Ask Me Anything: BedzoneII

How do you feel about Rolemaster/HARP or Castles & Crusades? Never did the play-by-mail thing (though I was tempted once or twice). Now, if you want to reminisce about PbP on old BBS*, I'm here for you.

* Kids, BBS stands for Bulletin Board System. It's a precursor to the Internet. It was what we old folks had back in our day and it meant tying up your phone line (unless you were rich enough or lucky enough to have a dedicated line) and waiting an hour for a simple download of a GIF.

What genre of music do you prefer and what do you do for fun outside of gaming and collecting?

What happened to BedzoneI? And is your name because you live in a timezone where everyone else is in bed when you're awake?

Also, what game have you seen other people praise but don't like yourself?

And which character has the best lightsaber?

Watching intensifies

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Lowkey published playwright: tell me more! What was the play about? Was it for your high school students?

What is it about generic systems that turn you off. Especially given that you instead seem to like Free League that basically uses variations of the same system for most games (albeit some woth more customization tha others).

Also: can you share some peculiar stuff about Singapore? I see it as an almost mithological place.

So what is your favorite dnd class to play as and have you ever played on roll20 and discord? Also what has been your favorite character to play as in dnd 5e?

I'll piggyback off Amber and ask the same questions but without the D&D restrictions.
1. What is your favorite class/profession/job in any rpg?
2. What was your favorite character you ever played?

Thanks for the opening shots! I'm going to mentally group them and take a couple of different cracks at them. First up, some of my idiosyncracies regarding gaming systems.
Rolemaster takes me back to what I consider D&D alternatives in its era (not to be confused with OSR, which I'll whine about later). It worked for me in its time as the crunchy fantasy system, in my head a clear contrast to what role D&D had in terms of gaming experience. I enjoyed it then, but then as a game-starved young man then I enjoyed everything I could lay my hands on. The two systems felt different, and that was a good thing.

The d20 era though, where I'm lumping HARP and C&C and others, was way more chaotic than my preferences. I was excited to see so many different takes, but they all felt samey samey to me, I think it's because of the deluge thatn accompanied the open-gaming license that lost me. So I briefly played them, but they didn't sink in much.

Which somewhat brings me to my point of OSR retroclones, that if all they're trying to do is to offer their preferred version of how original D&D ought to be like, then it just feels terribly arbitrary to me (let's keep encumbrance rules, or let's have gritty healing, or let's abstract supplies, etc), like homebrew where all rules are guidelines and you can just ignore the bits you don't like.

And I feel this inclination I have informs my feelings about the next thing:
I differentiate between having a core system that branches out into many rules and mechanics variations corresponding to their setting, and having a core system that simply adds setting elements to them.

So for something like World of Darkness or PbtA, the core mechanic is the largely the same, but each setting has its own special features, so vampire power lists are different from werewolf power lists, even though theiy both use the same dot system, or the classic 2d6 in PbtA is consistent, but each setting has its own very different set of playbooks and moves.

On the other hand, Cypher, Fate, SWADE all point you back to the same set of powers and abilities, regardless of setting, so a bow is the equivalent of a gun, winged boots are jetapacks, just reskinned, a blast power is both a fireball and nuclear explosion. If I'm buying into a game designer's vision of what their system means, I want to hear what 1d6 means to them in their design, rather than for them to tell me they're leaving it up to me to decide what 1d6 means.

Free League seems more like the former than the latter.
So I'm trying my darnest to see the good in Cypher or SWADE, and while I can cognitively get the elegance of the Cypher system or the comprehensiveness of SWADE once you start looking into its ruleset, I can't get into character the way I'd prefer, and that does bother me a bit, because I'd like to think I'm a true sucker for all sorts of systems.

