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<H1>[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</H1>
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<LI><em>To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI>
<LI><em>Subject</em>: [MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</LI>
<LI><em>From</em>: Caliban Tiresias Darklock <<A HREF="mailto:caliban#darklock,com">caliban#darklock,com</A>></LI>
<LI><em>Date</em>: Sat, 26 Sep 1998 16:02:22 -0700</LI>
<LI><em>Reply-To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI>
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<PRE>
On 01:12 PM 9/26/98 -0400, I personally witnessed Adam J. Thornton jumping
up to say:
>On Fri, Sep 25, 1998 at 09:54:59PM -0700, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
>
>[fascinating examples of REALLY major surgery to AD&D snips]
>
>> As another aside (and it may be obvious to people by this point that my
>> AD&D campaign literally rewrites the entire rulebook), I have a "classless"
>> character available who does not gain levels.
>
>> You do NOT want to know how much of the AD&D rules had to be rewritten to
>> accommodate the classless character. Suffice to say it was second only to
>> the amount of rewriting necessary to do away with separate to-hit/damage
>> rolls and replace them with a single roll.
>
>I'm just a little confused here.
>
>Why are you still playing it as an AD&D game? You long, long ago passed
>the point where the mods to AD&D were far more effort than translating the
>characters as best you could into a system that does a lot of what you want
>to do "out of the box" and is much easier to modify and keep consistent.
It happened incrementally. At first, we modified a little piece here, a
little piece there, and in the end there had to be a full rewrite of the
first several chapters of the PH. Formulas for converting monsters were
scrawled on the inside front cover of the Monster Manual, new tables were
written up, some of them neatly typed and arranged in Excel or Access, but
what it currently stands as is a series of handwritten, typed, and printed
pages that fill the majority of the bottom drawer of a file cabinet. Much
of this material is rewritten from memory upon discovery that an original
has been lost or is just not close at hand, so there's a lot of duplication
and a fair amount of contradiction. I can resolve such things when they
come up, but it sort of screws the idea of having anyone else run campaigns
in the same system.
It's been on my plate for a long, long time to sit down and write it all up
in a well-formatted rulebook format for easy reference instead of
photocopying forty to fifty pages of material for every new player, and
referring him to the file cabinet (with its two to three thousand pages of
badly-formatted and completely unorganised notes) for further information.
I am reasonably sure that if I really sat down and wrote everything out,
throwing away contradictions and discarding rules that are no longer
applicable, I'd probably only end up with about three hundred pages or so
of cohesive material... but that's a big job, and I just haven't had the
time.
>GURPS comes to mind immediately, but Champions or Hero or a variant of
>Chaosium BRP would all have been a lot easier to beat into submission than
>AD&D.
This process has been ongoing since about 1979, at which time AD&D was
still very new (mostly cobbled together from Dragon magazine articles) and
more or less the only game in town. The Calydon campaign bears the
distinction of being the second-oldest AD&D campaign still running, second
only to Greyhawk -- and I was much more partial to Blackmoor, but Blackmoor
kind of died. While I could indeed have migrated to another system at some
later date (and GURPS caught my attention quite strongly for a while), it
was the sort of thing where we really weren't *playing* AD&D anymore, and
hadn't been for years. To the credit of the system it's become, most of the
newer editions of AD&D have been reasonably simple to integrate using the
same formulas we used to scrawl in the front covers of books. But it still
means someone has to go through every supplement and do the math, which can
be tedious.
>I want to make clear that I'm not criticizing your decision: if you want to
>play a heavily-hacked AD&D it's certainly your business. I'm just trying
>to figure out what made the extra effort worth it from your perspective,
>when the much lower-effort course would have been to do something else.
There *wasn't* anything else.
Or, more correctly, while we often moved from one system to the next, *I*
always came back to AD&D, and by extension back to Calydon. I've put the
campaign away for months at a time, but sooner or later it comes back out.
(I can guarantee from personal experience that every time I re-read the
Belgariad and/or the Malloreon, Calydon comes out of mothballs with a
vengeance. Sort of like every time I read Stephen King's "Danse Macabre" or
Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature" I go and start writing my
novel again.)
There were time periods where we would leave AD&D to go play something
else; GURPS for a time, a very long association with Vampire: the
Masquerade (my gaming group didn't follow suit; I wanted more story, they
wanted more combat, we parted ways), a slightly shorter fascination with
Shadowrun (which, in a particularly ill-fated modification born of sheer
idiocy, was actually made PART of Calydon for a while -- the Eastern
hemisphere medieval, the Western cyberpunk -- and used to create some of
the most horrendous adventures I have ever had the bad judgment to run),
even dalliances with Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer fantasy battle/fantasy
roleplay/40,000. Talisman and HeroQuest were occasional diversions, and
there were a few short Magic tournaments. In the olden days, before many of
you probably recall, there were Man, Myth, and Magic (my all-time favorite
out-of-the-box gaming system) and the Arduin Grimoire to occupy our time.
But AD&D was the mother of all RPGs, and like all her children we came back
home just to visit (with dirty laundry in tow, of course) and generally
ended up staying for several months.
>This is really a game design issue: what were the decisions that made you
>want to stick with AD&D, modifying it greatly to accomodate what you wanted
>to do, rather than ditch that set of mechanics and move to a different
>system entirely with roughly-converted characters? More generally, at what
>point is it worth it to you to scrap an existing codebase/rule set?
