wannabe, in general, is a great person, but sometimes a fairly mediocre gamer.  Usually at one end of the spectrum or the other, either completely fitting the stereo type or breaking it.

The Wannabe, for some reason, is commonly just slightly outside of the norm for gamers.  It’s not uncommon for Wannabe gamers to become true gamers, but even then sometimes they wonder… are they gamer enough?  Should they own more dice?  Do they have enough books?  Despite that sometimes nagging self doubt, it is quite common for Wannabe to level up into Professional status.


The Wannabe usually gets into gaming by someone else’s hand.  Introduced to the idea by a fanatic who sold them on it.  Usually, this means they come part and parcel with...
The Book Keeper… or Arcanist, as they’re sometimes called.

Hey man, I've been doing a bit of research on familiars, and...

You know the term Rules Lawyer?  Most of the time it is used as derogatory.  When it is a good thing, however, you’ll want to be respectful.  The Book Keeper is your best friend and your worst enemy as a GM.  They know all the ways you can spin or coax an extra +1 onto your character sheet, they troll the game forums for new errata daily… heck, they probably have a legion of RSS feeds going straight to their blackberry if they own one.  If another party member wants to make a PC who can stop bullets with his or her crotch, the Book Keeper is the one to consult on how.  On the flip side, the Book Keeper is your best way to get a player who doesn’t grasp some facet of the rules to begin to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.  Since the BK is one of them (a player) and not one of Them (you, The Man, the GM, or “He Who Is Trying To Kill Us”) they have a much higher “acceptance index” for arguing minutia and displaying to the offending player that it really is impossible to fire four laser pistols at the same time no matter how many ranks in dual wield you have.

Due to the immense knowledge that the Book Keeper wields, you need, NEED to make this individual your best buddy in the game.  Don’t treat them differently during the game sessions, don’t give them extra XP (unless they deserve it) or extra favors/items, but make sure you’re close buddies outside of the game.  This will help defuse the inevitable arguements that crop up when you step outside of the rules and you don’t want to just put the big “GM SAYS THIS HAPPENS” boot down.

Usually there’s a little bit of a wait before the next pair shows up… they’re typically a bit late.  First in the door is…
Trouble.

With a capital “T” and that rhymes with “P” and that stands for Player.

Yep. "That Guy."

Trouble usually shows up at the game when he’s bored or doesn’t have anything else to do, and is conspicuously (and sometimes thankfully) absent the rest of the time.  Trouble is the player who just seems to exist to put a thorn in your rear end… or sometimes push you out of a helicopter into a forest full of cacti.  They’re looking for amusement, and they don’t quite care how they get it.  They may seek to derail your entire campaign by shooting your main and quite important NPC in the face for a perceived insult.  They may constantly derail the game session by keeping out of game conversations going, heckling you or other players, or just generally being an asshat.  Unfortunately, most of the time, Trouble is very good friends with one or more of the other players, making it virtually impossible to excise them from the game without causing social drama.  They’re usually quite close to…
The MinMax.

I’d like to thank Tarol Hunt of GoblinsComic for actually making MinMax into a character.  Here he is, and it explains it all:

MinMax, the Unstoppable Warrior.

The MinMax might not “get” gaming yet.  They’re probably either someone who got pushed into gaming because it sounded neat, or they’re someone who’s played a lot of Risk or Xbox 360, and are still in the mindset that you need to win a game for it to be a game.  In Goblins, MinMax traded several ‘useless’ skills for additional combat bonuses.  For example, MinMax (in the comic) traded the following:
His ability to Wink was traded for Weapon Proficiency: Furniture.
His ability to rhyme on purpose was traded for Improved Unarmed Strike.
And so on.

MinMax players are there for destruction.  They want to do the most damage, the most times, to the most creatures.  They want to Win The Game.  I myself was a MinMax player for a while during my youth, so there’s definite value in encouraging the MinMax player to keep playing with your gaming group… as long as you can figure out how to make sure that they don’t butcher the entire scenario in a single round.  I find it very useful to send the Book Keeper out to get something from the convenience store before using some bullshit rule to immobilize the MinMax before progressing with the fight.

Now that you have most of the party around the table… the phone rings.  It’s…
The Leader.

The Leader is arguably your most important player, but sometimes they won’t even bother to show up until they know, for a fact, that everyone else is in place.  Sometimes they’ll show up with The Professional… and on rare occasions, you may have a dual-classed player who is both.

Honestly, I’m doing the Leader a bit of injustice with my quip above.  It’s not uncommon for the Leader to show up early, or to help wrangle your other players with phone calls asking if they’re going to be at game, if there’s any problem, or anything of the sort.  The Leader tends to be very involved with the players, a close friend to most, and a stern guiding hand to folks like Trouble and MinMax.  He works to keep the game moving forward, to keep the players on task instead of making worthless sidetrips to the Apothecary Shoppe to find out which tentacle of the Freshwater DoomSquid is the most potent for regeneration potions, and to make sure that not only do things get accomplished, but they get accomplished with style.  The Leader is usually the most charismatic gamer of the group, though this is not the case in all groups.

Of all the types pictured above, remember that there innumerable and unquantifiable combinations.  You may have a Trouble Leader, or a MinMax BookKeeper (the WORST thing ever, by the way.)  You may have a group without all of the components listed above, but GameMasters can’t be Deities.  You can’t create your own game group, no matter how hard you try.  You can, as any artist does, look around at your environment and pick the best things, and do your absolute damnedest to make some art.