I'd love to hear what the rest of you think about this! :)

I was trying to recall as much as possible my D&D characters, and realise I can't remember any dwarves and gnomes (although I've done other smallfolk like halflings and goblins.) Hmm, no sorcerers, rogues, and only one very forgettable barbarian. I am very partial to clerics/paladins and warlocks (but no Hexadin cheese please) because I find it very enjoyable to reflavour them into all sorts of very enjoyable configurations. I guess that a clue to the broader question regarding favourite or preferred PC choices in any rpg (I'm having trouble picking A favourite!). I tend not to do straight up warrior, wizard or rogue types (aka each corner of the triangle).

My most recent favourite characters are:
For D&D, a goblin monk who speaks like he's on Downton Abbey, and that's because he's pretty much been a drow butler most of his backstory life.
In Lasers and Feelings, the sentient AI of a ship, poly in every conceivable way, wants to (what else?), become human of course.
And reskinned for a couple of supers games, a split personality amina/aminus character with the ability to divide and merge with each other, one strong, the other ethereal, constant interior dialogue, different external voices.

Now on to the hobbies, interests and general peccadilloes!
I'm roughly 12 hours away, give or take, from where I used to get my RPing kicks, aka American timezones. It made a lot of difference in the earlier years when playing MMORPGs and making boss runs was a thing I could still do at 4am (my time) on US servers and still go to school or work the next day by 8am. But the more mundane explanation is that Bedzone II (that's Bedzone the Second to you), is simply an acronym of my real name.
My imagined music preferences of the past have devolved into a generic mish-mash of whatever's on the radio these days, and I've fallen into the normcore trap of spending too much time and money on vinyl and fiddling with the perfect acoustic set up (currently a Rega P3 turntable). My wife tells me I keep defaulting to rock and metal played too loud and I admit that's true.

Zero interest in sports and the outdoors, so it's really reading and writing and gaming and collecting for the cerebral pursuits, but for the more hands-on pursuits, it's cooking (I'm told I inherited my momma's chef genes and am Asian, so stir-fry is such a mainstay of how I cook) and carpentry/metalwork, leaning towards restoring furniture and gadgets rather than outright building. This last thing is a strange side effect of living in an ultra-urban city like Singapore, where old things are scarce, and consumption and disposal are part and parcel of life.

I'll get round to talking about Singapore next!

Well, the truly old school (70s, not 80s) stuff was literally different at every table -- because the rules were written so unclearly. House rules and interpretations were necessary, because people just didn't read the rules the same way. Holmes's Basic, Moldvay's Basic, Gary's AD&D and Mentzer's B/X changed that, and that's were I lose the OSR plot. I played one of those games, and have zero interest in going back there. Retroclones are Not For Me.

But the neo-OSR, the post-OSR, the New School Renaissance, whatever you want to call it -- the classic themes repacked in amazing ways with lean, mean, and innovative rules? Yes please, several helpings of that!

OSR really just tries to recapture the 'feel' of Red &Blue Box D&D while cleaning up some of the older, clunky mechanics and adding more possibilities for actual roleplay. From what I remember, the original Red/Blue experience was more akin to a boardgame, like HeroQuest, than having much roleplay involvement. Most of that, I'm certain, was it's relative proximity to the wargaming hobby in how it was thought of in the late 70's-early 80's.
For me, OSR Games are more of a nostalgia thing for me. A return to a simpler play style where things didn't have to be consistent or make sense, characters were in constant jeopardy and were a big investment of time so players tended to play smart with them rather than recklessly.

I imagine you'd like to be like the articles that talk about D&D campaigns that run for decades.

Since you like long-running systems, what is the longest campaign you've ever been a part of? How did you all manage to keep it going so long?

Singapore is a strange confluence of contradictions for sure. It's tiny, about the size of New York City, densely populated (just behind Monaco, but then Monaco has 40k vs Singapore's 7mil), ultra modern, ultra clean, all high rise, concrete, no countryside nor hinterland to speak of. We've resorted to reclaiming the seafront to add to our land area. Our most famous greenery is a man-made indoor mega garden.

