Today's installment of the Firing Squad welcomes +James Introcaso , proprietor of the World Builder blog and all-around fun guy to talk with. We chat about the next edition of Dungeons and Dragons, his world-in-progress called Exploration Age, the edition wars, and other fun topics (like grappling!) having to do with RPGs.
We spoke for nearly two hours, and if nothing else, this interview taught me that while I might not stick with my list of questions, not having one makes for some scattered topic coverage!
MP3 Audio File
Text Transcript
Douglas Cole (Gaming Ballistic): Good evening and welcome to Gaming Ballistic’s Firing Squad. We are joined today by . . . James Introcaso?
James Introcaso (World-Builder Blog): Yes.
Doug: Very good! James Introcaso. Proprietor of the World-Builder Blog, and I believe that you got a few publishings to your name, and you also run the Roundtable – a regular podcast on . . . all-things role-playing, or all-things Dungeons and Dragons, or both?
James: It’s all things Dungeons and Dragons, but we do often delve into other systems and topics as well. But it’s very role-playing centric for sure.
Doug: I listened to at least one of your episodes, and it was kind of fun. There were three or four people, and all had definite opinions, and you’d have one person saying “This rule is the greatest thing ever,” and this other one said “This ruins the game for me.”
So it was a good [James laughs] friendly, but really you had all kinds of opinions on the topics you were covering.
James:Absolutely, but that’s kind of the point of the podcast.
In the Dungeons and Dragons community there is a division, the edition wars as they say. With the old school grognard gamers sticking to 1st and 2ndedition [Dungeons and Dragons], people who prefer 3rd [Dungeons and Dragons], and there is a whole new group of gamers who prefer 4th[Dungeons and Dragons].
And on the Internet, and message boards is want to do in a virtual anonymous space, people can get pretty nasty.
We’re hoping to have more intelligent, thoughtful debate about the new rules coming out, particularly for the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons which is supposed to be released this summer.
The whole point of that podcast is to bring people to the table and have a civil debate about things. It remains pretty civil for the most part, though it does degenerate sometimes into wackiness – which is sometimes fun.
Doug: Yeah, indeed. I’ll offer up a couple thoughts on that.
First of all my system of choice, where I play most often, and contribute most often, is GURPS.
So to a certain extent, some of the edition wars are kind of funny to me, largely because I’ve played Erik Tenkar’s Swords & Wizardry campaign, which is about as old school as old school gets.
I grew up with the Basic and Expert, I never had Champion or Epic. But I had the 2nd edition [Dungeons and Dragons] Player’s Handbook with the statue and all that [James laughs].
[Note I got this wrong: The PHB with the statue was obviously AD&D.]
I played in one game that I think was 3rd edition, and I have played extensively, recently, in Pathfinder, which is a 3.5 modification I believe.
I know not a thing about 4th [James laughs].
James: 4this very close to 3.5 and Pathfinder; in fact it even does some of the same things Pathfinder does. But it’s also very different, in that characters have, instead of spells, and fighting feats that allow you different maneuvers, everybody has power sets.
You have powers you can use during encounters, and you have you powers that you can use daily, and you have powers that you can use at will. It takes its cues from modern day MMOs, and I think that sort of turned people off, because it felt a little two constricting. It became very combat focused.
And Dungeons and Dragons has always been heavily focused on combat, that is where most of its rule set lies. But this is really . . . laser focused that in, and there wasn’t as much to do rule-wise with your role-playing aspects.
I think that turned a lot of people off, which is why 4th edition came out, four . . . six years ago, and you’re already seeing the release of another edition.
This time they brought everybody in. Hundreds of thousands of people for a big, open playtest. The point of that was to get everybody’s opinion, hopefully they get to a point where everybody likes the game and will buy it.
I think they actually lost a lot of business to Pathfinder when it came out, because Pathfinder still had a lot of the role-playing aspects. It still had spells that could be used outside of combat for wizards. And the fighters had some crazy moves that make them feel a little more magical mechanically.
And I think it was, rather than you starting as a regular guy who gets better and better and better, it was you started as a really great hero, and then by 30th level your heroes are definitely superheroes. They had these ridiculous abilities that begin with the phrase like “Once per day, when you die, you’ll come back from the dead, and be even better than you are.”
