I like to play Dungeons & Dragons.

But I was bored of playing the 4th edition of the game, which is too little like the older versions I grew up playing.

And I was also inspired by Zak Smith’s blog and enthused by the re-publishing of the old Advanced Dungeons & Dragons manuals. So, for the past few months, I’ve been running an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

It’s early, but so far it has been everything I hoped for.

We have had characters’ lives balanced on the roll of a single die. Quick battles. Running away. Capture. Escape. And the sort of best-plan-busting creativity I remember. And – despite my familiarity with the ruleset – plenty of winging it. The things I truly dislike about the more recent version of the game are out of sight and out of mind, and the game has been fantastic fun.

Beyond simply returning to the older versions of the game, I’m making a conscious effort to be slightly “old school” with my approach. I’m not entirely sure what that is, mind you, but there’s a certain type of randomness I associate with older roleplaying games — the rolling of 3d6 to determine an ability score, random encounter tables, Decks of Many Things, the risk of rolling up a 1st level fighter with 1 hit point.

Once upon a time, house rules were furiously added in an attempt to control this randomness; an approach that must have been popular, as each iteration of the game has further reduced the frailty of low level characters, and the randomness and cruelty of the fantasy world in which the game is played.

Now, all those things are embraced with only minimal nods in character creation towards allowing the players to create a character they will want to play. A random encounter with zombies might kill the entire party — but it was rolled; it happens.

The whole thing is such fun that I’m going to go out a limb and say you should do it too. Not only should you do it, but you can do it. All old books are now published for sale in PDF form.

So go forth, young (or old) gamers! And play like we did in the ’80s. (Or ’70s or ’90s, if that’s your thing.)

So I’ve been playing roleplaying games for a long time. And it’s fair to say that my favourite game of all time is Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (in either the 1st or 2nd edition varities). I don’t think it’s the best game ever made, or anything along those lines, but there’s a combination of things that put it at the top and kept it there.

• It’s a fantasy game, and I spent most of my childhood glued to fantasy novels.
• Dungeons and Dragons was the only roleplaying game I was aware that existed for many years.
• I like games that involve characters going on adventures.
• Everybody who roleplays knows it.
• It’s pretty flexible.

So you’ve got nostalgia, people to play with, and an approximation of my cup of tea. Which is pretty much all you can really ask for in a game.

Within the AD&D system, my favourite character class has long been the Thief (or Rogue, after it’s renaming and rehabilitation).

I see combat in the game as secondary, so rarely choose Fighter types (including Rangers and Paladins, who are a bit more interesting). And I was never a fan of managing the long spell lists that Clerics, Druids and Magic-Users build up through a campaign.

The Thief character is my ideal — a character type that thrives in the non-combat portion of the game, who has a well-defined but limited skill set that improves as the game goes along (rather than expands, as a spellcaster’s would). I think I like that the skills are based on real world skills as well. Scaling walls, picking locks, and creeping quietly through the shadows are real-world things that can be done.

But one of the traditional D&D thief skills has always bothered me: picking pockets.

While real world pick pockets exist, and it is a real skill, the application in Dungeons & Dragons has always felt more magical. Like a wallet sewn into someone’s underpants could be removed by someone being watched like a hawk in a huge crowd. I disliked it. In 2nd Edition, where the player can choose where to apply their points, picking pockets was the poor thief skill that I would neglect.

But today, I need to re-evaluate that belief. Because that magical application that I so disliked for its lack of realism? It’s correct.

The New Yorker has run an article on professional pickpocket Apollo Robbins. It’s absolutely unbelievable. Take the following story of him meeting Penn Jilette, of Penn & Teller:

Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”

Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.

“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.

Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.

The descriptions of his feats are ridiculous, and night unbelievable. So I went to YouTube to find him:

And it looks like he really can take a pen out of a person’s pocket, remove the inside of the pen, and then slip it back — all without that person noticing, even as they are aware he is a pickpocket, and talking to them about pickpocketing.