English is our first language, thanks to our former colonial masters, so we've inherited a bunch of archaic laws as well, such as one that criminalises gay sex (which the government says it won't enforce but at the same time won't repeal, to pacify the conservatives while still allowing freedom of choice). It's true chewing gum consumption is prohibited, and so are assemblies without permit (so no peaceful protests even.) On the other hand literacy and education, health care, employment, transport are top notch, petty crime is non existent, and we handled Covid in a draconian manner but have almost the lowest death rate, but freedom of political speech is tightly controlled and the press is largely government influenced, and we have no porn. William Gibson famously called my country Disneyland with the Death Penalty in 1993.

It's a melting pot of races and cultures. I get sushi and stirfry as easily as pizza and escargot. It's the only place in the world where I can get a Michelin starred meal for US$4 (but also $400). Oh yes, the price of an average sedan here will buy you a huge three storey house elsewhere in the world; you actually have to bid for a certificate in order to entitle you to buy a car. Beer and smokes costs are pretty much top 10 as well.

And on a lighter note, it's Galen Marek's from the Expanded Universe!

Huh, I've never seen it up close. I like that the crystal is exposed to explain how he just can just switch it out whenever he feels like it

This goes in a couple of different directions actually.

For one, I've been the longtime teacher for my school's drama club, so it's fallen on me whe budgets are lean to produce, direct and sometimes write the play to be staged for the annual dramafest, and more importantly (in the context of my highly competitive country), to stage against other schools to attain awards.

The published stuff is something else. I've submitted a number of pieces over the years to various theatre companies, whether open calls or specific to a theme, event or competition. One I'm particularly proud of was a monologue about a prideful employer lecturing his ambitious employee in his office. Plot twist, the employee is dead. That one's of those which got published, good times.

The big time event I had to write both the script and the libretto for, and also direct to a full crowd in my national theatre, was a commission for the 50th anniversary of the first college in my country.

(And yes I've been cooking in my head a contribution to your The Games We Play project, Qralloq. I need to sit myself down and bash something out!)

I echo this sentiment. Each retroclone I've felt is very much its designer saying I'll just pick the bits I want. And I've been down the rabbit hole of reading the clashing comments of those trying to defend their versions. I don't know if neo-OSR is another name for contemporary and minimalist, but that I appreciate nonetheless, ie, the spirit of believing in the simpler rules of earlier times in order to write new games and make new systems.
So I do get the nostalgia evoked very much with the new wave of neo-OSR (to borrow Harrigan's term) games. That's strong pleasure is enough for me not to need to return to the 70s/80s rulesets for it. The wargaming part though I'm currently divided as well, since computer games now make the intent of all that wargaming gameplay way more streamlined, I feel that to play though an old Avalon Hill boxset would be very clunky. I've actually cracked open one of the dusty boxes on my shelf, poured out all the chits and bits, and wondered if I'd still enjoy referencing physical charts and tables in the booklet while deciphering tiny numbers on the corners of square counters.

I have to give credit to both BBS as well as email for my longest running campaign. There were hardly any RPG gamers in my country in the 80s, so being connected was just magic. The DM was from the UK, and there was his buddies, two players from US and someone else from Europe. We played AD&D in the Greyhawk setting. I played a LE half-elf assassin who was cursed by a belt of alignment change to become a CG priest of Olidammara. To keep track of all the individual posts happening at different times, the DM would faithfully copy paste each week's worth of posts into a chronological sequence that read so much better. I think we played for over ten years, surviving interruptions, players quitting and rejoining, and even format change from BBS to email (or was it the other way round). It's as much a mystery to me how we kept it up so long.
Some recent years back we talked about playing a reunion over roll20 or discord, but I couldn't make it thanks to timezones. So I still haven't embarked on either platform, but am very willing to do so, given that I'm utterly grateful for the interwebs for giving me a chance to play RPGs. Life would've been very different in my early years of gaming because there was really hardly anyone to play with. We had only one very tiny RPG store in the 80s, and no tables to play on (not to mention the satanic panic, which meant one single smuggled copy of a game book had to be passed under the table at school).

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?