Because that’s what you are.  An artist.  A GM paints a picture for the players, creates a world that’s so believable that it puts any book to shame, and breathes life and emotion into every moment of the game.  Hopefully the profiles above will give you some hints on how to deal with a troublesome canvas.

And now to figure out what to do for Part 3.  Suggestions are welcome!

GameMastery 101: Part 1 - Types of GMs.

Getting Started.
You’ve gone through all of the preliminaries.  Everything is ready.

You’re stoked.

You have your dice shined and polished.  Your books are stacked.  Character sheets are still cooling after being ejected from the printer.  Maybe you have a twelve pack of Mountain Dew, Coke, or even some beer chillin and ready.

Your players show up, ready for a game… and they stare at you.  And stare.  And stare… and stare…

And it sinks in slowly.  You’ve never done this before.  You’ve never run a game.  You’ve played them, sure, and it looked sooooooooooo easy to just get up there, flip open a book, and try to murder your friends with dice.

But it’s not that easy, is it?  It’s not that easy when you’re staring down the hollow eyes of five disappointed friends who trust in you, who have faith in you, who have a firm belief that you, and you alone, can transport them on the shoulders of your imagination to a world they’ve always wanted to visit and then horribly mangle.

So what’s a wannabe GM to do?  It’s not like Yale offers a course on gamemastery.   The first thing you’ll want to do is try to figure out what gamemastering style you work best with.

Style #1: Hardline.

First you have Hardline.  Why do I call it Hardline?  Because it sounds cooler than “Nazi-style GM.”  Plus, uh, apparently Nazi has some connotations.  But I digress.

Hardline GMs tend to be very rigid and structured.  You like your shit locked down.  You like deep notes.  You like stats on every single NPC that you are going to use.  If you have a rat that’s going to run through the gutter when a PC steps out of a Taxi on a rainy Seattle day in ShadowRun, then BY GUM you want those stats!  In fact, that’s not deep enough!  You want a background!  You want to know what motivates this rat, and why he chose this particular shoe to run across.  You know where he came from (working out at the YRCA), you know where he’s going (first to the Circle-K, then home to see his lovely lady wiferat who he hopes didn’t find his kitty-fetishist porn stack hidden under the bedding like she did last month, one of the reasons why he’s running instead of just ambling casually), you know when he last ate (32.5 minutes ago, stale Domino’s crust) and how the meal is sitting with him (badly.)

Being a Hardline GM can be marvelously rewarding to both players and yourself.  Because you put so much work into the world, because it is so structured and real in your own head, you have a much easier time with imparting your vision to the players, of drawing them into your world as well.  Through your investment, the game takes on a very real aspect, and your players will most likely appreciate this.

It’s not all a cakewalk, though.  Being Hardline can very easily lead to being a ScreenHitler and railroading your games towards a specified end that you desire.  Is this the way to do it?  Honestly, it just might be.  It all depends on if your players enjoy that, which is something we’ll touch on later.
Hardline GMs tend to be extremely strict with rules.  If the GM’s manual doesn’t explicitly state that you get a combat bonus for ambushing your target by leaping from a 10 foot ledge and landing on his head with a battleaxe, then by golly you aren’t going to get combat bonuses!  But you will most likely take that falling damage, thankyouverymuch.

Hardline GMs also tend towards a structured play environment, to keep the world continuously feeling the same in a physical aspect to the players.  Playing in the same room, with the same maps on the walls, with the same stale, half-empty cans of Mountain Dew that Steve ALWAYS leaves on the freakin windowsill can be a great help to a player settling back into a role week after week.  You want your game to run like clockwork.  Every Tuesday at 4 pm, running until 10 pm, or the like.

The Hardline GM style could very easily be attributed to a Lawful perspective.  You follow the letter of the laws laid down in the manuals, and you follow every single letter to the grave.

Style #2: Revolutionary

On the opposite perspective is your Revolutionary (or Chaotic) GM.  Revolutionary GMs tend not to believe in things like, like… books… man.  They play the game because of the spirit of the, like, game, and those McCarthy-era rules and strictures don’t have any place in this world, man!  Revolutionary GMs tend to show up to game without such things as notes… or sometimes books… or even dice.

The Revolutionary GM commonly doesn’t give a crap about having all the T’s crossed and the I’s dotted.  They’ll cross and dot as those letters present themselves.  Revolutionary GMs tend to read through the game world books repeatedly out of sheer love, where Hardline GMs do it out of a deep need to know every last modifier and oddball rule.  This pure love for the spirit of the game is a double-edged sword, though.  Revolutionary GMs tend to have very vibrant games that hinge heavily on the desires of the players instead of a pre-fabricated plotline and designated end point.  They’ll introduce subplots left and right, chase a few of them, and leave the others to wander aimlessly in a game-less universe in which they are suddenly free.  If a particular subplot interests the majority of the players, they’ll go after it, if not, then off it goes to la-la land until it becomes convenient to reintroduce, if it ever does.  The converse of this is that, due to the Revolutionary GM’s lack of note-taking ability or preparation, games can be rather erratic in playstyle.  A Prime-NPC (one that reoccurs through the storyline) that you fought 3 sessions ago may use entirely different tactics and abilities, instead of remaining constant.  An entire village may disappear from the shores of the sacred River of Black Thorns because you didn’t write it down.

Revolutionary GMs tend to play hard and fast with the rules.  If the player takes the time to climb up to a 10 foot ledge to ambush someone from behind and above with a battleaxe, then the Revolutionary GM will most likely figure out some delicate scientific equation (read: pulling it out of your butt) and give the player a combat modifier which is fitting.

