The Bar Is Open!

Welcome, my lovelies.

Welcome to the TaleSpin Tavern.

I am Leland, called the Waywright, and I will be your host and guide as we stumble between tables and tales and worlds. Yes, I'm also known as the Silent Bard, but that's only a joke; text is pretty quiet, but if you see me in person all bets are off. In the meantime, feel free to call me Lee, though I must admit that I've answered to worse.

So what are we doing here?

As a teller of tales by trade I make no promises, but I'll try to keep the digressions to a minimum. My purpose here is to talk less about the tales we tell and more about the games we play to spin those tales. As a character in a more than few of those games I have a better perspective than some... so I'm going to take you back to the kitchen for some taste-testing, and to discuss the recipes. I want us to get an understanding of how these gamescwork, where each excels and falls short, and what we could maybe do better.

Well, whatever we like, as mood may strike, but mostly we're going to discuss Role Playing Games. We'll spend a good bit of time comparing various games available, demonstrating interesting things about them, and imagining a best possible system. 

Full disclosure - that last bit is going to be a running theme. The "House Homebrew" of the Tavern is a running work-in-progress that will hopefully be interesting enough to stand among existing games. We'll leave that to be seen.

As for me, I started in First Edition AD&D back in 1980, back when TSR still owned the company. At the time, Bard was just an Appendix in the back of the book, and I was just one character in a drawer full of scribbled notebook sheets awaiting the day my south Alabama fourteen-year-old author would meet other people who would try this crazy game. (He had been playing the Blue Book rules for a while, and AD&D was an amazing step up.) 

When he met someone, I was the character he pulled out to play - partially because Bard sounded like a lot of fun, but also because, in a stack of forty-odd characters, I was the one that had rolled the best stats.

Hey, Destiny works in weird ways. I'm just happy he didn't go for the merman ranger.

Thing is, Bard in that Appendix had to start out as a Fighter. 

Hm. Some of you may not actually play D&D. I mean, it's the de facto standard, the Grand Dame of the industry and what most people assume when you say "role playing" if you don't specify, but we've come a long way, so maybe we should establish some points of reference. You don't need to play D&D to follow along, but telling you my origins won't mean as much if you don't at least have an idea of what it is.

So to keep this short, you can always go read the Wikipedia Article to get an overview of the game and its history. You can check out the D&D Beyond website, or the 5e Community Wiki, or any of a thousand other pages that are pretty easy to find.

The important bits to get are that TSR published a set of rules that let players make up characters like me and play a game as those characters. The world was nominally modeled after Lord of the Rings with elves and dwarves and goblins and trolls, and characters were represented with  a standard set of attributes and rules for how to use them.

All those video games where the characters have "hit points" to represent their health? That pretty much came from D&D. Class and Level? Yep, D&D. 

So to get back to what I was saying, First Edition AD&D had the idea of a Bard as a Class, but you couldn't just "be a Bard." You had to start out as a Fighter, and you had to get to at least level five, but no higher than level seven. Before you made level eight you had to switch class, for which they had elaborate rules.

At that point, you had to become a Thief. This was before they introduced non-weapon proficiencies in Second Edition, or Feats in Third. In those days non-humans could be "multi-class", but they had level caps, and humans couldn't be multi-class, but only humans could switch classes, and usually only once. Bards were the exception. I was special.

I won't bore you with the sordid details of my early adventuring career - at least not today. We'll almost certainly get to that when we discuss characterization and narrative games ("role-play vs roll-play") but for now, I want to focus on what I learned in my many, MANY (re)incarnations.

In First Edition I started as a Fighter. I planned to get every level allowed (seven) before switching to Thief, and every level of that (eight) before becoming a first level Bard. As a level one Bard I would be trained as a Druid, gaining all the powers of a Druid, including Spells, but with a somewhat restricted Spell progression table. Glorious! Not that I really wanted to become animals, but hey, the Aois-dàna were magical in all sorts of ways...

Then Second Edition came out... 1989. Bard was still considered an "optional" character class, but it had been "promoted" to an actual class of its own - sort of. Now we learned Wizard spells, though still with a rather restricted table. No more class switching, we used the Rogue table.

I was reconceived, and lost a significant bit of level and power in the process, but it was all in the name of Progress! I kept my amazingly good stats, at least conceptually, but practically everything else was retrofitted with the new rules. I was, in very real terms, reborn. I couldn't shapeshift any more, but boy could I climb some walls. Why? Who knows? I guess to sneak into those damsels' chambers, because Bard. Right?

As you might guess, I went through it all again when Wizards of the Coast came out with the Third Edition. By that point I had already been through a few more rewrites as the ongoing campaign of many years added various sourcebooks, so I was getting accustomed to it. In game, I was cloned, and with a miraculously rare dice roll was ok with it. My alter ego had a minor existential crisis but acquired a Chapeaux of Difference and levelled into his own identity as an Archmage Illusionist, and it didn't even seem odd any more.

By that point I had been reimagined in systems that weren't D&D at all. I have lived as a Toreador Vampire in the World of Darkness, a star-hopping entertainer in Traveller, a Priest of the Serpent and Lord of Chaos in Amber Diceless, and several versions of myself and my own protegés from gods to baffoons in GURPS and FATE and ChargeRPG... 

I believe I can say with confidence that I have some perspective in the matter. I have struggled to be what I was meant to be in system after system that insisted I must have skills I did not want or need, or that I was not allowed to use some armor or weapon because it was forbidden to my Class, and I have earned levels galore to have them shorn off arbitrarily because the game was "just getting out of hand." I have earned wealth and fame and power and influence to have them redefined, been given abilities I never wanted only to have them stripped away once I'd become fond of them, and seen my compatriots suffer all this and more.

Frankly, my friends, I'm a little tired, but it's all just so damned interesting that I can't help but tell it.

Would you care to follow along? Pull up a table, buy me a beer, and let's look at some of these details together, shall we?

I look forward to see you here again soon.