The Kingdom of the Emerald Hills

I certainly hope everyone's flurb side is showing at midreign...hehe

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Duke, Squire Docsi HardAnvil
aka the Mad Dwarf
GMR of Dreadmoor
Squire to Sir Logan T. Black
Clan Chieftain of the Turtle Clan
Ship's Surgeon, HMS "Turtle's Revenge"
Gaslight Sky Pirate

"Dwarves and mountains have one thing in common: It takes an almighty hammer and a tremendous amount of persistence to overcome them."

As a young player, I often hear of the "golden days" where Roleplay flourished and traditions were kept. I have heard various reasons why roleplay has gone down, and the rulebook rarely ever comes into the conversation. It makes me wonder if there are any correlations between today's society and how it influences Amtgard culture. I often wonder why so many of my friends have no problem spending all day playing WoW, or some sort of game involving fantasy but are reluctant to come out to Amtgard, and when some do they tend to not stick around. Could it be due to the fact that teenagers nowadays tend to lack imagination? Virtual worlds where quests are designed and planned out specifically for a person's character leads me to believe that my friends don't like Amtgard because the fun isnt set up for them. Making one's own fun and using imagination does not seem to be as prevalent in the video gaming community.

When I read V8, the mechanics to me resemble an MMORPG in the way that each class is strong/weak against specific classes. This, in my opinion, is a good step in order to try and target a larger audience as our beloved game grows more and more each year.

Wow. What a statement.

Over the years Ive seen the rules change and change again and then change again. They never seem to stop changing. All in the pursuit to make the game flow better and in hopes to attract new blood. Does it? Has it? Not for me to say. But I do know that imagination ran a bit wilder in those early years. I remember a player down in the old Austin Kingdom of Barin Ruins playing his warrior class as a Samurai. He had took a old stop sign and cut it into a armor suit like an old samurai would have. His garb off the field reflected his samurai persona. Sure his weapons looked more like a pillow on a stick (as did most of ours as well) and not a classic samurai sword but in his mind it was what he wanted it to be. Years later when some new player came into the game he thought the one class this game needed was a samurai class. So he went thru all the effort of writing up the class and presenting it to the game just to have it shot down.

Sometimes its not the game that needs fixing, its the players need to change the game due to their lack of imagination that needs fixing.


But hey, thats just my opinion. I could be wrong.

I'd like to jump in with a little context here: I started playing regularly in summer of 1996, and even that far back, people were complaining that there used to be more roleplay.

For as long as I've been aware of Amtgard, the *rules* have predominately dealt with medieval-fantasy combat. Class information is all about what you can and can't do in a battlegame, and the other rules cover things like how to make your weapons safe and what is or isn't a legal shot. The rules cover the "what" of the game. Thing is, most roleplay is about the "why". And therein lies the fundamental disconnect between rules and roleplay, whether it's Amtgard or D&D. And that's why I can't agree with anyone who claims that the rules by themselves are killing roleplay.

The Amtgard Rules of Play weren't at all involved when the horde of barbarians were asked to count themselves off at Clan, and dutifully went down the line "One! One! One! One!...". I didn't have to look in the rulebook to figure out how to try and hold a Peace Rally at Spring War 5 (the rally didn't happen, because the event was mostly rained out...so I guess I won? Yay me?). And while I probably got my Master Healer title by coming up with an optimized spell list for a support healer in the 6.0 rulebook, I got my Order of the Mask (y'know, the ROLEPLAY award) because of all the times I would wander around during quests not taking any side, just throwing out a Heal or two (or ten - *cough*Tarkas*cough* to whoever needed it. And the couple of times during battlegames that I would throw a Heal on somebody at the other team if they promised not to kill me while I was doing so. It was never about whether I followed the rules correctly; it was about how and when and why I chose to take actions that were allowed to me by the rules.

In my case, it actually happens to go both ways. K'tai bin R'al is a healer who draws on what D&Ders would call arcane power. I didn't start out with that idea; I got it after reading through the rulebook and noticing that Protection from Magic blocks all magics, even healer magic. I wouldn't be surprised if there were people in the mists of antiquity who tried to whine and wheedle that Pro-Mag not stop their Healer spells, under the aegis of "roleplay". I chose to build a character that fit within the rules of the world she'd be living in, rather than try to argue that the rules be changed to suit my persona. 'Cause seriously, you let me get away with that and suddenly it's all bardics all the time 'cause K'tai's a long-haired everybody-huggin' hippy-dip like that.

Is it going to suck when the "what" of the game changes? Sure. Change sucks. There's a really neat book, called The Dance of Anger, which observes that even when people are encouraging a change to happen (e.g. a loved one quitting smoking), they will not necessarily take well to the results of that change (e.g. not having those extra five minutes to finish putting on makeup because loved one is no longer needing to puff one last cigarette before y'all leave). But a fundamental change to the "what" doesn't have to equate a fundamental change to the "why". Unless the whole of your persona history is "Umlauto goes and gets himself killed a lot early in a battle so he can go Berserk as quickly as possible", I suppose...

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"And in the end, we decide if we're remembered for what happened to us or for what we did with it."
~ R. K. Milholland

I’d like to reply to that last statement…
I have never said that the rules, by themselves, are killing roleplay.
And admittedly the complaint far outdates this particular change of the RoP.
The trend away from society and more toward game and then sport, has been ongoing for decades and the rules not only reflect that trend but reinforce it as well.

Something as simple as “how you die”, for example.
Holding one’s sword overhead and declaring “dead” is hardly an accurate visual depiction of dying in a swordfight.
Yes, I realize that has not been in the “rules” for a long time. *see decades*
On its own, it’s no big deal…
However, if you combine that with garb requirements and class descriptions/abilities that actually depicted Archetypes and added the fantasy & medieval flavor, rather than designing classes and abilities for fast-paced and so-called balanced quick games and garb requirements that seem to serve no more purpose than player/class identification and field position…
Add to that a lost understanding that mundane things are left behind/covered up when in Amtgard. Cars, golf-carts, floodlights and the like had no place in the campgrounds during an event… It was understood, if not written.

The less Amtgard pushed for those things, the more Amtgard forgot what they meant.

Maybe it’s not Brennon putting the final nails in the coffin that bothers me so much…
Perhaps Amtgard’s demise would have happened regardless of who decided to kill it.

Someone recently wrote to me...
"Thanks to Brennon and Co., the game I loved passed away long ago, never to return."

When I think about how much this One Person put into Amtgard and is now gone forever...
A deep sense of loss comes over me.
What hurts me the most, is having to watch the society/game I loved so much, being killed bit by bit, slowly over the years and not being able to stop it…