Revolutionary GMs have a massive benefit over the Hardline types in that they tend to be ready to run anywhere and anywhen at the drop of a hat.  They don’t need notes, because they don’t use them.  They have some (or sometimes even most) of the important details stuffed into their cranium, and they can spin a story purely off of that.  A large note of caution to any wannabe Revolutionary GMs is to not let the players closest to you have a ludicrously higher amount of playtime than those who are not.  If you’re running a 5 player game, and 2 of them live with you as roommates, you could easily have ‘mini games’ with those two players every night.  This would be marvelous for them, but very, very crappy for the rest of the players.  The players who are not involved in those ’sub sessions’ will quickly lose track of what’s going on in the game as it continues to grow more and more focused on that fraction of the group that you dedicate more time to.  Another warning, if you do run ’sub sessions,’ is to do them no more than one sub session for every two real sessions.  Even though the plotline continues to spin and unfold in your lovely little skull between games, if you run too much, you’ll find yourself quickly burning out on the game and concept.

How do I know these things?  I’ve been both.  The earlier part of my career as a GM held me as a Hardline, but later on I “evolved” into a Revolutionary.  Why the quotes?  Because the word evolution typically denotes that the after-change state is better than the pre-change state.  That’s simply not true.  Both styles have wonderful advantages.  Knowing which you need to be is important.

Style #3: Common Sense GM

Or you could ignore all of that, and do your best to be a Common Sensist GM.  To save my fingers, we’re going to abbreviate that to CSGM.  A CSGM walks the line between the two, creating a super-fueled Hybrid of both styles, taking the best from both and leaving the worst.  You know, like a half-drow, half-orc ninja/ranger/sorcerer/priest who grew up in the Orient learning the sacred secrets of lovemaking from the famed Pink Lotus Geisha.

CSGM style tends to be -very- difficult for beginners.  Why?  Because beginner GMs usually have a poor grasp of exactly which rules can be fudged (combat modifiers) and which ones can not (stat or skill gains) without major game repercussions.  In order to grasp what can and can not be changed without mucking about with basic concepts, you need to first have a deep understanding of not only the game you’re running, but game mastery in general.  Does this mean you shouldn’t try?  No.  By all means, do go ahead, it’s the best way to discover which kind of GM you are, but do warn your players first.  Tell them straight up that you’re experimenting with some new concepts and ideas, and that it may jam up the game from time to time if you get stymied at how to cross a T which is suddenly leaning heavily to the left, or how to dot an I that is now inverted entirely.  Gaming Science at it’s finest.

The most important thing to understand about being a beginner GM is that you will make horrible mistakes.  Your buddy Brad will convince you that there’s really nothing too powerful about playing a drow elf.  Sweet Michelle will help you understand why a plasma pistol isn’t really -that- overpowered… I mean everyone else is running around with laser guns anyway, she just wants to be beautiful and different.  You will, at some point, most likely give someone a baby dragon as a familiar.  Don’t sweat it.  Drow elves can be killed.  Plasma pistols can be stolen.  Baby dragon familiars can grow up and decide the PC would make a better snack than they make a master mage.

The Dreaded TPK.

You will most likely experience a TPK.  A Total Party Kill.  This event will (or at least should) change you.  You’ll feel a brief rush of exhilaration as you realize that you actually won.  That the player’s didn’t win.  And then you’ll look around the table at the crushed and hollow eyes of your forlorn players, who stare alternately at you and at the crumpled remains of Tristian The Fearless Doombringer’s character sheet.  You’ll see the pleading eyes, the quivering lips, and you’ll realize what a shitty job you just did at GM’ing.  You may decide that it’s not for you.  You may decide that you need to take a long break.  You may feel your own eyes begin to water, your own lip begin to quiver.

You’ll need to man up at that point.  TPKs happen.  They happen to the best GMs and the worst GMs.  The worst GMs are the ones who cackle madly at the victory and then never run again, stopping while they’re ahead.  Maybe the GM in question pulls a TPK and then grows depressed and despondent, vowing never to wield such terrible and awesome powers for evil again.

The best GMs are the one who realize that every end is just another beginning.  Experience a TPK?  Have a nearby king/diplomat/archaeologist/historian hire a new party to go find out what happened.  Not up for the whole “Mr. Johnson hiring a party” scenario?  Have your players write up peasants, or young people, or refugees from a war-torn nation nearby that stumble over the remains of the old party.

Or just ditch the whole thing entirely, and go start another game with the same players.  No matter what it is you decide to do, you have to do something.  You can’t just wallow in grief/victory and let your players rot.

Few players have the skills to be a GM.  Fewer still have the balls to stand up and do it.  Of that small percentage, only a fraction has the raw talent to be an excellent GM right from the start.  I should know, I sucked when I started.  I experienced TPKs.  I experienced the dreaded Walk Out, where your players just decide to screw the game and go to a movie.  I’ve been told, to my face, that I suck and I’m the most horrible GM ever, and that I’m the only reason the person who told me this no longer roleplays.  (The exact moment of ‘breaking’ came when he stood below a helicopter, killed the pilot by shooting through the copter’s floor, and then didn’t move.  Then he got horribly angry that I had the temerity to land the damn copter right on him, because, you know, physics?  Anyway, I digress.)
That’s not the same story now.  I persevered.  I scratched and clawed and crawled and limped and then walked along the trail to becoming a “Good GM.”  Now I stand here, moving easily at a swift trot, making sure not to outdistance the players, but still keeping them seeking the same goal I am:  An incredibly enjoyable gaming experience.