Doug: “I got better” [Monty Python Black Knight voice]. There is the gratuitous Monty Python joke for the podcast.
James: Yes. That’s fun.
It can be fun. I played two campaigns with people with the group from level 1 to 30 and that has its own appeal as well, flying around the battlefield, and shooting lasers, and farting, and killing orcs with that fart. It has its own appeal as well.
Doug: One of the more memorable characters from Mystery Men: The Spleen . . . had that ability. It’s part of the nerd canon so to speak.
A couple of questions. A couple of things about that I guess. One is . . . a hundred thousand people in a playtest. That is bold.
James: Yeah, I think it’s obviously an unprecedented move, particularly for Wizards of the Coast, to show us how the sausage is made – so to speak – and to invite people in on that process.
And it has changed, if you look at the first packet and the rules that were in there, and the way things have changed from this final packet, and now the playtest has since closed, but you can…but there is a friends and family playtest that I’m not actually a part of. But you know they’re continuing along up to this August release date that has been leaked. And not officially announced.
They really have been listening to people, it seems, like up until the playtest closed. I have high hopes.
Certainly at first it was a very simple, basic game like you would expect the first round of a playtest to be. But they really did have some things in there that could be considered game-breaking. They’ve gone through and found a way to please the min/maxers, but to also please all the role-players, so they don’t feel like their characters are nothing compared to the people who enjoy min/maxing, you know?
And hopefully everybody can sit together at a table, or convention style setting and get along.
Because I have players who were in a theater troupe with me in college, so they love the role-playing aspect, but then I have a couple of guys that we know that are somebody’s brother, and they went to see all the shows, and they want to build the min/max characters . . . and it’s a hard balance, sometimes, to please everybody at the table.
Doug: Sure. Sure. The other part of that is, do you think that having it so large actually generated a useful amount of signal to noise ratio, or do you think that you could have done better with…at least with the playtest of the book that I did, I had about 12 to 15 people, and the one thing that I regret, and has come up a couple of times later, is we didn’t get enough opportunity to actually play games. We did have some good fights, and it was a grappling book.
I looked over the 5thedition grappling rules…ehhh, I don’t know [James laughs].
James:They’re much simpler probably.
Doug: Where they are, is the grappling rules in most games actually up until . . . I’m sure it was Riddle of Steel, or Burning Wheel . . . I know that there are games that have done more detail in everything.
But the original GURPSrules are fairly similar to original Dungeons and Dragons rules. You roll to hit, if you hit you are grappled or not grappled, and it’s an event state.
Whereas the system I came up with is…“Well isn’t it fun to hit…” and in GURPS if you fail to defend, or you roll under your armor class in D&D. And then you roll some damage, and the damage counts for something.
I’ve actually been noodling in the back [of my head] with something like that in a D&D paradigm, because I think it would be useful and fun for people who wanted to have more detail about that.
The flip side of that, though, is I don’t know of a venue in which house rules are published.
James:Right. Well you can find a lot of house rules/suggestions on the message board, but one of the things you’re going to see, supposedly, we’ve been promised, are modules.
You’re going to see a lot of optional rules modules they’re going to publish. I would love to see something like that because whenever I think about grappling, I think about the climactic scene in every action movie, the hero or the villain are wrestling on the ground, one of them has a dagger, and they’re trying to turn it around. You don’t really have that option in the Next rules.
Doug:Because that scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan wasn’t tense or dramatic at all.
James: Right [both laugh].
Doug: Or a little more action hero-ish, the first of the two recent Sherlock Holmes movies, with Robert Downey Jr, had a great Technical Grappling scene where there was an arm bar, legs, all kinds of stuff. It was very much period as well because I know that Conan Doyle studied fighting and wrestling and he studied the Bartitsu stuff, so he knew about it.
It was a accurate depiction of what Arthur Conan Doyle was trying to put into his stuff, there was judo or jiu-jitsu or Bartitsu or whatever. The kind of stuff can be really cool, but having it be a “state thing, grappled, not-grappled,” is…
Let me give you the flip side of that though: Grappling is slow. Grappling is slow.
