RPGaDay 2020 # 18 Investigate

The last investigative RPG I ran was called InSpectres. I'm sure I've written about it on the blog before. It's a fun, light little horror comedy game that I like to run in coffee shops.

This was back in March, right around when the pandemic was picking up steam. But it was Friday the 13th, and it had to be acknowledged in some way. I posted the event on my Meetup group and got two players.

One of the things that I have always appreciated about InSpectres is that players will never get stuck on a mystery or fail to find a clue. Every die roll has a chance of contributing to the ultimate goal. One of the players that I got was actually experienced with the system and helped me see a few more kernels of genius in the design.

Action is always better than inaction. This one is sort of obvious. It's what I've always said about the game, but from a slightly different perspective. Since every roll can contribute to the completion of the story, it is in the players' best interest to make as many rolls as possible. This was highlighted in this particular session, as the other player, who didn't have experience with the system, was generally more passive. I tried to check in with him a few times to make sure that he was engaged.

The other thing is the reason why the players get to generate the clues that they find. On the surface level, it ensures that the clues you discover make sense in the context of where you found them. If the GM constructed the mystery and handed out clues as you made successful die rolls, it would seem very strange if you found the secret love note in the bathroom, or inspired a confession with a pratfall. By letting the players construct the mystery on the fly, you also ensure that every clue is actionable. Rather than discovering a hair sample that they need to take to the lab to have analyzed, or something obscure that has to wait for another clue to emerge to make sense, the players can hand themselves information that pushes the action forward.

My love for that game grew even stronger after that experience.

RPGaDay 2020 #17 Tower

 As a lifer GM, it might seem that I am in a tower of sorts, lording my ability to run games over all the mere players beneath me. But that's not really true.

You see, I've long held the belief that GMs are players, too. I'm not there to be all-powerful enforcer of plot. I'm there to present the players with a situation and see how they respond to it. And that's fun to me. That's how I get my entertainment. I'm a player, there to have fun, just like every other person at the table.

I'm finding that games where I plot less tend to bring me out of that tower and more into the player realm. I still do lots of prep, but it's fleshing out the world and making sure that I'm ready for what the players try to do rather than crafting a set of hoops for them to jump through (or avoid). But without a set plot, I'm not trying to corral the players or push them in a specific direction. There's no need to be heavy handed. I'm just as much a participant of what unfolds as the players are.

RPGaDay 2020 #16 Meet

 Of all the things that the pandemic has made more difficult, it's meeting people. Everything we do these days has a deliberateness to it. Every interaction is planned to be as safe as possible. There are few, if any, chance meetings.

In-person gaming is also shut down for many of us. Online gaming does exist, but requires the same level of planning as an in-person game. Perhaps moreso, because those chance meetings that we don't have anymore means that we don't have those "Hey! Been a while! I'm running a game like the one I did back in the day. Do you want to play?" conversations.

But meet we do, in whatever form that takes. Because we are social animals. Especially gamers.

RPGaDay 2020 #15 Comfort

I don’t know that I would ever call gaming comforting, but I will call it a comfort.

In a lot of ways, gaming is work. Especially for the Game Master, which is usually me. Even as a player, you have to put effort in. That can be building your character correctly or making sure that you are biting onto the GM’s plot hooks. Even organizing a no-prep game like Fiasco means the effort of getting everyone in the same place at the same time (even if that’s online).

But it is absolutely a comfort. Having a regular game night with all the regular players showing up can be a lovely routine. A one shot can be a pleasant break from a humdrum routine or a chance to try something new.

RPGaDay 2020 #14 Dramatic

 The last few days haven't given me a lot of time for writing. I don't know if I'll be able to make it up or if I'll come out short this year. I'm going to try.

I've usually been pretty bad about stirring up drama between characters. The one time I tried was kind of a disaster.

It was GURPS Technomancer, a setting in which magic took the role that atomic power did in the latter half of the 20th Century. One of the effects of this is that people started having not-quite-human children, called changelings. They often appeared as various human-animal hybrids. The main ones I remember off the top of my head were fox people and spider people.

Since this was GURPS, and a setting where magic was available, nearly every character poured as many of their points as they could into every possible spell. Since playing a non-human cost points, no one was really interested. Except for one player. He was one of those overly excitable anime fans and I guess he wanted a kitsune sort of character.

It was right about this time that I bought GURPS Martial Arts and made the detailed combat moves available to my players. Which also meant that I created a plot surrounding a martial arts tournament. I decided that someone was trying to rig the tournament because they were racist against changelings. Which meant that every time I had an NPC say something denigrating about changelings, I had one player feel it.