This is your duty.  You are part of the few who are brave enough to take the blame, to take the burden, to provide for your friends in a way nothing else can.
You are a GM.  Congratulations.  Just don’t give up, and you’ll see it gets better.
At the end… there’s cake.

In this case: Not a Lie.

5 Awesome CRPGS from the Before We Had Mice

We’ve all been there.  Well, if you’re a gamer geek, you’ve probably been there.  At least once.  You’re hanging out at a cool party, talking geek shit, the conversation slowly lapses (or may have started) to video games, and someone says something like…
“And then this one time in Final Fantasy I killed the end boss in one round by using…”

And your brain fucking shuts down.  Why?  Because you’ve heard it before.  Hell, if you’re ANY gamer geek other than me, you’ve probably even done that.  Knights of the Round or whatever the fuck it was.  I don’t know, because, as you may have surmised, I never fucking played Final Fantasy.
Nope.
Okay, maybe I fondled Final Fantasy’s joystick once.  We played around, we kissed, but that was it.  I never levelled up past like 5th level, and I certainly never got anywhere in the plotline.  But that doesn’t really matter right now (other than to probably completely discredit any ‘geek’ cred I may have had with you Nintendojocks), what matters is the fact that there’s a shit ton of ancient, incredibly awesome CRPGs out there that you may not have heard of.
Here’s five of them.  I’ve included links behind the Titles to each game that I could find available for download online.  Enjoy!!

#1: Wasteland.

Wasteland was a godsend in the late 80s.  A shining, radioactive jewel among the trash that many companies were kicking out for video games back then.  Based  highly upon the Bard’s Tale style of RPG, it allowed you to control a party of characters as they traipsed through post-apoc California.  The game starts with the characters living in the remains of a prison, and they’re sent out to find out what the hell is going on.
This game varied highly from many others of the time because it earned a PG-13 rating.  Why?  Because of shit like this:
“Your full auto burst from an uzi reduces an angry townie to a thin red paste.”
“Your blast from your LAW-rocket makes an angry townie explode like a blood sausage.”
Those were actual motherfucking combat prompts for a game produced in 1988!  This game was produced with a version on the most wholesome computer ever, the Apple IIe, and it contained lines like that.  Did it change my childhood?  Why yes, it certainly did.
It included everything.  There were angry townies (as mentioned above), mutant everythings, and even an out of control AI and a horde of robots that you had to defeat.
What made this game truly great was the fact that in most situations you could overcome the obstacle in a variety of ways.  For instance, you are faced with a badass steel gate that you have to get through.  With most video games of the era, this meant you were completely fucked unless you had brought along a thief type.  Not so in Wasteland!
If you had a thief, you could pick that lock.
If you had a strong dude, you could force the lock open.
If you had an explosive expert, you could blow the door down with some C-4.
If you had a character who could climb, he could get over it and unlock it from the other side.
If all else failed, if you had a LAW-rocket, you could just blow the son of a bitch wide open.
Wasteland also was one of the first games to include a game world that changed as you changed it.  If you went to the town of Needles and killed every last person there, then later on found out you had to go to Needles to talk to this dude, you were completely SOL.  That dude was dead, and he’d stay that way.  The only way to fix it was to load a previous save game, or to restart the entire campaign.
If you played any video game during the era, you’ll remember the absurd lengths they went for copy protection.  Wasteland’s solution?  A big fucking book full of shit you have to read on occasion, including disinformation that would completely screw you if you read crap you weren’t supposed to read.
In short, this game was completely ball-breakingly awesome.  It had guns, death, fast women, big explosions, robots, mutants, and radiation.
Also, it brought us this…

Fallout. Claims Wasteland is it's spiritual predecessor.

Respect your elders, young’ns!  Especially when they have a flamethrower and grenades.
Next on the docket is something they’ve tried to reproduce in recent times, and have failed mightily.  They screwed the pooch so horribly on the new version of Bard’s Tale that I’m not even going to credit it as being in the same storyline.

#2: Bard's Tale Series.

Binary Badassery.

Depicted above is another of the OG thugs of computer roleplaying games.  In Bard’s Tale you played (surprise) a bard, and his merry band of awesome fellows, traipsing around the land of Skara Brae.  It was up to you to stop a certain dickheaded dark wizard from controlling the land and taking all the hot chicks for his harem.  And who is this sorcerous Dick Cheney?  A guy named Mangar the Dark, which is a direct translation from 80s speak to “Dick Cheney.”
Bard’s Tale is a straight up dungeon crawl, and it never claimed to be anything but that.  You would tool around the countryside and cities in a first person perspective view of each room (which was a static image) as you progressed through the storyline.  You could have up to six characters, with a variety of classes (warrior, rogue, paladin, monk, hunter, magician, conjurer and of course bard), each with specific strengths and weaknesses.  The only truly necessary character class type was the bard, as many puzzles within the game could not be passed without the use of a bard or the playing of a bard’s song.
The bard was also the pimp mac daddy of buffs in the game.  If there was a stat for it in Bard’s Tale, the bard could modify the fuck out of that stat… and the music of the game would actually change depending on the particular song you were playing at the time.  Doesn’t sound too cool now-a-days, does it?  This was nineteen fucking eighty fucking five, dude.  If you were playing Bard’s Tale, you were probably playing it on an Apple II  (maybe not even a IIe), MS-DOS (you remember, before Windoze?), or a Commodore fucking 64.

