NeoGrognard

When the RPGA came over to Wizards of the Coast from TSR, I don’t think the newer company knew what to do with it. 

For those of you who are asking, “What the fuck is the RPGA?” Well it probably isn’t anything anymore. It’s probably part of the Wizards Play Network, which sounds like some freaky organization that Elminster and the Seven Sisters could be a part of, but hey, I might be a tad bitter. The RPGA was created 30 years ago by TSR to be a mix fan club and tournament organizer.  In practice, it was almost always a marketing arm. Its main concern was the retention of the hardcore of the hardcore among D&D players, or at least the hardcore of the hardcore who could handle a group larger than a normal D&D group, and the increased drama that increased size usually creates. 

When I worked for the RPGA, I went through many job titles, but most of those were just the whims of corporate America’s restructuring addiction. All them equated to, “the dude who does shit.” And there was a lot of shit to do. Most of those years were roiling stacks of projects that seemed never to end, but there were a few interesting and even enlightening challenges; sometimes coming from the strangest places. 

When I started working for the RPGA in 2000, the card side and the RPG side of organized play was very segregated. That first year I didn’t know any of my card-side compatriots. We went to different meetings, we did different things, there was little to no reason to interact. But with the rounds of layoffs that have always occurred with surprising frequency at WotC, the consequential restructuring eventually changed that. One day I woke up with a gaggle of card-side bosses. Bless, them, they knew what D&D was…or rather they remembered  what D&D was from playing it a time or two in their youth. And bless them even more, the best of them began playing again when it became a part of their job. 

This is one of the early Campaign Cards for the Legacy of the Green Regent campaign. The size and shape of the card was for two reasons: they were the same size as the old Living City and Living Greyhawk magic item certificates, which some people missed, and they fit in paper money sleeves making it easy for collectors to store them.

When you’re a D&D nerd, it’s hard to imagine that someone really doesn’t like D&D, or at least doesn’t like it nearly as much as you do. But there are those people in the world. And some of them ended up being my boss for a while or more. They had other skill sets, important skill sets, but I still found it annoying as hell from time to time. 

Also realize that businesses—smart ones—capitalize on past successes. The majority of WotC’s past success has involved cards.  So I should not have found it shocking when my boss asked me to create a reward item to mail out to RPGA members, and that reward had to take the shape of a card. 

I thought the world had finally gone mad. After explaining to my boss that D&D was not a card game, and watching his eyes roll back into his head yet again upon hearing one of my diatribes, I went back to my desk to bang my head on its surface. Twenty minutes later, I had the idea and the preliminary set of Campaign Cards. 

Basically Campaign Cards were session-frequency utility powers before there were utility powers; at least the majority of the most popular ones were. They also gave you access to expanded character creation choices. They were designed and useful in the most current campaign Wizards offered, but other campaigns (like Living Greyhawk) allowed their use also. 

Campaign cards were a huge success. Not Pokémon successful, I’m not rich, but some of these cards would go for hundreds of dollars on eBay, and they did a good job of increasing reported games with a surprisingly low rate of fraud. The rate of fraud was something watched very closely, but we were rather lenient in acting against. You really had to be blatant for us to bring down the hammer. Still the fraud rate was lower than Magic programs of a similar ilk. 

They were also successful in play. All the sudden even the most tricked out wizard or cleric could juggle another level of complication, due to the aid of the card interface. If those things were just crap you earned or that were given out, and were buried on the character sheet, they would go into disuse very quickly. Cards helped to create a new class of character power, that while small and usually dealt with meta issues (modifying rolls in times of need), that people actually wanted. 

More importantly it taught me that we could rethink the interface of RPGs. Books and sheets may not be the best method of interaction, and that it was okay to experiment. You weren’t doing any damage to the game. RPGs were hardy creatures. It doesn’t surprise me that today, more people play 4e with a stack of cards that a stack of sheets and books. 

Gamers fall in love with the trappings of their games. They fall in love with the categories that companies make to market games, and rarely look beyond the veil to see what makes a game what it is and makes it fun. Part of this is because gaming geeks usually portion of their identity within the game they play.  When that game changes in some way, they feel like it is an attack on their identity. It’s not. Things change. They will continue to change. 

Books and paper are eventually going to go away.