Kill 'em all, let the cleric sort 'em out.

[avram]

So there I was in the shower, font of all ideas, thinking about fireballs. Well, originally I’d been thinking about lightning bolts— No, originally I’d been remembering a piece about Hanukah I’d seen on The Daily Show last night, which got me thinking about Passover, which reminded me of the four sons portion of the Passover liturgy, which reminded me of the joke Lisa and I used to make about “the four Harrys” (cloned versions of my character in her long-running RPG campaign), which reminded me of how Harry had been killed by a lightning bolt while being held for his part in the attempted assassination of the vice president (actually a shape-shifting troll, acting as a body double for the real veep, who has an evil sorcerer. The president was Jack Kemp, which always got me speculating about a scenario in which Jude Wanniski was an agent of the Old Ones and the Laffer Curve was the Yellow Sign), which got me thinking about an old Alarums & Excursions essay about Faraday cage armor as lightning bolt protection, which caused me to conclude that inventing such a thing would just cause magic users to use fireball spell instead, because the only real difference between the two is that fireballs are better for taking out groups while lightning bolts are better for picking off enemies mixed in with your allies, at which point it occurred to me that the real old-school D&D way to do things would be to just blast the whole group with a fireball and then go in and bring your friends back with resurrection magic. It’s still not a great solution, though, ’cause the fireball might destroy any magic items your friends (or enemies) were carrying, which would piss them off more than killing them would.

It was at that point that I realized that the ideal inspiration for a D&D campaign is cynical gonzo military black comedies like Catch 22 and the original M*A*S*H. Characters trying to stay alive in the midst of insane carnage and irrational military thinking, ethics stripped down the barest essentials (and sometimes not even that), alignments serving as mere indicators of who it’s OK to kill rather than having anything to do with real behavior. I don’t think I’ve still got the complexity tolerance it would take to actually learn the current D&D ruleset and run such a thing.

I don’t remember what little I read of Glenn Cook’s first Black Company book to say whether it’s what I’m thinking of. Mary Gentle’s Grunts is another book I haven’t read that may have been written along these lines.

Comments

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

It's largely a matter of how you play things. If you want to go for the maximum tactical advantage, cool. It can work.

On the other hand, I've played with you in that long-running campaign, for a while. If you (Harry) had ever gone for full tactical advantage, you'd have ruled the world.

For one session.

Then Lisa would have created something to be your match and you'd've gone DOWN. That campaign is based on literary merit more than on tactics. This is both more difficult and more rewarding game play. It was, frankly, too difficult for me at the time.

I mostly agree with you about the cynical gonzo military black comedies being the best basis for a campaign, but I think that says more about us than about role-playing.