I just used this C64 to invent the wheel!

One feature which set Bard’s Tale far beyond the norm was the ability, on some platforms, to cross-populate your characters.  If you had played Wizardry or Ultima III, you could import your PC from that game directly into Bard’s Tale.  For those of you that don’t understand what I just said, this is like taking Sonic the Hedgehog into MarioLand and whooping some serious ass in order to find that princess and fuck her brains blue.  It’s something that computer companies don’t fucking do anymore… because they’re dicks.  Back in the 80s, computer game programmers were too coked up to be dicks, so they let shit like this fly.
They also had another cool thing you could do with your magick users in this game.  If you had a conjurer or a magician, you could advance to a wizard or a sorceror.  Once you managed to master all 4 magick classes with that character, they had the option of becoming an Archmage.  Sounds pretty cool, right?  Well, it wasn’t.  An Archmage was just a term for someone who knows all four schools of magick, and got access to the ONE spell that only archmages could get.  It was a pretty cool spell, but the lead up to it was the equivalent of a four day erotic massage without the happy ending.
Bard’s Tale 1 was followed by two sequels, and something even more awesome.  A construction kit.  You could make your own motherfucking Bard’s Tale if you wanted.  I know this is common now, but it’s common because THEY did it back in the 80s.  See how dickheaded they weren’t back then?  See?
Wasteland and Bard’s Tale were awesome, but now I’m going to focus on a game that helped change the world.
Ever heard of the internet?  I introduce to you...

#3: Neuromancer.

William Gibson invented Al Gore.

WOAH!  Really futuristic, right?
William Gibson is a dude who you may have heard of.  If you haven’t, you should crawl out of your hole and go investigate him.  He’s one of the most amazing sci-fi writers of the late 20th century, and he’s still kicking out the mad science right now.  William Gibson (@GreatDismal on Twitter) and Bruce Sterling helped give the nerds who invented the internet an actual, textual vision of what a serious virtual reality could look like.  Where Al Gore says he invented the series of tubes, William Gibson actually did have a big hand in it.  There, if you didn’t know about him before, you do now, you fucking noob.  The More You Know!
In Neuromancer, the game follows the path of the book by the same name.  You play Case, who was once one of the world’s best hackers before he crossed the wrong people and they burned out his brain in a way that would make River Tam envious.  The game involves getting the perfect mix of programs, gear, and organs, all while trying to figure out what the fuck it is that’s going on.  Organs?  Yep.  You can sell your natural organs for low grade Chinese knock-offs, but some of the cybernetic organs can actually help keep you alive where your natural meatstuff would fail.  It’s a very interesting process to find the best balance of meat/ware.
After you get Case back on his financial feet by knocking over small time jobs and getting some base scratch, the plotline begins to unfold before you, and leaves your head spinning with a mix of Voodoun Loa, crazed orbital personages, Jamaican shuttle pilots, and lonely AIs that just want a hug.
The copy protection for Neuromancer was one of those ungodly wheel things, about the size of a small hubcap.  It was truly atrocious, and Gods help you if you’re dumb enough (as I was) to spill Cherry Coke all over it.

I'm not making this shit up.

Neuromancer was originally released in 1988, and in early 1989, I spent 5 hours on the phone trying to figure out if the rumor I had heard (from the front of the Neuromancer novel) that New Line Cinema was coming out with a movie on it soon was true.  It was!  ZOMFG!  I almost died.  The closest they ever came to making the movie was the 1995 production of Johnny Mnemonic.  Saying that “movie” was close to Neuromancer is like saying a dog turd is a close relative to the ISS.  It’s just not truth.  I anguished in freakish misery, and have frantically checked IMDB.com every month or so to determine if there were any advancements to the movie process.
When I found out the guy who did Torque was in charge of the project, I almost committed seppuku.  That guy (who I won’t even name) was thrown off the project, and now Vincent Natali, of “Cube” fame, is in charge… but I digress.
Back to fucking video games.

#4: The Zork Series

If you don’t know what Zork is, you should go kill yourself right now. (DISCLAIMER: DO NOT IN ANY WAY KILL YOURSELF.)  Especially if you think you’re a gamer.  Either that, or you should just keep reading, and then go find a safe place to play it.  
Zork was so damn important to early gaming, that it defies description.  Therefor, I won’t describe it.
But what I will do for you is this. You see that link up there that says "The Zork Series"? It actually contains a website that gives you the ability to play a huge selection of old Infocom text based games. Go check it out. Lose hours of your life. You'll thank me.

On to our next game.

#5: Wonderboy in Monster Land.  

Wonder.  Boy.  In.  MotherFucking.  Monster.  Land.

As titles go, it doesn’t win any awards.  However, did you know that WBiML (as I will call it from now on whenever I don’t want to type the whole title because that son of a bitch is really goddamn long and I might have to type it several times during this post) was the first prophetic video game?
That's right, it told the motherfucking future.  Wonderboy, in this game, is none other than Jack Motherfucking Black.  It tells of his struggle as a youth in Santa Monica, before he overcame great obstacles and starred in a commercial in 1982 for motherfucking Pitfall.