I think what it really comes down to is that AD&D is home. It's where I
started, and it's where I stayed for a very long time. I cut my teeth on
it, I raised my level of awareness with it, and from a purely pragmatic
standpoint I've spent more money on it than I've spent on my *CAR*. The
only system which even comes close to this level of investment, in both
time and money, is White Wolf's World of Darkness and all its associated
supplements. I may spend a hundred bucks here and there on new systems
(Alternity is really interesting), but I've never spent more than a
thousand on anything except VtM and AD&D. AD&D rulebooks and supplements
completely dominate three shelves of my gaming bookcase.
Or, from another perspective, imagine that I took a pickup truck and made
it run like a sports car. It cost me a lot of time and money and effort to
do it, and in order to *keep* doing it I need to spend a lot more time and
effort in maintenance. Sure, you could say "why not buy a sports car?" --
but I couldn't buy a sports car at the time, and all I had to work with was
this old pickup truck. By this point, even though I can *get* a sports car,
there's a certain level of perverse pride in having a pickup truck that
runs like one. Sure, I could go out and buy that sports car. But a sports
car is just a sports car, and a pickup truck that runs like a sports car is
-- pretty unique. And it's mine, all mine. That's a level of pride that may
not be altogether practical, but I certainly hope it's understandable.
I like this old pickup truck. And besides, where are you gonna get a
sports car that can haul a quarter ton of watermelons? ;)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban#darklock,com> | "I'm not sorry or
Darklock Communications <<A HREF="http://www.darklock.com/">http://www.darklock.com/</A>> | ashamed of who I
PGP Key AD21EE50 at <<A HREF="http://pgp5.ai.mit.edu/~bal/">http://pgp5.ai.mit.edu/~bal/</A>> | really am."
FREE KEVIN MITNICK! <<A HREF="http://www.kevinmitnick.com/">http://www.kevinmitnick.com/</A>> | - Charles Manson
</PRE>
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<UL><LI><STRONG>References</STRONG>:
<UL>
<LI><STRONG><A NAME="01253" HREF="msg01253.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></STRONG>
<UL><LI><EM>From:</EM> Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban#darklock,com></LI></UL></LI>
<LI><STRONG><A NAME="01242" HREF="msg01242.html">[MUD-Dev] FW: [MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></STRONG>
<UL><LI><EM>From:</EM> "Peck, Matthew x96724c1" <x96724#exmail,usma.army.mil></LI></UL></LI>
<LI><STRONG><A NAME="01248" HREF="msg01248.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></STRONG>
<UL><LI><EM>From:</EM> Andy Cink <ranthor#earthlink,net></LI></UL></LI>
<LI><STRONG><A NAME="01268" HREF="msg01268.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></STRONG>
<UL><LI><EM>From:</EM> "Adam J. Thornton" <adam#phoenix,Princeton.EDU></LI></UL></LI>
</UL></LI></UL>
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<ul><li>Thread context:
<BLOCKQUOTE><UL>
<LI><STRONG>[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</STRONG>, <EM>(continued)</EM>
<ul compact>
<ul compact>
<ul compact>
<LI><strong><A NAME="01273" HREF="msg01273.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></strong>,
Travis Casey <a href="mailto:efindel#polaris,net">efindel#polaris,net</a>, Sat 26 Sep 1998, 19:22 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="01296" HREF="msg01296.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></strong>,
Vadim Tkachenko <a href="mailto:vt#freehold,crocodile.org">vt#freehold,crocodile.org</a>, Sun 27 Sep 1998, 07:12 GMT
</LI>
</UL>
</LI>
</ul>
<LI><strong><A NAME="01253" HREF="msg01253.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></strong>,
Caliban Tiresias Darklock <a href="mailto:caliban#darklock,com">caliban#darklock,com</a>, Sat 26 Sep 1998, 04:58 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="01268" HREF="msg01268.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></strong>,
Adam J. Thornton <a href="mailto:adam#phoenix,Princeton.EDU">adam#phoenix,Princeton.EDU</a>, Sat 26 Sep 1998, 17:13 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="01287" HREF="msg01287.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></strong>,
Caliban Tiresias Darklock <a href="mailto:caliban#darklock,com">caliban#darklock,com</a>, Sat 26 Sep 1998, 23:04 GMT
</LI>
</UL>
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="01297" HREF="msg01297.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></strong>,
Vadim Tkachenko <a href="mailto:vt#freehold,crocodile.org">vt#freehold,crocodile.org</a>, Sun 27 Sep 1998, 07:36 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="01299" HREF="msg01299.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft</A></strong>,
Caliban Tiresias Darklock <a href="mailto:caliban#darklock,com">caliban#darklock,com</a>, Sun 27 Sep 1998, 07:55 GMT
</LI>
</UL>
</LI>
</UL>
</LI>
</ul>
</ul>
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="01238" HREF="msg01238.html">[MUD-Dev] FPL: Another embeddable bytecoded scripting language</A></strong>,
J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#under,engr.sgi.com">claw#under,engr.sgi.com</a>, Fri 25 Sep 1998, 23:28 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="01262" HREF="msg01262.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: FPL: Another embeddable bytecoded scripting language</A></strong>,
Ling <a href="mailto:K.L.Lo-94#student,lboro.ac.uk">K.L.Lo-94#student,lboro.ac.uk</a>, Sat 26 Sep 1998, 13:00 GMT
</LI>
</UL>
</LI>
</UL></BLOCKQUOTE>
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