An Old Dungeon Story

I love story games. I love games that let me create new kinds of stories when I play. The tragicomic betrayal of Fiasco. The monstrous humans and human monsters of Monsterhearts.

It’s also true that I’m a big fan of the Old School Renaissance. Dungeons, and dragons and 10-foot poles. In fact, I’d rather play an old school game than a more modern version of D&D.

What’s the deal?

Maybe it’s the fact that I came to it via the OSR, where the old game is explained in new words, and some people have added their own interpretations of the original text, but my position is that Old School D&D is a story game. Back in the late 90’s, when I first developed my interest in gaming, it was typical to sneer at D&D as “the game of killing monsters and taking their stuff” as we played GURPS or whatever other system we were into at the time. But then story games came along and the fact that a game has such a clear mission statement is considered a virtue.

But it takes more than a mission statement to make a story game. You need mechanics that are geared towards that mission statement. There must be some sort of carrot to lure players into playing in certain ways. Maybe even a stick or two to cut off stories that are not in the game’s wheelhouse. Simply put, story games deliberately create “winning moves” within their mechanics and by leaning into those winning moves, you’re supporting the game’s style.

In Fate Core, the winning move is to engage with aspects and fate points. To keep the blog from getting too far from its main topic, the winning move in Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road is to help people and make friends. Not only will doing these things make your character more powerful and effective, they also help create the story that those games want to tell.

Now back to the OSR. Looking for those winning moves that offer the big rewards, what do we see? The big reward is clearly experience points. That’s how you level up. And they also line up neatly with that mission statement. In Old School D&D, you get XP for killing monsters and taking their stuff. In fact, first edition D&D is unique in that it’s the only version that offers XP for taking their stuff. And that makes all the difference.

For example, let’s say that a party of 4 orcs is guarding a chest with 100 gold pieces in it. In 1e, the orcs are worth around 15 XP each if they are killed, but none if they survive. Recovering the chest of gold is worth 100 XP. If you kill 2 orcs and the other 2 run away (because 1e also had morale rules), you’ve still got most of the XP for the encounter.

Old school D&D is not a game of heroic adventure. It’s a game of treasure hunting. Realizing that, so many of the odd relics of that edition make a degree of sense. One of the simplest advantages is that it removes a certain sort of metagaming. Since the player at the table and the character in the game are after the same thing, anything the player does to get the best reward for their character is also the character working to get the best reward for themselves. 

Encumbrance rules and fiddly equipment lists are all about planning and preparation. How much can you carry into the dungeon and how much can you carry out? Did you remember to bring the thing you need to deal with the challenges you expect? How many extra challenges can you cope with? And how much treasure can you get out of the dungeon once you’ve found it? Because coins and weapons and scrolls all have weight.

Time is another resource in the dungeon and random encounters emphasize the ticking clock. The group could spend several turns making sure that they’ve explored everything in a dungeon room. Every trap disabled and every secret door uncovered. But every turn spent is one turn closer to the dreaded random encounter check.

What’s wrong with a random encounter? Isn’t that just a bundle of XP walking right towards you? Maybe. Remember those orcs guarding that chest? Now imagine that you found those orcs wandering the dungeon away from their chest. If you kill them, you get their XP. But you don’t get XP for their chest, since that’s back in their lair. So, a fight is going to potentially cost you spells, hit points and items without a worthwhile reward.

The funny thing is that the earliest roleplaying emerged from trying to beat this clock. Instead of taking a turn of game-time to check for a trap, secret door or hidden treasure, players would listen for clues in the Dungeon Master’s description of the room. Is there a candle sconce in the wall? Try to turn it and see if a section of wall opens. Does the floor sound hollow when I tap it with my 10-foot pole? Probably a pit trap there. Traps could be detected in segments instead of turns. There was less chance of failure for this type of searching as well, since no dice were rolled for these types of actions.

And if a random encounter did occur, players could do things other than fight the monster. Like talk to it. Especially if there was a large power disparity between the monster and the party. A powerful monster might get an apology for intruding upon their domain, while a weak monster might be intimidated into revealing where their lair and treasure (and XP) are.