In WonderBoy, you follow the Hero (Jack Black) through his trials to save the goddamn world, which just couldn’t ever seem to stay out of peril in the 1980s.  On his quests, you’d kill monsters or jump for coins and save up dough.  You’d find shops in various towns were you could buy boots that’d increase your jump length and speed, you could buy armor that’d protect little Jack from the perils that was trying to eat the goddamn world, shields to deflect things that were thrown at you by the perils trying to eat the goddamn world, and even spells (witchery!) and potions (drugs!).  You could even stop your pre-pubescent, armored and shield clad self in one of the towns and hit the bars looking for chicks or info to help you on your quest.  Yeah, even as a child, Jack Black was swimming in babes and booze… is there any wonder that he’s actually saving the fucking world right now?
Unfortunately, the game stops before Jack Black ever meets Kyle (who is known as Young Nasty Man, but was edited out of the game for America.  In the Japanese version, he’s depicted as a tentacle festooned, balding robot who is always accompanied by 3 girls in school uniforms) Glass and goes on to form the band Tenacious D.  I can only assume that the company lost funding due to the massive amounts of blow they were obviously doing to come up with this shit.  The sequel was, unfortunately, never made… however Jack Black never forgot his experiences as a child, and has gone on to write several successful songs, including one that he tells of his trials.

So there you have it, whippersnappers.  Us Elders knew how to party down with video games before everything was clickable and scrollable and all that other newfangled horsepuckey!  Heck, even before a mouse was anything other than something a cat chased, we were exploderating mutants and saving the worlds from chaos.

So respect your elders, give us some mad credit, and learn about your roots.

From the Red Box and Onward - A Review of Dungeons and Dragons

My Gods… what have I done.  This review is going to be insane.
I've trimmed things down a bit... I am deciding not to do reviews on Chainmail, or any of the 'progenitor' editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This is going to start at the iconic Red Box edition.DnD was what I cut my teeth on.  It’s how I discovered roleplaying.  I went over to a friend’s house one night in the wild outback of Washington State, and I woke up chewing on his book.  I was about 8 years old.
I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a group of four 7 to 9 year olds play Dungeons and Dragons, or any tabletop game, but they don’t precisely follow rules.  We would roll up characters, and then roll a die randomly to determine what level we were, and then just pick a bunch of spells that were cool out of the book and hurl ourselves relentlessly at random stuff included in the books.
For those of you that don’t know what DnD one is like, here’s an archeological reference:

We didn't read this.

See how it has a big "READ THIS BOOK FIRST!" in ALLCAPS at the top?  Yeah, obviously that didn’t apply to us.  We picked through, threw out all the bullshit rules (anything our 7 year old brains couldn’t comprehend) and started playing.
I remember half way through our first combat round we suddenly realized that we didn’t have hit points on our sheet.  The monsters all had hit points.
Instead of looking at the rules, we deduced, by simple logic, that this meant that we couldn’t be damaged, and we pushed forward.
This lasted for months, I think actually maybe a year or two, until one day we got bored after our 54th black dragon mage golem and someone opened the book and started reading from the beginning. It might have actually been on a dare, come to think of it. I don't recall. But suddenly, there were rules up in this here country.
This has come to be known as My Fall from Grace.  My PC had hit points, and therefore could now die… which I did.  Over, and over.  And over.  And over and over and over and over.  I’m pretty sure, somewhere, there was an entire nation of undead beings created from the bodies of my fallen characters.
Basic DnD is just that.  It’s very basic.  It’s a very swift system, with very little in the way of situational modifiers to confuse beginning players.  Unfortunately, it also has a staggering amount of loopholes  and situations that are not covered by modifiers which will confuse the crap out of beginning players.  Basic DnD is the Catch 22 of the gaming world.  It’s a great place to start, but only if you have someone who knows what they’re doing to show you how to start.  The very nice thing about the system is that if you do have a DM who is experienced at just running games in general (not even DnD) that they can usually cover most of the situations with some off-the-cuff modifier or role-making decision.  This makes a terrific game for a casual weekend with friends.
Basic DnD gets 6 crits out of 10.
And then the damn system evolved (or a new one was created, depending on your particular religious idiom) which just went further with the pooch screwing.
I hauled my bitter, broken, angry ten year old butt down to WarGames West one mid-summer afternoon, and ran face to face into this book right here:

Ogres + Halberds... not a fun combination.

I was stunned.   ADVANCED Dungeons and Dragons?  What the FUCK!?  Were they trying to say I was some sort of feeble newbie?  Were they trying to suggest that I, in all my 10 year old glory, didn’t have a flying clue what I was doing?  I immediately ran shrieking to my father (who was bored, as he hated gaming stores) and informed him that he had to buy this book for me because the fate of nations depended on it.  Realizing the truth in the statement, he did just that.
Here's the ironical part. The book sat right next to this one:

Who the fuck needs rules anyway?

I spent the rest of the vacation pouring over the various monster descriptions and thinking of how totally awesome they were, even going so far as to chatter my dad’s ear off about stuff he could never conceivably care about… like otyughs.  He did his best feigning of interest until I got tired of talking and went back to reading.
It wasn’t until I was back in Washington State that I realized I actually needed the rule books too.  Yep, somehow, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was more Advanced than normal Dungeons and Dragons, and you couldn’t play ADnD with the old rules.  I think it was two or three months before I actually got the rules.
I was blown away.  Was this the same game?  It had HARD COVERS!  On all the books!?  No longer could we fold the cover back and show how right we were to Player X or DM Y with vicious stabbing motions of our pre-pubescent fingers.  Now our game was Official.  Now we treated the books like tomes of ancient lore, handling them with the utmost of care, and being careful to never put a single mark in them.  Yeah.  Right.  Within a month, all the books looked like they’d been covered in meat and thrown into a pool of water filled with sharks that had pens and pencils for teeth.  Rough doesn’t begin to cover it.
Everything fucking made sense.  Races were races.  You could be an elf AND a wizard!  Classes were classes, and you could even, if you really kicked ass, be more than one!  Monsters were even more super-deadly, the pictures were more super-awesome, and the modifiers were more super-modifier..ing.  If you were carrying 90 lbs worth of gear on your back and you had to jump over a 15 foot chasm which was covered in oil on the other side… you could figure out exactly what you needed to roll in order to die horribly.
This, obviously, was the game for me.  This was the ultimate in the gaming experience.  I could never find anything better than this, and I played it faithfully for a long while, until this came out…

This taught me the meaning of "Losing My Shit."