A typical grappling match (you can see I’ve got my Hwa Rang Do sweatshirt on), a typical grappling match is – what we do is two minutes, a championship match is five minutes. In Brazilian Ju-Jitsu, and no offense to any BJJ practitioners since I’m not deeply experienced in it. The kind of the joke is, maybe it’s their testing, is they grapple forever. They just work, it and work it, and work it, and they are very patient. They are very good offensively, and they’ll break you in half like a pretzel, but they are very cautious, deliberate grapplers, and you can be wresting out there for 10 minutes.
In GURPS at least, 10 minutes is 600 turns.
James: Huh [Laughs as he realizes the implications]. It’s the same way in D&D.
Doug: Yeah. In D&D it would be…let’s see, 600 seconds is a hundred turns. And if you’re doing a die roll a hundred times, with just two guys. I mean, you’re going to get pelted with d4s and beaten with the Player’s Handbook. And you’ll deserve it.
James:[laughs] Exactly.
And that’s one of the things that they wanted to do, was to be able to have combat be very speedy and expedient at the base level with this. I think they definitely achieved that.
4th edition combat was really fun, because you had so many choices and options, but combat at first level took an hour.
So you never had a random encounter, because it would slow down your story.
Now, a random encounter can take about five minutes. It’s super-lethal right now, 5thedition.
I think you are going to see options for more facing rules, and they’re really going to get into, with those rules modules, into the nitty-gritty, again.
What we’ve been promised. I don’t speak for Wizards.
But it would be great to see that kind of thing. But it is nice to be able to do a theater of the mind style – four goblins are guarding the door, the party comes in and they waste some of the party’s resources, but ultimately the party wins overall, and continues into the dungeon or whatever it is.
You want to see for the bigger encounters, I want to have those grapple rules because I want to see that action take place, I want to see Solid Snake, from Metal Gear Solid, get into a close-quarters battle with a knife and handgun.
So hopefully that kind of stuff is available, that’s the dream [crosses fingers].
Doug: It should be kind of fun, because one of the complexities of, for example, playing GURPSwith close combat, is if you ever throw somebody down on the ground, it actually…playing with a actual face-to-face group with cardboard heroes or miniatures it’s actually pretty easy, but on Roll20 or MapTool all of a sudden they are a two-hex figure, so you better have a second token prepared [laughs].
James:That’s one of the challenges. Or if you’re in a battle when someone is flying, that’s really hard too . . . [laughs] on a virtual table, how do you express that? Or even on a regular table that can be hard to express.
Doug: Right. Squadron Strike. Ad Astra games. Ken Burnside has a really neat system where you stack up 3D tiles or cubes and it gives you facing, orientation, and everything, and gives you vectors because he uses vector math for where the ships go. And it’s all visually intuitive at the blink of a eye.
So theoretically you could show that your red dragon is banking at a certain acceleration [James laughs]. That would be kinda fun. The Dungeons and Dragons extension to Squadron Strike.
James: Well I actually heard that they’re making…so they just released news that there is going…WizKids is going to be making miniatures for them. There is going to be a dogfighting dragon minigame that’s going to come with those minifigs.
Doug:Because why not? [James laughs more]
So let me back up a little bit and ask a little bit about yourself: It sounds like you’ve been gaming for a bit.
James: Yes. Since…I guess I was in about 2nd grade when I joined my brothers AD&D game in our parents basement. So very stereotypical: little brother wanted to tag along and play D&D in the parent’s basement, and they gave me a Halfling thief, and it’s been my favorite class/race combination ever since.
Doug: So I actually just started reading the Forgotten Realms book, with Cale, and the Slaad, and Riven…I’m going to have to look it up because now I’m irritating myself.
Erevis Cale I think. Cale Forgotten Realms. There we go. Erevis Cale thank you, by Paul Kemp.
Paul Kemp. I finally got around to that, I was forwarded the books by a friend, but it wasn’t a great copy, so I bought ‘em online anyways.
So it’s part of the original D&D mythos, so in a way it’s like reading history to see how that works.
But one of the things that is interesting about those books to me, at least in the beginning of the first book and this really does get to your point, it’s not as random walk as it seems.
Your point about D&D 4thedition actually has a strong resemblance to the initial character types if you’re doing a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy campaign, which start at 250 points, or about a 100 points more than a typical action heroish starter character.
