54. Life games #1 - Woman Up the Corporate Ladder by Angela Harper

This was a crazy thrift store find, a Choose Your Own Adventure for the 1980s career woman.  I wonder how well it did at the time.  I can see how somebody would have come up with this idea as CYOA's were extremely successful in the 80s.  However, the demographic seems like a major leap.  For some reason, the concept of the reader taking an active part in the narrative (which is also the base concept of role-playing games and ultimately video games) seems for some reason to really only resonate with nerdy types, which back in the 80s was predominantly male (and young, though less predominantly).  Happily, this is slowly improving, but I still don't see a market for "normal" grown-ups to read books like these.  I'd be curious how well they did.

This book was a fun read, more fun than I expected.  I thought at first that I might just flip through it or read a few of the storylines.  I ended up reading every single possible outcome.  It's very digestible and a real page turner because every decision leads to a different path and you want to learn what happens.  It actually gets somewhat outrageous, though never totally insane.  You can end up in Brazil, have affairs with your boss (or reject his advances), decide to take a bribe, go after opponents and so on.  There are a lot of ethical decisions, yet not a consistent ethical message.  Sometimes doing the right thing, doesn't end up so well and sometimes making a bad decision can work out for you.  It felt a bit random.  There were some quite bleak and sad endings as well.  

I feel like a man wrote this, but I am not super confident about that.  I'd love to hear a backstory on these and I'll keep my eye out for them.

53. Dungeon Crawl Classics core rulebook by Joseph Goodman

I had to get the Erol Otus cover

If you want to find a reason for my lack of reading in the last couple of months, it is to this tome that you can point the finger.  I did actually read it cover to cover, which I don't believe I have ever done for a tabletop role-playing game before.  However, "reading" an RPG book, usually then triggers a myriad of other activities, such as hunting down multiple other source materials (such as adventures and supplementary rulebooks, older versions), going online to ask questions (an entire internet history is here in the TTRPG sector from usenet to fora to blogs to G+ and today to Discord), creating your own content and finally actually playing!

All these things have happened.  Now that I have had a chance to actually play and GM, my mania has subsided to a more consistent, sustainable level and I have picked up linear non-fiction books again.  So I will limit this post to a broad review of the DCC core rulebook and leave the TTRPG nerdiness to other places of expression.

Goodman Games started out designing adventures for D&D 3rd edition and kept doing that right into 5th.  As D&D evolved, I guess he realized that the system was not fitting the kinds of adventures they were making, which tended towards the kind of fantasy found in sci-fi and fantasy fiction from the mid-twentieth century, which in turn was the material that strongly influenced the original versions of D&D.  It is extremely hard to pinpoint any one playstyle, but very broadly speaking, D&D back in the 80s had less powerful player-characters and was focused more on dungeon exploration and what we call "emergent story" where narrative would come out of whatever weird shit happened in a dungeon.  The term "murder hoboes" captures it well.  In today's D&D, the adventures and campaigns are structured around long-term narratives involving character development and the PCs are insanely powerful ("Fantasy Avengers").  Death is really no longer an option.

Beyond the D&D RPG system, it is the famous "Appendix N" that influences DCC the most. This was a section in the back of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide that listed the fiction that influenced D&D. It is an exceptional list of some genre classics and some relatively obscure.  

DCC builds on the spirit of orginal D&D but has its own slightly more complex ruleset that involves lots of great random tables.  The book is just under 500 pages but probably only 100 pages is actual rules.  The bulk of the book are the spells. Each spell has a table of results which vary wildly and are a blast to read. I laughed out loud several times.  

Engaging with an RPG is an ongoing, dynamic and multi-media experience.  You read it, you talk about it with others, you play it and ultimately, you run it as a GM (gamemaster or what they call "judge" in the DCC world, to emphasize the notion that you are there to interpret the outcomes based on the rules, not guide them).  There is no ultimate understanding of an RPG.  It's a dialectic.  I played in a few online one-shots and then ran a few sessions with my friends.  It went fairly well, but we didn't get in deep enough to really take advantage of the crazy magic.  Another friend is now the GM, which is great as I only have to play, but if he wants to take a break, I'd be happy to get back behind the screen.

Magic is powerful but not without consequences
in Dungeon Crawl Classics