Ask Me Anything: BedzoneII

The OSR is certainly a *lot* more than just B/X or BECMI emulation, even though OSE has emerged as the gold standard in retroclones. OSRIC is AD&D, Swords and Wizardry is OD&D, etc.

For the record, my own AD&D game in high school (that I ran like 4-6 times a week!) wasn't very wargame like, at all. Early on I gravitated towards overland and campaign play (Greyhawk), and I dumped most of the truly fiddly bits around weapon speed, rating different weapons vs. different ACs, etc. In the end, my AD&D was a lot more like B/X... but as a closed-minded teenager I refused to play the "basic" game. :)

The neo-OSR stuff I'm talking about, BZ, is indeed often contemporary and minimalist. There are way too many of them to even begin to count anymore, but examples include The Black Hack, Troika!, Knave, Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells, Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Mausritter, Morg Borg, Warlock! and the like. Lighter games with more modern or streamlined mechanics. Yummy! And sorry for making your get-to-know-you about the OSR. ;) Also fascinating to read about Singapore, school theater and such!

You mentioned the 1980s "satanic panic": were you already in Singapore when that hit the US media following the JD Egbert disappearance in Michigan? Would be interesting to know if and how it manifested there.

If you were still at the time in the US, in your area, was the ban on d&d enforced only by parents, or were there more official actions from schools, libraries, police, etc?

What's your favorite lego set?

I've lived in Singapore all my life. So while the actual hoopla about Egbert etc didn't reach my shores (pre-internet, our media didn't cover it, so it didn't exist for us), the sentiment certainly did. My society is heavily inter-faith, and I remember the overwhelming pressure coming from religious institutions, parents and schools regarding role-playing games. To begin with, RPGs were very niche, one small hobby shop in the entire country in the 80s, visiting it felt like a mix of Aladdin's cave and underground speakeasy. Bringing a copy of red box D&D rules to school already felt like passing around a copy of a well-thumbed Playboy. Then came the outright ban in schools, which I learnt much later in adulthood to be connected to the satanic panic. In a good number of religious institutions, D&D was certainly lumped together with the occult and preached against (it was the same era as the prevalence of 'chick tracts', I remember the D&D one!). I had to hide my copies of the PH, DMG and MM from my parents by stashing them behind the neat row of Encyclopaedia Brittanica (which no one really read, so it was the perfect hiding spot). Libraries certainly didn't carry anything remotely resembling them, they weren't seen as 'proper' books. In the pragmatic culture of that time, RPGs were also seen as a waste of money, compared with a more 'proper' game like Monopoly or Cluedo.

It did come to an ugly head at one point when I was forced to get rid of my gamebooks. I re-bought them all later, naturally.

Fast-forwarding, what made pen and paper RPGs much more accceptable here was computer gaming, which was totally acceptable in a technocratic society.

Ooh the collector in me has made me accumulate way more than I can ever get round to buildling, so the LOTR, Star Wars, Ninjago, current Harry Potter releases have gotten me very excited. I enjoy very much all the annual Modular buildings for their clever attention to little details. I consider something like the Death Star a classic and one of my favourites simply for its ambitiousness in trying to create so many vignettes. I like very much the Statue of Liberty Apocalypseburg set from the Lego movie, bold, idiosyncratic and totally on theme. And there's the Stranger Things set I've been hoping to make time to get to.

Not at all, I could go on and on about it too! OSE is on my shelf as well for the same reason; I do want to own one version which I deem a good and proper cleanup of the all the OSR options available, old and new. And since my current weakness is Free League / Stockholm Kartell, I am enjoying what you're terming neo-OSR. If your Offworlders game was a little less hard science and a little more grimy, I would've imagined a system like Death in Space to be a reasonable ruleset for it.
Lol I think I had the same idea, in that when I discovered AD&D I felt that 'basic' D&D was too childish!

Thant's for the Singapore Summary! What do movies/TV get wrong about your country and culture?
Do you build any custom or MOC LEGO stuff?
What is your favorite wikipedia page?

What's the most interesting book you've read in the last year?
You mentioned MMORPGs, which ones have you played and what's been your favorite of the bunch?
If you weren't teaching what profession would you lean toward?

Well, our 'favourite' is when we get mistaken as a city in China, but that's more real life.
In movies/TV/comics, Singapore is still used as a trope for 'modern city but with quaint old world charms in its nooks and crannies'. That's probably true pre millennium, but now it's really very much concrete and steel. The worst is probably when they still exoticise or fetishise gaudy chinatown style backlanes or indian style bazaars. Nothing looks like that here. Even when we want to make movies about Singapore's past, we actually have to build sets.
Darn I haven't delved into that like forever. It was definitely a thing for me about twenty years ago, because it does require a certain degree of commitment and design. Then it devolved into using Lego for terrain and PC miniatures, naturally, but now that I play face to face tabletop so much less, there hasn't been a reason to set it up that way.

Chipping in on the whole OSR talk, I share your sentiment on retroclones and people trying to go back to the versions they grew up playing, though a friend recently put nicely into words the whole difference between that and what Harrigan called nu-OSR: "Instead of the developer telling you 'this is how we played back in the day, this is how the game should be played' the idea seems to be more along the lines of "this is how people used to do it and it seems they were onto something that got lost along the way, so let's play the game that way because it's great"

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go re-watch the interview video you did with Qralloq and try to wrap my head around the fact you're 52 when you actually seem to be in your 30s.

Funny how these two questions serendipititiously conflate. While I wouldn't say 'most interesting', I just finished "Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopaedia of Mechanisms" by Engelstein and Shalev. Yes it reads as nerdy as its sounds, and I thoroughly enjoyed having my enthusiasm for board/card/tabletop games all catalogued into their respective mechanics. It was never a viable option in my earlier years, as my country didn't even have such an industry to begin with, but I've always imagined I would like to join a game company to work on design.

On a totally different tangent, it sat on my shelf for more than a year, but I also just got round to finishing Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, because I was absolutely floored by her Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell when it came out in 2004, an alt history fantasy novel with an entire created corpus of magic.
Oof, I don't think any wiki page has left any impression on me, even though I do use them regularly, for me to even get close to a favourite.
I can certainly rewind all the way back to Ultima Online, but I'm now remembering it without nostalgia, because I can only recall grinding for hours on end catching fish. Of course there was World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, but the game I misspent most of my life in, if I needed to total the thousands of hours, was Diablo. I think Diablo II occurred during the period in my life when I didn't need sleep and could play on the US server (Singapore is rougly 12 to 15 hours ahead of the American time zones) every night.

Oh wow that's very succinctly put and very much spot on for me. I've definitely moved very far from the 'how it should be played' phase that seemed almost Gygaxian-inspired (for one could certainly quote chunks of his writing where he so strongly advocates for how a DM ought to run a game in a particular way). I still subscribe to some of the grognard groups on Facebook for shits and giggles though.
Aww shucks I attribute that entirely to the Dorian Gray effect of Zoom. :D

Thanks everyone for all your questions! I enjoyed answering them, and they were certainly an opportunity for some self-reflection as well.

What is the level closer social interaction do you care to have in your gaming?