Why I No Longer Hate Playing RPGs

I can remember exactly when and where I got into roleplaying games. It was the spring of 1989 in a school camp in Scotland. I was 9 years old and obsessed with Lord of the Rings, martial arts and horse riding. The camp was a dull affair – walking around some woods cataloging trees and insects, learning about the industrial revolution and being very careful not to make too much noise.. During the few hours we had free in the evenings we were supposed to play football and the like, keep out of the way of the teachers and not break any windows or each other. Football wasn’t really my thing and so I initially spent a lot of time reading. On the second day I noticed a group of boys from the year above me heading off to one of the classrooms. The next day I plucked up the courage to ask what they were doing.

‘MERP’ was the less than illuminating reply. This, it turned out was a game where you could pretend to be a hero, or a villain; to run around Tolkein’s Middle Earth and kill orcs. There were no pieces, no board just imagination, paper and some odd looking dice. I could be anything I wanted, anything in the whole of the Tolkein mythos. Like a Dúnadan fighting monk with a warhorse. This was pretty much the coolest thing I had ever seen. 2 hours in I was hooked. MERP proved too complex for me to play with my friends at home, and a helpful cousin provided a first edition copy of D&D that he had never played. This was the real gateway drug. 1st edition dungeon crawls were soon followed by AD&D, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Star Wars and tabletop wargaming. I had a freaking huge dice bag and shelves full of rulebooks.

As soon as I went to the Comprehensive school I started a gaming club, with a friend running a totally awesome Warhammer 40k game with on some homebrew rules taken from the Fighting Fantasy books. This was where I met up with friends who I still have now. As we got older we joined a larger gaming club and after a while I got a job running games for the local community centre. The games we played became more and more varied  – Blood Bowl, Mighty Empires and the magnificent Cyberpunk 2013. This latter co-incided with my discovery of William Gibson, and the whole cyberpunk literary movement. I was obsessed.

It was about this time I started to get into practical, non-McDojo martial arts and shooting. The Cyberpunk 2013 and later 2020 systems worked well with these, being some of the most gritty and realistic rules out there. I could look at the rules and see that it tied in with what I knew about combat, small arms and terminal ballistics (And I knew a lot about such things for a teenager. I even made a special trip to the library of the Imperial War Museum to do research). However I began to get frustrated by other game systems. The models they used to deal with combat were either too abstract, too time consuming or just damn wrong. Take a dagger for example. A standard dagger such as might be carried by any baddie from central casting. Something like one of these. Imagine someone plunging that into you with force. It’s probably going to kill you and if it doesn’t you are certainly not going to be running around afterwards. Compare that to AD&D where a mid-level character would need to be stabbed repeatedly about 15 times to get the same effect. If that mid-level character also had a huge 2-handed axe then he and the dagger man would take turns bashing each other until one fell over. It all seemed a bit silly and as a result of this nonsense I pretty much stopped playing fantasy games. This was all my friends wanted to play and so RPGs pretty much fell by the wayside.

After leaving University  Wizards of the Coast took all the money they had made from selling cards to and bought a real game company. The result was D&D 3rd Edition and I really liked it. A lot of the complexities and odd elements of the system had been sorted out (Roll high for attack rolls and roll low for saving throws. Who ever thought that was sensible?) and I began to play again. Regular games with friends got me re-enthused. However combat was still not right – too illogical and too abstract and I was still not satisfied.

Things got worse when I discovered Historical European Martial Arts. Learning about swordfighting ruined RPGs for me further. Everything in them was wrong. In real life a spearman has a clear advantage against a swordsman. A real longsword is closer to the D&D bastard sword in approach and weights about 3.5 lbs rather the sword shaped sledgehammer most games describe. You can bash steel plate with a sword all day and do nothing to it, whilst someone skilled with a rapier is incredibly difficult to hit without needing a huge shield or armour. Even the simple quarterstaff was wrong. What RPGs call quarterstaffing is actually halfstaffing – holding the staff in the middle and hitting with both ends as opposed to the more fearsome and sensible method of holding the staff at the end and using it’s reach and leverage. Even the scouts knew about this FFS!

This crossed over to movies and books, making it hard to take seriously some otherwise excellent works. Even those what tried to make an effort just irritated me more. Take Kingdom of Heaven for an example. In one scene  the main character is getting a lesson in swordfighting and is told to hold the sword high above his head, and is told this is called Posta di Falcone. So it is, by Filipo Vadi in his Liber de Arte Gladitoria Dimicandi from about 1485. Awesome, real swordfighting in a movie. Apart from the fact that the scene’s teacher translates it as the position of the hawk. Falcone. Hawk. Not falcon? Arrrrggghhhhhh!

Essentially I had developed an allergy. Much like ‘Font geek’ Michael Bierut I couldn’t experience such a lack of sense without feeling very uncomfortable. Moments of realism in films and games made me glad. The scene in Collateral where arch-loon Cruise guns down 2 thugs or pretty much every fight in The Duellists for example (That last is a wonderfully shot film BTW – check it out). RPGs were lost to me though. As much as I loved the majority of the experience I just could not get on with the combat mechanism.

Little did I know I was not alone. Jean Chandler had come to some of the same conclusions as me and, being an experienced game designer, got on with fixing the system. Using the Open Source nature of 3rd Ed D&D he has come up with a supplement that fixes almost all of the flaws in RPG combat. His Codex Martialis has had the effect of a very good pollen filter. I can now enjoy RPGs again.

The system itself is slightly more complex to set up than the original system – it uses dice pools and combat specific feats – but this offset in game play. So long as you have your sums done ahead of time combat becomes fluid and tactical. Gone is the ‘take turns bashing each other’ approach. Now I can meaningfully feint, slip and defend. There is a point to having a spear (which was, in one guise or another, the most common primary weapon for most soldiers before the invention of the gun). It is nothing short of wonderful.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not the most polished of presentations. The e-books are produced by a very small company so don’t expect the same standard of illustration or decoration as the main books. However this is more than made up for in both the excellence of the system. Jean is no mean swordsman himself and he has taken care to consult some real experts. The martial feats he includes have names based on real techniques and these are interspersed with real life accounts of combat and passages from historical fighting manuals.

Alongside the main rulebook goes a second that lists and illustrates an extremely wide selection of real life melee weapons, along with rules for using them. If you ever wanted a Schiavona or a cutlass in your game then this provides what you need. And everything weighs the right amount. No 15lb swords here!

I’m not going to describe the system in depth, there are other reviews that do that, but I do want to impress on you just what a remarkable feat it is that Jean has pulled off. He has done what I thought impossible – taken an abstract pencil and dice based game and created rules that allow for fast, fun and realistic combat.

Tagged as: Codex Martialis, D&D, Ire Game, Role Playing Games, RPG