Combat 3000

As much as I was fighting shy the previous post then this one is a much more cherished task.
Of all the games that I played before leaving school, this, a sci-fi skirmish set in the distant future, was the one that really fired me up...

Written by Halliwell and Priestly in 1979, it flung gamers into a universe of possibilities some of which were trailed on the inside as including...

"Command a squad of Star troopers, blast your way into the Galaxies richest banks and out of the strongest and most infamous jails. Boldly go where no man had probably gone before, swap insults with exotic aliens, then swap blows with insulted aliens..."

Front cover by Tony Yates

Which all sound great to me as a kid raised on Dr Who, UFO, Space 1999 and just discovering The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Combat 3000 seemed like an ideal jumping off point for the whole universe...

Not that there was a whole universe inside the rule book, this was a TTG product and the whole thing ran to 32 pages long, with just three alien races (plus humans) for the players to get there teeth into; Trimotes, three armed apes, lifted shamelessly from Larry Niven's 'A Mote in God's eye', Maniblax, bipedal insectoids, and Zarquins, which had a more alien hive-mind thing going on, but this was enough, along with what seemed like an endless list (50+) of lasers and blasters to arm your soldiers, and loads of armour and secondary weaponry to add, the game lent itself to highly personal squads.

Once again, looking back, the rules themselves were quite complex, a percentile system with everything; (range, movement, target size and situations, types of weapon,  types of fire; aimed indirect, covering, conditions etc) adding or subtracting from the chance to hit, and then all that armour and variable weapon effects to take into account for damage, once a hit had been achieved... which lead to quite small intense games, 6 - 10 each minis a side on a 4 feet square area would take a few hours for us to get through, with each -5% for being hotly (childishly) contested, each move/shot/throw or melee vital...

Space Marine by Nick Bibby

I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised that this game played so sweetly, and that I became so enamoured with it, Halliwell went on to become THE greatest British game designer of his generation, with a list of credits that include; Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and it's highly regarded but less well supported sister game, Warhammer Fantasy Role-play, Battlecars, the most entertaining car-wars game ever, and of course the classic Space Hulk.

This was also the first game I played outside school, the time needed play meant we (Simon, Mark, a lad called Richard Purseglove and I) had to meet up on Saturdays to play at each other's houses. In fact the only time Andy Chambers ever came to my house, was to play was a game of Combat 3000, he arrived an hour or so late, mocked my rudimentary modelling skills on a future-tank I'd made, and then nuked the playing field from some cool looking space-fighter he'd scratch built.

Which cuts to the heart of what I loved about Combat 3000, and the problem with Sci-fi gaming in general. This is summed up in a quote from Ripley in the Aliens movie... present with an insumountable number of menacing monster aliens she says..."I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?", in that, in the far-future whole planets can be whipped-out at the press of a button, or alien cities reduced to dust by half a dozen power-armoured Space Marines with imploding mini-nukes, so that minor conflicts can't/shouldn't exist, without some kind of narrative to drive the game forward, scifi gaming becomes a power gamers dream.

Trimote, by Nick Bibby

How much better then, not to use all those high-end future weapons (Imperial Arsenals, the standard weapon of Imperial troops, +18% to hit, +5 damage effect!) "check your blasters at the door", and duke it out with pistols and laser sabres, rather than to fight armoured combats, with roughly man-shaped future tanks... Battletech anyone?

Combat 3001 was released in 1981, this time authored by Halliwell alone, and although it did add more depth to our imaginary future worlds; gravities, vehicles, more weapon types, more Aliens, it didn't really add anything much to the gaming experience, and apart from Laserburn, British Sci-fi gaming was heading to the doldrums for half a decade or so...

Future-Cafe from the inside cover of Combat3001, reportedly showing the Asgard crowd responsible for the game

Interested in reading these veteran rule-sets?
Check them out here on my Scribd page. Combat 3000, Combat 3001

D&D the game that changed the world

Well if this blog is going to be about Games and Gaming then we might as well start with the biggy, the daddy of all modern fantasy games, the system which launched a thousand imitators and made stars of its creators, writers and artists...

Dave Arneson

Dungeons & Dragons is, this year in its fortieth year, and fifth or sixth incarnations . It's creators, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, both of whom are now dead  had the genius idea of marrying, role-playing, a previously little known psychology and management tool, with escapist fantasy story telling, and traditional tabletop miniature and board games, to create a game like no other of its time...

The earliest versions of the game, simply called Dungeons & Dragons, or Chainmail, seem to have had an effect not unlike the Velvet Underground's early LP's, or the Sex Pistol's gig in Manchester 1976, not many people bought records or heard them play live, but everyone who did went away and started their own bands, or in this case their own game systems... The game was that inspirational.

Gygax, great dress sense too...