Admittedly, the treasure for XP rule was dropped in all subsequent editions of D&D because it was not often used. Monster XP was increased to make up the difference, but it doesn’t seem like they thought of the results on the game’s incentive structure. While the objective of treasure hunting led to a lot of variety and creativity, simply rewarding monster kills encouraged players to be combat hammers banging on as many XP nails as could be found.

Modern D&D seems pulled between two forces. On the one hand is this reward structure that has become so ingrained into gaming culture that it cannot be escaped. On the other hand, there is the desire to be a generic fantasy RPG, being as big a tent as possible and encouraging people to play it in any way they want. The downside is that it has too much identity to be a truly generic game, but it has sold too much of its original identity to continue the story game legacy of 1e.

RPGaDay 2017 #16 Which RPG do you enjoy using as is?

As I said yesterday, all of them.

So instead, I'm going to talk about the time that running a game as is actually opened up some doors to me.

Old School D&D, at least as conveyed to me by OSRIC, included a couple of rules regarding mandatory downtime. That is, time that characters must spend away from adventuring in order to take care of other things. In those rules, these included training times for when a character goes up in level and medical recovery when they are dropped below 0 hit points, but not actually killed. I'm sure most tables would ignore this sort of rule. The guys over at the System Mastery podcast have complained plenty when this sort of rule is included in a game they review.

But I wanted to get that First Edition, early-days-of-gaming feel, so I left it in. Another thing I knew that happened in Ye Olden Dayes was players having multiple characters, suitable for multiple levels of adventuring. So I encouraged my players to build multiple characters in case one of them became unavailable to play for whatever reason.

In the early days of this, what mostly happened was that players would wait for all characters to be recovered before venturing into the dungeon. Even if that meant days or weeks of waiting. If I was on top of my game, I would have put pressure on them by highlighting the expenses of staying in town and also taken the time to repopulate the dungeon, but I was new to the whole process myself.

But once there were enough characters and enough players involved, deciding which character to play became part of the strategy of the session. "We're going down to the tomb level. Who's got a cleric to turn all the undead?" "I do, but they're in training right now. Do we want to wait on the tombs and clear out the gnolls on the fourth level instead? My fighter's looking for some action!"

It was a unique and fun experience that I wouldn't have had if I had ignored those downtime rules.

Time Out!

For those of you wondering if I will be at DunDraCon this year, have no fear. Unfortunately, Adventures in Oz will not be there in an official capacity. It seems that real life intruded at just the wrong time and I missed the event submission deadline this year. Unofficially, if anyone wants to play Adventures in Oz, I and my adventure notes will be there and there's lots of space in the Open Gaming room.

In the meantime, I've been catching up on expanding my podcast listening to the System Mastery podcast. They review old and (best left) forgotten tabletop RPGs with a healthy dose of humor.

It should also be noted that they have a few biases and pet peeves regarding the games that they review. The one that I want to address in this post is the requirement of extensive downtime, especially with regards to healing and recovery. It was a common feature in games for quite some time and some treatments of the subject are indeed worthy of mockery (How it's discussed in the Prime Directive RPG is something of a running gag for these guys).

But it doesn't have to suck. I ran an Old School campaign for many years with all of the downtime rules switched on and that was overall a success. Here's a few tips that I've picked up from my experiences.

1) Give every player a character to play. The first time I did this was back in my Cartoon Action Hour campaign. The party was split, with only one character remaining at the site of the big set-piece battle I had devised. So I decided to give each of the players whose character was not present a temporary character to play for that battle.

For the run of my Old School campaign, each player had several characters, some of whom were in downtime at any given moment. When the characters were high enough level to attract henchmen, those henchmen were also available as alternate player characters while their main character was unavailable.

2) Make downtime worthwhile for everyone. My earliest experience here was kind of a bad one. By Third Edition D&D, most of the required downtime rules from earlier editions had fallen by the wayside, except for those required by wizards. Spellcasters still had to take time out to make magic items, like scrolls and potions, as well as to add newly acquired spells to their spellbook. So for the megadungeon game that Kris Newton ran, the party wizard tended to be something of a drag on the rest of us. It didn't help matters that we had a rival party exploring the dungeon, so whenever we took downtime, we felt the need to negotiate with the rival party to keep them out of the dungeon as well.