So, um … yeah. Next game? I’m playing a pickpocket.

There’s some trouble in retro roleplaying land.

I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons in various forms for about 25 years now. It started with a Red Box, an elf, and Ryan Tunnecliffe behind a DM’s screen. This was followed by years of AD&D, in the form of 1st and 2nd editions.

There have been other games, but it always comes back to Dungeons & Dragons for me. There’s something about it, I guess.

Most recently, I have been playing a lot of 4th edition. It’s still fun, but it’s a very different game, that leaves me wanting to re-experience the versions that have nostalgia attached.

Enter Wizards of the Coast, or so it seemed. This week, the core books for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons were re-released. In theory.

In practice, I’ve tried to find them in two different stores that peddle fantasy roleplaying wares, only to find not a sniff of them. I’ve looked on Amazon, and found this, which looks like my old 1st Edition Player’s Handbook from back in the day:

Except that to buy it from Amazon new costs four hundred and forty three pounds. I wrote that out as a sentence, so you wouldn’t think there was a typo or anything.

There’s one more shop to try in London, but I don’t expect to find it here. Guess I’ll have to fly to America to buy these things.

In the midst of all my end of year best of the blog malarky, I seem to have left off one of most important year-end wrap ups: my photography.

So today — a few days late, and in no particular order — I bring you the eleven photos (of mine) that I like most from 2011:

The miniatures

As regular readers of the Big Bad Blog will know, roleplaying is a hobby of mine, and I play D&D on a semi-regular basis. I often take my camera along, to take photos of the minis in action.

Here’s an example of minis in action:

Engagement

Two friends of mine got engaged (to each other) early in 2011, and so I took the opportunity to have an “engagement photo shoot”. A number of the photos resulting from this can be found at this post in April.

My favourite photo from the shoot is this one. The epic feel just feels right.

Greenwich foot tunnel

For most of 2010, Karen and I lived in Greenwich. There’s a tunnel there, that crosses the Thames to the Isle of Dogs. We didn’t use it at all.

When we moved back to Wapping, however, it started to get regular use — we would walk or jog to Greenwich, to spend time in the park or one of their many lovely pubs. The tunnel is quite picturesque, but usually the pedestrian traffic is too heavy to make for a good photo opportunity.

One day in March, however, I found myself in an uncrowded tunnel with my camera. I like the result.

Bubblehead

Summer, a visit to a friend’s, bubbles in the garden. A beautiful day.

Maggie

The Maggie-a-day project is an endeavour in which your blogger attempts to add a photo of his daughter to his Flickr stream every single day.

The project has met with partial success — I certainly do not take a photo every day, and I seem to miss posting a photo approximately one day in four (she’s about 450 days old, and there are about 350 photos in the stream). But with so much of my energy spent on photos of Maggie, it should be no surprise that they make up a significant portion of my top eleven.

Reflections on a nephew

All that practice taking photos of children comes in handy when I get to take photos of other people’s children. These stand out to me, as they are different from the Maggie photos I take daily.

My favourite of these is this photo of my nephew, taken while in Canada:

The green wood

I don’t get out hiking or walking much — while London has a fair bit of green space, none of it is “wild”. And it’s tough to drag a child who isn’t up to walking along with you.

Exceptions are made, however, and one such exception led me to find this little green gem:

The road to the sea

This summer featured our first family holiday — we went down to the French seaside. It was gorgeous, and filled with a dozen photos which would all be featured were this “the top 25 of 2011″, and I did not have an aversion to filling such a list with a group of photos taken in the same short timespan, in the same place.

Out of these photos, two made the cut to the top 11. The first is the final photo in the Maggie sequence above. The second is a black and white photo I took of a pier jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. There’s something special about photos of water in black and white.

All photos are CC licensed by Mr. Topp, and can be found in my Flickr stream. Alternatively, just click on the photo to go to it on Flickr.