2e or not 2e, That is the Question.

or, is nostalgia blocking me from doing cool things?

I wanted to take a brief break from so-called serious writing to discuss something that, while is specific to Dungeons and Dragons, applies to life in general. Which is to say, my non-geek readers should stick around and enjoy the show anyway.

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to decide what to do as a fun creative project. I like to have a serious one and a just for fun thing to do to unwind and blow off steam. Since doing thinking makes me hungry, my first choice of what to do was to figure out what to eat. I settled on Kraft Dinner. You can judge me if you want; although I suspect we all have our Kraft Dinner comfort food. Sure we know it is absolutely terrible and might not even qualify as food, but it makes us smile to eat it once every six months.

I was also listening to music at the time. What it was specifically doesn’t matter, though the fact it was “classic rock” from the nineties adds much to what followed. I am sure there was some whining and complaining and crunchy guitars with feedback. Whatever, the point is, noise was coming in to my ear holes. Old noise, comfortable noise. The kind of thing that feels good to listen to because it is familiar.It is comfort ear food.

I was also reading a reprint of an old Dungeons and Dragons rulebook on my iPad. This was a comfortable read of a book I had read before about a system I had used often. It was comfort brain food. Are we sensing a theme? Anyway, I was cooking and reading and listening to music.

PSA: Don’t read while cooking, you might mushify your noodles.

All of my sense were engaged in a moment. That was when nostalgia came to visit me. I was immediately reminded of when I met one of my closest friends growing up. His name was Anje at the time. It didn’t hurt that it was snowing outside either.

Back in the 8th grade, I was a weird dude doing weird dude things. I was totally in to baseball and not doing my homework. One day, I stumbled upon the chess club, the gateway drug to nerdery. It was kind of boring, and I am not smart enough to be good at it. I suck at patterning and that means constantly loosing. The king nerd, whose name I cannot remember, though I can see his blonde haired pimple faced skinny body in my mind as I type this took pity on me. He recognized right away I was not capable of hanging with the gifted kids from 8E.

He saw that I was interested in comics and other geek things like statistics and probability. Baseball is mathletics after all. Because of this, he thought I might be interested in the games club. You have to remember back then, there was the statanic panic and other controversies surrounding role playing games, so any school group was always a games group. Even my patents, who never went to church and only had bad things to say about religion thought I was joining a cult when I brought home the Tome of Magic and a Beastiary Binder.

As a result of all of that nonesense, you would walk in the room and there would be misdirection displays of Monopoly and Connect Four and whatever else, and then in a corner you would find be-speckled loners with bad hygeine and pimples (to be fair, the only thing that didn’t describe 95% of students at that age was the glasses thiung) huddled around a hex grid tossing dice. I think one teacher thought we were gambling, and was surprisingly ok with it.

PSA: no matter how cool you think you are, do not allow the year book to feature you, as a teacher, holding a jug with the universal sign of moonshine on it. This just screams inappropriate.

PSA: also, be sure to choose your faculty supervisors well kids, it makes life easier.

I had little in the way of friends at the time so I joined in and played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2e. It was a super fun game and full of math! I should have gotten an A in math just for figuring out Thac0.

A few weeks in, two new members joined from grade 7. One was a girl, the other just looked like a girl. I was not the suave and debonair man I am today, so I started slow and talked with the long haired boy. We actually hit it off, and found many things in common, from music to liking girls, again 13 years old here people.

That day, after school, we walked home together and just talked. It was pretty cool. He liked Guns N’ Roses. No one I knew liked that, they were all focused on NKOTB and the like. (Yeah I just dusted off a 10 year old meme). When we got to my place we just sort of stood on the edge of the road kicking snow and talking. I think I was supposed to invite him in or something, but that was not allowed in my house. Strangers were not welcome. Actually, my friends were not welcome. There was a standing rule that none of my friends could come over. To some extent, I and they earned that. One of my friends once walked in to the house and saw my mother doing something to new born kittens while naked, and I was not even home. I was also not a great kid, so there was that.