The guys…and then there is Monster Hunters which is 400 points, which is even more over-the-top, because you’re playing in that particular genre, you’re playing Monster Hunters International, or whatever, or Laurell K. Hamilton’s character at the middle of her powers before she got really out there, and was mostly soft porn. [both chuckle]
But these characters start badass, and they get more so.
And so the interesting thing was, in a lot of this stuff, and the Halfling and whatever – it showed that you could start off…it felt to me and I don’t know what the character types were, there must have been a cheat sheet – but it felt to me they started at 10th level and got more awesome from there.
James: Yeah. I’ve heard that book described as these guys are power-leveling through, and they just keep getting crazier and crazier, and more and more epic, as the story goes on. Which is definitely true. It’s a very like manly sort of adventure too. There going into planes to fight demons and all that kind of stuff. It’s really over-the-top with the action and with their ability it’s pretty crazy.
Doug: It kept getting more and more and on the flip side you’ve got a book like Elizabeth Moon’s Paksenarrion. First of all, as I’ve said at least one, if not two or three of these interviews, is my favorite paladin story: it’s not the lawful goody-two-shoes that everyone wants to see die [James laughs]. [garbled audio] and I don’t know if there was
…I’ll come back to this, this is what happens when I don’t have my cheat sheet.
The thing was, very clearly that Paksenarrion started off as a first level fighter, went through mercenary training, you could see her getting a couple levels there, multi-classing to ranger for a little bit, and then came into a full-on paladin, and it really did feel like walking through the first half of character progression, like going from a level one to a level twenty character,
And Elizabeth Moon used the terms, and you could see the fighter, and the cleric, and the different races, and the dark elves made an appearance and all kinds of stuff.
It was a great series of stories, but you really got to experience the novice, to intermediate, to professional, and the character progression, and it sounds like in 4thedition you started a little bit more badass, but maybe in 5thedition they dialed it back?
James: Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s a very…not to the point where you are useless, but to the point where you feel useful cleaning out a cellar of goblins.
Whereas if you were doing that 1st level in 4th edition it was more like “Where’s the real action, I didn’t feel threatened at all?” And I didn’t feel…
Whereas in this one, you’re back to smaller hit points, you have a lot more hit points in 4thedition at first level. You have smaller hit points, you have less options for what you can do in combat. It seems like your starting equipment that you can afford is as not as good as it was in 4E and that’s great, I like that feeling.
Because by the time you hit twentieth level in any fantasy RPG it seems like you’ve reached that superhero status. This is definitely less so.
To give you an example, I have a player at my table who is a rogue and your back to…rather than point buy being the standard, you’re rolling for abilities scores. Point buy was the standard for 4E, and so he rolled a 6, and rather than put his 6 in Charisma which is sort of a dump-stat for a lot of classes in D&D, he put it in Constitution. He began the game with 3 HP.
Doug: There is a motivation to play cautiously.
James: Absolutely! It was so interesting to see that. You don’t normally see that in a combat-focused game like D&D.
You don’t see that guy who is constantly being cautious, and he really did have to play smart.
And kudos to him, it took him a good four sessions before his character actually died [laughs] as it was bound to happen at some point.
He had a lot of fun doing it, and you know they have a lock of his hair, so a resurrection spell is in the future perhaps.
Doug: Could happen.
James: But that’s a example of the lethality of 5th edition. You’d never have a character at 3 HP at first level. It’s just impossible to do in 4E.
Doug: Okay. I want to talk a little bit about yourself, because I know you got this World Builder blog, and you’re into doing, it seems, adventures and world building.
Walk me through how you started gaming, what games you played, and how you started into…whether it’s the pro or semipro- or playtesting, writing, or authoring or offering opinions on a blog.
Just go through that history a little bit for those who are curious.
James: Sure. I started with my brother, way back when we were in the basement. And I had some other friends over, and I was young enough that it was kind of like “You want to do that? Now roll this die. Now roll this die. And here’s what happens.”
AD&D is difficult for an eight year old to understand. I invited some friends over, and we were deciphering it, and trying to play it, and it was hard for me to translate for my friends and everything. So one of my friends went home and told his father and his father said “Oh, I have this other game.”