I completely lost my shit.
Up until current day, with all the editions, and rule changes, and errata, and random bizarre weapons out of Dragon Magazine, NOTHING has topped the Dark Sun setting in DnD.  Nothing.  Ever.  Anywhere. (I still feel confident in saying this because Monte Cook's "Numenera" has not yet released.)
When it came out, I picked up a set.  Many of my gaming group thought it was ‘too hard’ because of such rule tomfoolery as “You have to carry enough water to not die.”  I could go on for hours about Dark Sun, but I won’t.  Because I’m focused on (A)DnD right now.  And also because the asshats at TSR came out with this…

Surely this would be the last book I ever had to buy...

Which pretty much eclipsed Dark Sun for my friends.  Because all of a sudden they didn’t have to worry about dying in a desert from dehydration, or from Jamey psionically controlling them to jump into a large pool of silt that they thought was water.  Jamey, by the way, was playing a world-class jerk.  His alignment was Lawful Asshole.
All of a sudden, ADnD was more complex.  They hadn’t just updated a few things, they had REWRITTEN THE ENTIRE DAMN SYSTEM.  For one thing, instead of everything being measured in inches, because all DnD and ADnD1 people were only as tall as the figures that represented them, all of a sudden shit was measured in feet.  Spells were rewritten, level requirements for those spells were changed, and some spells were entirely deleted from the system. They made so many changes that even their own comic book series made fun of the changes.
They basically took all of our collective pooches, and screwed them all at once in some massive despicably unnameable act at TSR headquarters.  Were we pissed?  Nooooo… of course not, we lapped it up.  We bought those books hand over fist… and then we went back and tried to change the rules for every single damn expansion we had bought to work with ADnD2.  Unearthed Arcana?  We did it.  Oriental Adventures?  Yep, that one too.  Ravenloft?  Got that one… NOT THAT WE EVER PLAYED IT EVEN ONCE.  Dark Sun…. no, of course not.  Too tough.  Sigh.
In addition to changing the very structure of damn near everything, ADnD2 added something that would someday become the Greatest Goblin To Ever Live.  They introduced the concept of ThAC0.

A Goblin Monk. Yep.

What is ThAC0, you may ask?  ThACo is not only a goblin monk (click here to go to Goblins Comic, the best webcomic out there. I've taken the liberty of pointing the link at the first issue), but a mind-bogglingly complex mathematical construct designed to completely fuck several pooches on many different levels by making nerds do math when all they want to do is fucking kill orcs.  And by mind bogglingly complex, I mean you take your “To hit” score and subtract your opponent’s AC (armor class, for you heathens that don’t play ADnD) from it in order to get what you have to roll to hit them.  How did this fuck shit up?
Because some of the damn AC scores were negative.  Which ones were negative?  The REALLY good ones.  So if you were in combat with a great fucking phantasmal doom wyrm, you then had to deal with not only getting scalding acid-flame spewed out over your well armored (or scantily clad, if female) body, but you had to deal with fucking double negative pseudo math.  All while trying to figure out who didn’t bring enough damn Doritos and Mountain Dew.
Overall, after all the bitching and moaning, 2nd edition was wildly popular because of how much more simple the system was… as long as you didn’t try to hit anything with your sword.  The company quickly started updating some of the older products which we ourselves had done so much effort to configure, and then started kicking out some nice tools called “Class Handbooks.”  These handbooks gave every single damn class eight more choices on what they could be, twenty more ways to do it, and a ton of background material, class-specific gear, and nifty tricks and traps you could use to completely skullfuck your GM in to submission.
Somehow our GM, Al, managed to keep up-to-date on every damn thing every single fucking character class could do.  Mind like an adamantium trap, this guy.  Wouldn’t let a damn thing get past him… except for his brother and another player named Terry, who had ninja-monk-psycho-quisinart classes that could somehow manage about 7 attacks in a round, many of which counted as backstabs.  How borked were they?
They one-rounded a Terrasque.  A fucking Terrasque.

A Fucking Terrasque. The above caption is completely correct.

But I’m not bitter.  It was a great game.  We played it for years.
ADnD 2nd Edition gets 9 crits out of 10 in my book.
And it was truly a glorious game… until TSR fucking sold out to a bunch of asshat lawyers due to some bullshit marital scandal which left a wife who had no concept of how fucking valuable the damn game was with complete and total control of the damn franchise.  Where once TSR had been owned by gamers, it was now owned by lawyers.
Fucking lawyers.  The only thing in the system you couldn’t kill enough of.
They took our beloved game, rewrote the rules, printed them in urine on pages made of pressed baby flesh, and then sold it to us.  How did it look?  A little something like this:

Pictured: Loathing.