Anyway, we stood in the cold for over an hour before he left. Despite that, we became friends, and I ruined his life, but that is not pertinent to this story. Also, I just remembered the time when a friend of mine paid me a hundred bucks to leave so he could have a threesome with Anje’s sister and a lesbian. I know that seems weird to put in a post about Dungeons and Dragons, but I am trying for a more broad appeal here, or maybe I am just brain dumping. Either way, the point is, we were friends for some time after that, and I miss Blondre. He was the one who paid me to leave.

We actually never stopped playing dungeons and dragons and a few other role playing games. It is something form my youth that I look back at and smile.

So often we can focus on the negatives in our past, but on that Saturday a few weeks ago when I was eating Kraft Dinner and reading a 2e source book, I was reminded of happy times, and I am loathe to give that up.

As I wasreading the book, I really started to get in to the idea of finding like minded people to join me in a game of second edition. I wanted to start collecting old books, and even went in to more than one store looking for them in the interim. The idea of building a campaign world using second edition was taking hold.

Then the worst thing possible happened. I ran out of Kraft Dinner and the iPod broke.

The thing is, as I read on, I started to realize something was missing. Sure it reminded me of the past in a good way, but it still felt hollow, like the echo of a thought. Ghost images of the past that were insubstantial floating masses that were born away from on the wind. I wanted to recapture something, as we all do, but it was not happening for me in the way it had when I was eating Kraft Dinner.

I wanted something we just can’t have. A second chance to do what we enjoyed the first time. The spell was broken, and instead of engaging my heart, I switched on the brain, and that is never good for my creative projects.

I realised that the game was a relic of a different era, written by people with a different sensibility of what might be fun. Second edition is full of restrictions, full of rules about what you can’t do, instead of outlining a system for what you can. I know this is a simplistic view of the rules as written, but there is truth in it.

All of the restrictions, like the need for high abilities in order to choose a class, or strict limits on what class you can be based on race, were very evident. There is a part of me that likes the idea of choices having consequences. We live in a world today that tries to teach us we can have anything and everything we want, without restrictions. The problem is, this is not reality. There are many restrictions on what we can do in life, and our choices are the major restriction.

I cannot be Prime Minister of Canada. Not because I am not allowed to be, but because I made choices when I was 13 that closed that road to me. My capabilities are not part of that, so it matters little if I am capable, it only matters that I am restricted from that path as a direct result of the consequences of the choices I made.. When we teach children they can be anything or do anything, we fail to prepare them for the reality they will face, because of choices more than anything else in their lives.

We aren’t talking about reality here though, are we? We are talking about a fantasy role playing game. I want choices that matter, but I also do not want restrictions, or at least systemic restriction as to what I can and cannot do. Second edition literally keeps you from being able to cast spells as certain races.

I was looking for a new creative project, something that was fun and not at all business like. I wanted that project to be gaming related, and that is why I fell down the rabbit hole of second edition. It appealed to me to go old school. Not in the ironic hipster way, or in the look at me I am a unique snowflake who lives in the past, but in a, this feels good to me sort of way. Thing is, it stopped feeling good, and started feeling like homework.

What doesn’t feel like homework is Fifth Edition. It feels like a steamlined way to play a complicated game. The rules as written do try, as much as possible to get out of your way while you are tring to do something fun.

All of the things that made 2e fun, can simply be house ruled in to a fifth edition game. The benefit here is that the game has evolved and grown in to something both easier and more complex to play. More complex because of the options and rules sets; easier because of the lack of restrictions and complicated mathematical equations to do anything. No one wants to be plus oned to death.

The world, and I have changed since I was 13, and I need to accept that.

For that reason, my next fun creative project, a complex world build, is going to be based in the 5e realm. I will modify the rule set to be more interesting to me, and hopefully others, but as a core system, I am going to focus on the new rather than the old. As we do in life, I am going to incoporate what I learned and did in my teens, in to what I have right now. We do not have to throw out the old ways so brazenly, though we should consider adapting them to the new reality.

This brings me to the topic of my next post on geekery. Digital or analogue. I will examine whether I want to build the world and the materials using a digital platform, or using old school pen and paper, and pencil crayons and graphs paper, and maybe some good old arts and crafts.

The tools for building worlds have gone digital, should I?