But what was it that inspired so many people? There was little in the way of story, background or plot for a modern role-player to get their teeth into, the rule system although quite complex for its time, and becoming increasing dense with each new edition, were really little more than a combat system and list of spells and their effects, it's surprising to look back at those rules now and read "the DM's word is final" and accept we live/gamed in worlds with no fixed rules.

When I got to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as it was called, in the late 70's TSR monstrous baby was seeming huge, they had a whole world, Grayhawk, for gamers to explore, but wafer thin, huge areas were pencilled in with mountains or dessert, cities and kingdoms but very little detail was given, not even 'Here be Dragons' to aid the Characters or DM in their quests to adventure into this new world... and even where D&D did give you a grand plot or over arching scenario to discover and work through, such as in the now legendary G1/2/3,D1/2/3,Q1 campaign, the action takes place outside of the Greyhawk continuum, and outside the rest of TSR's output (other modules) completely.

my first D&D character,
in Andy Chambers's hand writing

Later as the system and the Company behind it grew, TSR became more prescriptive about its worlds and the mythos within them, they spoon fed gamers with Dragonlance, or Ravenloft, or Shadowrun or... but somehow giving us more detail, they restricted the imagination of  the gamer, they corralled  everybody, 1000's of us, all locked into the same 10' wide corridors fighting the same Liche Lords or Tentacle walls.

And although this gave people of a certain age, a shared experience, it also reduced creativity at the base level of the game, the stand alone role-play group and it's DM.

Today Dungeons & Dragons is huge, more people play now than ever have before, the conventions are better attended, gaming groups are growing and TSR's parent company knows that if it continues to nurture its brand with new product and continued support, the game will run and run...

12 pages of black & white print, and few drawings

So if you're a gamer, or modeller, or even a collector of fantasy and sci-fi metal models, and you've not already contributed to the Gygax memorial, or raised a toast to Dave Arneson and those ground breaking early guys, can I suggest you do so, salute D&D; the game that changed the world.

Arnold Hill D&D club

So my first ever game of D&D was with Andy Chambers, and a lad called Grant Wesselby.
I was given a Half-Orc character by Andy, and unusually we were in a wilderness adventure.
It took me 20mins of so for me to get the jist of the role-play aspect, I just though Andy, the DM was doing a lot of talking about the set-up, but after I got-it, the world(s) just opened up...

TSR's advertising tag-line for this period was D&D; A Gateway to Adventure, which is pretty good, but for me D&D proved to be a gateway to imagination.
The possibilities were endless, just by imagining what we were doing we could be anywhere doing anything... and OK, mostly we'd spend our times in imaginary 10' x 10' dungeon rooms killing Goblins, but in theory we could have been doing anything...

And it wasn't just D&D, there appeared to be loads of these types of games around, Gamma World, Tunnels and Trolls, and more traditional board games with sci-fi and fantasy twists; Rivets, Ogre, Dungeon, loads of them... and we used to make games up... all this stuff  stuck me as a perfect way out of dull Thursdays (any day!), so everyday from then on, it was off to L7 for an hour or so of escapism...

One morning I came into school, and fellow D&D'er Andy Black said, would I like to see these... and in a old bacca-tin  he had three or four tiny model dwarves, he said he'd got them from Asgard...

I can't remember if I gave him my dinner money there and then, but by the end of the day those minis WERE mine...

Next up... My First Minis & Asgard, where was this mythical place...

A chance encounter

I came across the Arnold Hill Dungeons and Dragons Club by accident...

Second year Integrated Studied lessons, a mix of History, Geography and RE, were I discoverer, a bit of skive if you knew what you were doing... If you wanted to wander-off to the library, for research on your project, you could... Same went for 'the labs', large tables outside the general classrooms, which could be used for painting or modeling, drawing-up big graphs and presentation materials, you were allowed to... So, nominally I was painting-up a star map for a project, but in fact I was listening in to a group of lads from the classes next to mine talking about pretending to be dwarves and killing goblins...
Fascinated I poked my head over the intervening bench and said "that sounds fun, can i play?"
They all sort of looked at each other, and at one lad in particular, Andy Chambers turned to me and said "Only if you pass a test... what does XP stand for"... slightly baffled and dyslexic, I stuttered... "Extra Power?"

Chambers stared at me...
He was a big lad then, and always promoted a hard man image, to the extent that he had been banned from the 1st year recreation of the Battle of Hastings, after hardening a tennis ball in plaster and paint, and fixing it to a chain and handle like a flail...

and stared...

"Close enough..." chirped a voice at his side... Simon Maze came to my rescue, "its Experience Points, but it leads to extra powers..." "Andy is starting a new campaign, he needs players..."

and stared...
"12.10, L7" Andy grunted...

I was in.