We played a game called The Fantasy Trip that is a old and definitely in print anymore. It’s a d6 based Fantasy game where you have three attributes – Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence.
It’s the kind of game that’s not built very well. Your Strength score is also your hit points, your Dexterity is used any time you want to something, and your Intelligence determines your spell casting ability. And if you want to be able to cast spells, you have to be able to hit with them, and spells use up your hit points, so to be a spellcaster you have to have high all three. And every time you leveled up you got to put a point in another one of them, and that was kind of how the game worked.
And we played that for years, until we were in middle school, and then we started played Dungeons and Dragons again, and then the 3rd edition game out, and we stuck with that.
And then I, in college, introduced a lot of people to that. I have been playing D&D and kept current with whatever the current edition was since then. But I also play Mutants and Masterminds. I’m a big fan of the Ghostbusters RPG from the 80s [laugh].
Doug: Do you remember what system was that? A d6-based?
James: It was d6-based. I’ve played a couple of iterations of the Star Wars role-playing game. I dabbled in GURPS, I’m trying to find people who want to play it. I think it’s a awesome system.
One of the reasons I’ve stuck with D&D is I’ve had a rotating group with people, and I find people latch onto that one pretty easily. It’s the easiest to understand, it’s the easiest to find materials for, although now with DriveThru RPG you can find anything, man.
I also, in my life, my like day-job is I’m a television writer and producer. Promos, mostly. And I have traveled around, I was in Atlanta working for Cartoon Network for a while, I did a year-long stint there, and I was long for people to play with, and I didn’t know anybody and that was how I met people.
I went to DragonCon which is a big media/gaming convention down there. I met some people and started to game with people that way.
And that’s sort of what happened. I have submitted a lot of article proposals to Dungeon and Dragon magazine in the past, but I’ve been very busy. My job is sometimes a 60-hour a week job.
I recently decided I wanted to take this to the next level. I wanted to start my own podcast and several months ago, I reached out to a guy named Mike Shae who runs a blog called Sly Flourish, he’s published numerous books and adventures for a lot of different systems, dungeons and dragons included.
He told me I should talk to a guy named Jeff Griner, who hosts a podcast called the Tome Show. Jeff has a lot of followers and subscribers, and he talks about D&D, and it’s really his passion.
So I emailed Jeff and said “Jeff, do you have any advice for someone starting a podcast.” And he said “What’s your idea?” so I pitched him my idea for the roundtable and he said “Ah! That sounds really cool, why don’t you do that and I’ll host it for you.”
I had a built in several-thousand subscriber base and everything. His podcast is really great, TheTomeShow.com if you want to check him out. Tome Show.com is a weird Asian blog that pops up, which I’m sure is also really good if you want to check that out too.
And I’ve also wanted to design my own world from scratch. I’ve played in Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, which are all pre-built Dungeons and Dragons settings.
But it’s probably been since college that I had my own setting. So I thought a great way to make sure I’m using my free time to create a setting, rather than sit around and play video games, which for me is a good thing, it’s a fun thing to do, but it’s also . . . I can spend hours. Like a entire Sunday doing nothing else, but playing Arkham City.
So I thought it would be a good way to hold me accountable for writing and designing stuff, and putting out work. So that’s what World builder blog is.
For creating exploration age, which is a PDF which I’m eventually hoping to put out, and depending on the people who are interested, it will be available for a moderate or free download. So that’s the abridged version of the story.
I’m very passionate about gaming of all kinds. I love Kobold Press puts out a lot of good stuff, but I really want to step into the world of publishing. I really want/hope to be putting out stuff that is canon if you will, but until then, I really just enjoy making it, so I’m going to do it whether or not I’m getting paid to do it.
That’s what Worldbuilder blog is all about. I’m sort of discussing the techniques I use sometimes to create something, and sometimes I’m just putting out ideas I have there, and it’s a hodgepodge of stuff, some of it’s stolen.
Doug:Leveraged. Leveraged. It’s leveraged.
James: Yeah, exactly. Like any good idea [chuckles].
Some of it is weird brainchild stuff that I’ve had over the years. Which I’m sure is probably subconsciously leveraged from somewhere else.
