Fostering Familiarity

"So, now that we all completely trust one another with our lives..."

Party dynamics is always a factor in any of these games we play.  It's important for the sustained suspension of disbelief that the player characters are as comfortable with each other as the players' depict around the table.  Yet, often the subject of a given character backstory is glossed over when creating a party at the outset of a new game.  Even worse is "don't mind the orc" syndrome created when a very different party member joins during a game in progress - either it's the player's replacement for a dead character or it's a new player joining the game.

When starting a new game, it's fun to have everyone roleplay their meetings and come to know each other's character exclusively through gaming.  Sure one or two characters might be familiar with one another, but it's a standard trope to start a game with "You begin in the tavern..."  I encourage new groups to use this method, since players might not necessarily know each other well in real life.  New characters can be introduced in the same way...sort of a "cold intro".  Hello, I'm Seamus the Half Orc and I use an axe.  Here's my dungeon cart, where's the lair of evil at?

When your group meets a lot and you play many campaigns, this sort of intro can get old.  Instead of being interested in roleplaying this sort of party formation, veteran players gloss it over a lot.  In my own games, the core PC group tends to be the same ones every time, plus or minus an equal number of potential players depending on the weather and the season and the rest of life's crazy conditions.

I prefer to foster a familiarity among the player characters as part of the creation of the party and prior to the group's first adventure.

Sometimes, the "meet in a tavern" this is cool, but for me it dredges up all sorts of questions as to the nature of such a group.  It's not really credible that a bunch of Neutrals meet in a liquor bar and decide to go fight evil or whatever, and then fight to the death protecting one another.  Not only is that out of alignment (for the most part) but it's also incredulous if you think "hey, these people don't know each other that well."

For me, I have a new standing rule that's been sorta unspoken for a couple of years.  This rule is the Party Familiarity principle, and it has two parts.

1. All player characters in a given campaign must have serious connections to other members of the party to represent their decision to risk their lives together. (e.g. they are family;  members of the same community;  sent on a magical quest by the warlock Charlie Sheen, etc...)
2. New characters created and joining during the course of the campaign must likewise have a familiarity and relation to the party except under special circumstances.  (The story permits the entrance of an unfamiliar character.)

It's not as unfair as it seems.  It exists solely to keep the him-hawing to a minimum when creating backstories and making sure everyone fits together in what we see as the "party unit".  Obviously, I'm not precluding any character types and for sure, if you want to play a "loner outcast" that's fine - we're going to talk about it though, since to my mind loner outcasts don't hang out with other people in a paramilitary squad / militia.

For us at the Wargate, this will save a lot of time.  Already our new campaign in Greyhawk has used this to mostly good effect - though we did let a half orc join the party for no apparent reason.  It's that kind of hinky stuff that can throw off the track of an otherwise cohesive story.  Next time you're rolling a character at the Wargate, think about how he fits in with the rest of the group, even if he's radically different in background and ability.  Surely, someone else in the party lived near the tower of the Warlock Charlie Sheen, where you grew up and learned magic spells.

The Eastern Front

The trenches at Stalingrad.

The more I talk to people, the more I realize that the average person in America doesn't even know that a war was fought on the other side of Germany.  At least, that's the impression that I get.  Also, that the Soviets did the bulk of the fighting (and winning) against Nazi Germany also seems to be something that people here just don't think about.  Now, I'm not saying our grandparents didn't fight a deadly enemy for our country - just that more fighting was done on the Ostfront.  I'd even go as far as to call it "the bulk of the war in Europe".

Anyone interested in research on the subject can check out the awesome articles on Wikipedia, starting with the basics for the Great Patriotic War.  It's a fascinating subject, full of tales of heroism and horror.  There are numerous books written on the subject, of course, but it seems that in the U.S. you pretty much have to go out of your way to learn about this.

Of course, we'll be running various scenarios as we meander our way across the war in the coming years.  As everyone knows, right now we're fighting over Moscow, and you'd be surprised at how many folk don't know how to take it when we say we're not actually fighting IN said city.  All of a sudden, I wanted to make folks aware about the horrendous struggle between Germany and Russia.

Last year, when we were going through possible theatres to get the club revved up for Flames of War, I really pushed the Eastern Front.  Right away I was blown away by how much just isn't talked about.  Months later, I've just ordered my T-34 company and I run across the trailer below.

Now, the Wargate isn't about video games, and we're not going to start covering them.  I bring it up here because it's sort of on the issue, in a roundabout way.  I don't know of a single video game that's ever come from this angle, though they probably exist - in Russia.

I've been following the production of this particular game closely as it's relevant to my interests.  I must say that this isn't just exciting to me, but I find it touching in a strange way.  It might be crass to some, but I don't know if a better tribute could be made to the sacrifices made on the Ostfront. 

If nothing else, gamer d00dZ will be aware that something happened way back in the '40's and a lot of folks died.  That's if they are interested enough to check out this game, they might could learn a little something more about history.  The Company of Heroes title was very popular, so you never know.

The Cold War is over.  Being a Russian sympathizer (as I've been called) doesn't get you thrown in jail anymore...does it?

Greyhawk Adventure Time!

Well!  It's nice to be back in familiar territory once again.  Greyhawk Adventures was the first place many of us ever explored, and I must say it's the setting for D&D that's most familiar to me.  Sure, I had my love affairs with Dragonlance and Ravenloft, and even a little Forgotten Realms on the side.  I cultivated a secret love for Dark Sun, but to me Greyhawk is the ridiculously impossible "vanilla" D&D coolness.  You know, the one with all the tropes and gamer nerd paraphrenalia?

Our Greyhawk campaign will take us through the forgotten editions of Dungeonland.  We're doing this is AD&D 1st Edition (hence referred to as 1e) and all the orange spine items.  We've got a huge collection of stuff here, and I plan on using all of it!  All the stuff from the basic, printed rulebooks are in use, and of course all the new stuff from Unearthed Arcana.  Well, it's not new now...but you know what I mean.

We're about to embark on a quest.  That is, the club.  We're going to play huge, published campaigns in every edition of D&D over the next few years.  Now, we've been playing a lot of Pathfinder and 3e but now it's high time we ran some of these old-school published adventures, and played them how they were written with the rulesets they were written for.  That's why there's no Edition War here.

We're starting out with T1-4:  The Temple of Elemental Evil, but I have a lot of material from that same era and we'll be showing how it progresses in the Campaign Log.  We've got the entire classic campaign together, and to avoid any more spoilers than I've already given (though you can pretty much predict the course of the campaign, if you were so inclined) I'll not be giving the exact list of modules here on the site until the 1e romp is finished.

The group had a blast at the first real session of the game, and even though we didn't have big turnout it was sorta an off day for the club.  Next week however, we'll most likely have 50% more players...and it should be noted that 1e was written for a much larger group than 3e's assumption of 4 players.

For my own opinions, I'd just like to leave you with these nuggets.

I believe magic items are bought and sold on Oerth, but it's shops of magic that are rare, rather than magic items themselves.  Oerth is completely saturated with magic.

We will be using the printed works as best we can, RAW (Rules as Written).  

There is some contention on the intent of certain passages in the old Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide.  1st Edition is a completely different beast when used on it's own.  I'm pretty sure I have all the pertinent information nailed down for reference, though we're sure to encounter some more strange obfuscation at some point.

Then again, we are prepared for a different sort of game now.

We can only hope the Player Characters are ready for that game.