HINT:  DO NOT LOOK INSIDE!!  See that big lock on the front?  It’s a clue.
It’s lawyer speak for “We’re fucking you, and laughing about it while doing coke off of your wife’s tits, whom we rented with the money you paid us.”
3.0 was so entirely, horribly broken that I can’t even believe, for a single minute, that they even bothered to playtest the dice they advised using in this lump of horsecrap.  A guy I know got bored one night and created a half-orc paladin who could dual-wield halberds.  At first level.  Know what a halberd is?  It’s an eight foot shaft tipped with a foot-long blade that is used for defending against charging fucking horses and crap.  He had one in each hand.  Without any negative effects.
You can’t get a negative crit.  So I am not giving a crit level to this system.  It’s heinously borked, and we’ll leave it at that.
3.5 came out shortly after when they realized how fucked the system was.  Did 3.5 unfuck the system?  No, not really, but it did make it more palatable to people who liked to focus on roleplay instead of playing a quisinart half-demon half-drow half-giant sorceress/fighter/bard/lawyer who specialized in being a laser-gun sniper dude.
The precise problem with both 3.0 and 3.5 was that they took out all the stops.  Roleplaying games are all about building your character into something awesome when they start out as something that can get pwn’d by a damn housecat.  You think I’m kidding?  Take a human mage from 2nd edition.  Give them a dagger.  Put them in a 10 by 10 room with a housecat that is aggressive towards said mage.  See what happens.

While 3.0 and 3.5 did make being a human amazingly more survivable at lower levels, it also had some serious problems.  Like some skills that hinged directly off of stats… and those stats being entirely too high for the creature that owns it.
Example:  Wolverines are completely fucking badass.  I’m not talking adamantium claws snikt/snikt/snakt wolverines, but the furry not-fucking-cuddly kind that hangs out in forests deep and dreary.  You know, the bastards that aren’t even two feet tall when on all fours?  Those ones.  Wolverines in 3.0 have a charisma of 21 (on a human norm scale of 1-18.)  Charsima is the ‘OMG I wanna fuck you’ stat.  It’s for social interaction.  Since wolverines are intimidating little motherfuckers (I’d sure as hell run if I saw one in the wild), they had to have a high charisma so they could be intimidating.  Some genius at WoTC (Wizards of the Coast, who now owns DnD and all things therein) didn’t think “Hey, lets give the skill like a +10 to the roll.”  No, they just gave the damn 21 charisma to the wolverine.  So now, after it makes your 8th level fighter crap his chain mail pants and run in fear, it will turn to your fighter’s sorceress wife, walk off with her back to the burrow, and raise some half-wolverine half-drow-elf sorceress/fighter/assassin/rangers who it will train to come kill your ass for crapping all over its lawn.
Realizing how completely fucked 3.X was, WoTC left it for dead and plowed forward into the catastrophe that is 4th Edition.

I realize I may have just lost some of you.  Let me explain my opinion on 4th Ed.
It’s a great game for systemic massacres.  Every class has ‘powers’ which are called feats and talents.  Each one of these feats or talents has a preset amount of time it can be used per-game or per-day.  They are easily hand-printed or even machine printed off the intarnetz for use during your game on note cards.  Each one has a recharge time, a damage code, perhaps a special effect like damage over time, negative modifiers to your opponent, or beneficial modifiers to your team mates.
You can even, if you wish, arrange them at the bottom of your character sheet in a row so they’re more easily manageable.  Like so:

4th Edition is the latest in the continued dumbing-down of the playerbase.  Back in the day, you had to have some real brain power to play DnD, not to mention Rolemaster or Traveller systems, which I’ll do a review on later.  These badboy games made nerds into supernerds.  You could cross-correlate tables without looking at them, all while doing doublenegative superfractional quantum fucking math and stuffing your face with more Doritos.
In short, DnD made you fucking smarter.
Now?  Not so much.  Now all the tactics are carefully parcelled out.  Every power/feat/talent/moneyshot has a designated ability and can’t be modified because to do so would zomfg break the damn game.  Roleplaying is about stepping outside of the rules, about doing things you can’t normally do, about looking at situations you could never be in and figuring out how to conquer them or save the whole fucking world.
That being said, the system, as I mentioned before, is masterfully designed.  It works like fucking clockwork, because it has so little wiggle room.  It is a machine of dice-rolling and results.  There’s no soul, because it is so mechanically perfect.
Due to these factors, I give Fourth Edition a lackadaisical 4 crits out of 10.  That’s right, it scores LOWER than the original DnD which was written on napkins and old, mildew scented notebooks in Gary Gygax’s (may he rest in the upper planes forever) fucking basement.
However, if you’re a WoW player, it’ll easily score a 9.5 out of 10 for you.  I don’t decry your enjoyment, by all means, go buy yourself a copy, rip it open, and lap it up.  The more money you throw at WotC, the more likely roleplaying will continue in the future as an excellent source of inspiration for socially-awkward people who will grow up to write books, tv shows, movies, and whatever else we come out with to waste our time with.  The more money you throw at gaming, the more gamers will grow up, and the more we’ll own the fucking world.

Respect the Original Gamester. Rest in peace, Gary.

Thanks for everything you gave us, Gary.  You looked at all of the socially-awkward smart people in the world who didn’t have a place to go, and you created a place that didn’t exist where they could be whatever they wanted to be.  Through this, you helped them learn how to interact, how to solve problems, and how to become more than they ever dreamed of being.
I can’t thank you enough, sir, for the change you have brought to my world.