I had better luck running the Pathfinder version of the Castle of the Mad Archmage. By the time i got that organized, Paizo had published their book Ultimate Campaign which featured, among other things, a detailed downtime system. Now, while the spellcaster was making magic items or was otherwise holed up in their sanctum, the rest of the party has activities that they can do as well. Earning a few gold pieces, building credit with the locals, or even catching up on experience points for when the player misses a session.

3) Use downtime to provoke dramatic choices. At least some of the problematic treatment of downtime, specifically as it relates to injury, is the assumption that attempts at recovery must happen immediately after the injury. But what if there are still things to do in the adventure? The System Mastery guys suggest that the injured character must go into recovery mode immediately and the player must avoid the gaming table because their character is functionally useless.

But what if the character doesn't go immediately into recovery? While I didn't have this happen due to injury, I did have players make the choice to not take the downtime required to level up immediately in my Old School megadungeon game. Because leveling up not only takes time, it takes money in those rules. In the early levels of the dungeon, there was not a massive amount of treasure, so it did sometimes happen that a character would earn enough XP to advance in level, but not enough money in the bank to pay for the training.

In a slightly different game, that could be a dramatic choice. If the villains of the adventure are working on a timetable, the heroes will have to act quickly and decisively to thwart them, which may not leave significant time to heal up between fights. The big fictional example is the first Die Hard film (The only Die Hard film I've seen). John McClane is increasingly battered in his fights with Hans Gruber's henchmen over the course of the film and the increasing difficulties those injuries cause him are not shied away from. And since he is isolated in the building, the best he can do for healing is some improvised first aid.

The Burning Wheel RPG makes this sort of decision a little more interesting. Since skills only advance in those rules when they are used for increasingly challenging tasks, characters are encouraged to attempt more difficult things. But there are also a lot of mechanisms for making tasks easier. The result is a tension between making the task you're rolling for hard so you can advance your skill, or get lots of help so the roll is easier and you're more likely to get what you want.

When a Burning Wheel character in injured, they take wound penalties to their die rolls, making things harder until they recover. So again that tension comes into play. Do you take the time to recover and remove those penalties, or do you accept the penalties and use them to make tasks more difficult and therefore more likely to improve?

Any other thoughts on making downtime a more natural and interesting part of your game?

Shaking some things loose

If you haven't noticed yet, you don't have to be on Google+ to comment on this blog anymore. It will still be posted over on my Google+ feed, but it will also allow people who do not worship the glow cloud that is Google to chime in with their supportive comments.

I seem to have overslept L. Frank Baum's birthday, which was last Thursday. He would have been 158. Jared Davis over at the Royal Blog of Oz, did his annual tribute with a performance of one of the Little Wizard Stories, The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger. It also marked the 4th anniversary of my initial release of Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road over at Lulu.com.

My regular gaming group sort of fell apart about 2 months ago. I had two players back out, but since they were transportation for a third player, that meant 3 lost players out of 5. So the two that are remaining are typically not brave enough to keep plundering the deeper dungeons under the Castle of the Mad Archmage at their current strength. And one is only an intermittent player, so that party strength waxes and wanes pretty strongly. I've tried recruiting new players, with limited success. The bad news is that I have not run a session since those players left, but the good news is that I still have something of a game night. Mostly Munchkin and Zombie Dice, with a few other games that we convince each other to try out. I've been threatened with Risk a few times, though that has yet to happen.

Even if the whole thing fully implodes and I never run an session of this campaign again, it will still be the longest campaign I've ever run. It started back in May, 2011. Most campaigns I've run prior to this tended to last 3-4 months. We play through a story arc, a single large-ish villainous plot, then pick up another game, and run another campaign with another story arc, rinse and repeat. I've tried to push past that barrier a couple of times, but it has never worked for me. It's easier to kill the campaign in its prime than watch it wither away.


So what will I do now?

1) Try to keep the campaign going? I could. I could find more players, try to get things started up again. and just keep going. But on the other hand, my impressive shelf of games is not getting the try-outs that it did under my previous habits.