Doug: That was one of the fascinating things about talking with Kenneth Hite. We spent almost two hours yakking it up. The process that he goes to to connect…it’s like “Here is something you can look at in a history book” and “Here’s something you can look up in a mythology book” and “Here is something that occurred to me (him) while drinking heavily one day.”
We’re going to put these three things together, and go to the logical extension of that idea. And that’s for example, I think, where Day After Ragnarok came from. Which is World War II, I don’t know if you are familiar with it: you’re in the middle of World War II . . . and Ragnarok happens.
You take this two huge, cataclysmic events, World War II and Ragnarok, and just blend them together and you get three or four parallel mythologies going on there.
Because he wanted to have a world, to make this connect a little bit. He wanted to have a world where one part of the world was sword and sandal, Robert Howard Conan the Barbarian, and the other part of the world was Norse mythology, and then you had other things at other places. He had these turning points where it went off.
It’s exactly where you take your sources, and you have your variations, and you borrow where you can, and invent where you must, and take it to a logical conclusion.
James: Is that the kind of place where you can have fun? Can you have a Nazi riding a T-Rex that kind of thing [laughs]?
Doug:Possibly. I don’t know about the T-Rex and the dinosaurs, but certainly you could have a Nazi wielding the Spear of Destiny, or Valkyries flying into battle, or something like that. I know that he had this thing where the giants – the Jotunn return to Earth in the steppes of Russia . . . and stuff! There is a lot to it.
James: Well that’s fun right?
I think D&D is one of the last places – not just D&D, tabletop RPGs in general – are one of the last places where you can collaboratively put crazy things out there and people say “Yeah, I’m on board with that.”
You don’t necessarily have box office appeal to do it. One of the classic Dungeons and Dragons monsters is a beholder, which is a floating mass of eyes that all shoot different kind of rays. What was someone thinking when that came up?
And it’s nice to know that you can go there, and you can try something new. And that’s what it’s all about.
I invite people certainly on the blog. I want to know if they think, “Ah…that’s a little too close to something” “Not as original as I hoped” or “That idea is so crazy and here’s why I think it would never work.”
I’m all about the debate, I definitely want to see that, and I want to see if people say “This is cool.” That always makes you feel good.
But I think it’s great to explore new avenues. To play on archetypes. So, for instance, in Exploration Age elves, one of their main industries in this nation that the elves run, they cut down trees – and sell the lumber. They’re like lumberjacks. Which sort of goes against everything you’ve ever known about elves, and that was on purpose. Because I was like “What would it be like if elves were actually cutting down trees and slaughtering and herding cattle and selling burgers? What would that do?”
Doug: Invert the trope, and see what breaks.
James: It’s all about playing.
And Exploration Age, the big idea is…there are big, blank spots on the map. Particularly…it’s based on the Age of Discovery.
Australia had just been discovered by Europeans, and the Americans had just been discovered by Europeans. It’s based on the idea that all of a sudden these people’s world has doubled in size. And they have a whole, hopefully rich, history of war with one another, that war has translated into land grabbing over in this other place. But oh, wait, there’s people who are native to this world. There like… “You can’t come in here and just start grabbing up land.”
Doug: “What do you mean you annexed this in the name of the king? I’m going to kick your ass for that.”
James:Exactly. Instead of Native Americans, maybe a civilization of intelligent minotaurs, so that could go very differently for the people settling the land.
Doug: I’m resisting nine different puns. This is very difficult for me. There’s no bull about it. Bull in a china shop. I just can’t. I just can’t.
James: I love the puns, bring them on.
Doug: Puns and Monty Python jokes . . . they are like two of the fundamental base proteins in the DNA of gaming.
James: That’s right! Because it’s all about fun, and it’s all about fun that people aren’t going to judge you for having. I feel like, no offense, I feel like the community overall is awesome, but I feel within the D&D community there are these fissures that are forming that don’t need to be there.
Play the game you want to play. That’s what Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were all about. They were saying “Here is a book of rules we’re hoping you change. We’re hoping you modify for yourself.”
Do that, with any system. As long as you’re sitting around a table, or going online at some sort of virtual table with people, hanging out and having a good time. It doesn’t matter how weird it is or crazy like, get out there and have fun, if someone thinks it’s lame, that’s their problem.
Doug: Right. And they don’t have to sit down and play with you.
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