Another problem is that I'm realizing a couple of things that I should have done early on in the campaign, like build out the world beyond the dungeon or restock the dungeon behind them. In the early days of the campaign, I wasn't sure how long it would go on. By the time it became an established thing, other pieces of my life were becoming less established and it became harder to find the energy to do that sort of thing (and a lot of other things, like blog regularly).

2) Run something else? This is something that's been gnawing at me for a while. I've been thinking of a sci-fi game, maybe Star Trek or Diaspora, since the last 3 years have been heavy on fantasy for me. I've also been thinking of Monsterhearts, since one of the things I want to get better at as a GM is "going small," establishing character and setting by getting into those quiet moments when they're not having big awesome adventures. And since Monsterhearts is about being very small and petty, it seems like a good training ground. Or the Dresden Files RPG, since I've been a fan of those books for some time and I've been meaning to give Fate a test drive.

But at the same time, the experience of running a long term game has given me some insight into what is needed to make a long term game successful. Which means a lot more thought and effort than I've put into anything I've done prior. Even the current campaign. And with the life-stupid keeping me down, I'm not sure when I'll be able to get out of that rut.

What makes an RPG?

What is it that separates an RPG from other types of games? Please be warned that this is my own opinion on the subject. Other writers, many of them with much more education and experience than myself, have tried to tackle this with limited success.

Roleplaying happens when players go beyond the concept of "position identification" (i.e "This is my playing piece" becomes "This is my guy"). Roleplaying is encouraged when this works to the player's advantage. For example, Monpoly isn't an RPG because imagining yourself in the place of a top hat or shoe does not give you an advantage in the game.

The original Dungeons & Dragons game became one of the first games to offer this kind of advantage. Unlike many other wargames available at the time, D&D gave each player control of a single character, rather than a squad or army. And there's also the fact that first level sucked.

I really discovered that last for myself rather recently at the hands of OSRIC. My friend Fishgod had discovered this, dug out an old D&D module, and tried to run it for my gaming group. There was only one survivor. Mostly because we expected the rules to be more forgiving, like more modern games.

On reflection, it was this unforgiving nature that led to roleplaying in the first place. When you've got a visibly non-zero chance to enter play with only 1 hit point, you don't charge up to things with your sword. You get creative. You distract your opponents with changes to the environment. You lead them into the dungeon's traps. By visualizing the situation and putting yourself in your character's shoes, your character's survivability increased dramatically, making it more likely that you'll reach second level, at which point things get slightly less sucky.

Modern roleplayers (including some in my group) have complained that there is little room for roleplaying in classic D&D. The alignment system was not yet fully formed, so there's no real support for characterization and drama. Every adventure published for the system is a dungeon full of monsters to be killed.

By my definition, most of the video and computer games that are labeled as RPGs are not RPGs. They remove the player's ability to improvise solutions, reducing the game to the combat simulation that modern roleplayers decry. A well written story makes the game much more fun, certainly, but it doesn't really replace the flexibility of making your own decisions.

A couple of entertaining examples of what is possible when a person (as opposed to a computer) is mediating the action:

For those who have been following the Actual Play thread I have on wonderfulwizardofoz.net, I give you Corbin. In his first adventure, he managed to extend a war that otherwise would have been ended. Rather than tell him his action failed, and that his actions would continue to fail until he convinced the two sides to interact peacably, I allowed his actions to succeed and to let him deal with the consequences of his actions. It will be interesting to see him win over Ozma after that sort of incident.

Last night, Fishgod got us to try Paranoia. As a comedy game, one of it's many schticks that the characters are issued useless items and highly experimental items and are ordered to find uses for them. My character was issued a freeze-dried bagel and another character was issued a briefcase full of expanding monomolecular razorwire. After several characters fell victim to the razorwire, my character got creative and devised a shield made of the densest substance known to man: A freeze dried bagel. A computer would have to have planned rather far ahead to expect that move in order to allow it to work. Fishgod, seeing that it enhanced the fun of the game, allowed the unorthodox defense to take place and much fun was had by all.