He clearly thought I was picking on him, because he told me off after one session and stormed off. He didn't come back for the rest of the campaign. He was more a friend of a friend, so I didn't see him for probably a few years after that.

When we did reconnect, it was for another game I ran that went moderately well. Neither of us brought up the old incident, so it seems to be water under the bridge.

RPGaDay 2020 #13 Banner (Actually Frame)

 Not coming up with anything for Banner. I haven't hoisted a banner for anything in quite a while. Maybe I'll have something by the end of the month.

The next prompt on the list is Frame.

I've run a lot of campaigns over the years, some good, probably more bad. And the better ones are always the ones that had a stronger frame. The more strongly you are able to answer the questions of "Who are the characters?" and "What do they do?" the better off you are.

For a long time, I didn't bother much asking about who the characters were. That was up to the players, I assumed. Much of my work as GM was more focused on the "What do they do?" side of the equation. Coming up with fun things to dangle in front of the party every session.

Eventually, I realized that my stronger campaigns were the ones that offered some sort of unifying principle for the characters. Sometimes I did this (I once ran a superhero campaign where the characters had all taken jobs as superheroes). Other times, it was up to the players (another superhero campaign set in another universe had the players casting about for roles. One of the characters owned a bar, so another player decided that she was the bartender, another was one of the regulars and so on).

One of the great things about D&D, as well as licensed games and storygames, is that they often come with those questions already answered. With the campaign already framed, if you will. D&D is famously "The characters are all fantasy adventurers who kill monsters and take their stuff." The latest Star Wars RPG had three different rulebooks, each built towards a certain set of answers. Storygames Powered by the Apocalypse use playbooks to put characters in defined roles that support the game's premise.

RPGaDay 2020 #12 Rest

 One of the hardest parts of any campaign is managing downtime. Adventures are fun, but they're not everyday affairs.

Unless they are, of course. One of the gaming forms I've spent the longest time with is the megadungeon. In this situation, the adventure is a proactive thing, something the characters choose to do, rather than reactive, in which the characters are pushed to respond to events. (Though I do think that having events also happen in a megadungeon context strengthens it.)

In the first megadungeon I played in, run by my friend Kris, downtime was an obstacle. Mostly because there was only one party member who required it. The party wizard had developed the ability to make magical items and would occasionally need to take several days away from dungeoneering to make something. On the one hand, we didn't want to leave that player out of the action, so the whole party waited in town for them to finish. On the other hand, nobody else had anything to really do in town (it was largely handled as an abstraction), so all we did while he was working was twiddle our thumbs. (Not that it took long at the table. He just established what he was making and how long he took.)

And then there was Sir Meriweather. I'm sure I've told the story about him, or at least how it/he ended. But there was a good long time when he was simply the leader of a competing adventuring party. So every time the wizard wanted to make a magic item, we also had to go to Sir Meriweather and ask his party to stay out of the dungeon to keep things fair. (Maybe the fact that he agreed to do this as much as he did should have been a clue.)

For my own megadungeon game, downtime was much more prevalent. Between training times for leveling up and for serious injury, some characters spent as much time down as up. Troupe style play kept everyone playing for nearly every in-game day.

When it finally fell apart, I attempted to run the Pathfinder version of the megadungeon. For that, I tried to use the downtime rules from the Ultimate Campaign supplement. It was only a modest success. My core consistent player was more interested in plundering the dungeon than doing much in town. My inconsistent players were too inconsistent to make filling in the blanks when they missed a session really worthwhile.

My current campaign hasn't had a lot of downtime. Since I tend to keep the calendar pretty tight, only about 2 weeks have passed in the game, pretty much since the beginning of the world. Though, as I have mentioned, I have big ambitions for this project that involve more than day to day dungeoneering. (There are dungeons in the world. It wouldn't be D&D without them.)

I actually had a player quit the game because the timeline wasn't moving fast enough. It was hard to see the forest of worldbuilding for the trees of dungeoncrawling and exploration. While I might accelerate the timeline at some point in the future, the main thing the party needs right now is gold pieces. (The kingdom-building rules I'm using lean heavily on the use of gold pieces as its primary form of input and output.) And, as everyone knows, the best place to get gold pieces is from a dungeon.

RPGaDay 2020 #11 Message

 This is as good a prompt as any to talk about my experiences with online gaming.

For a long time, playing a game online has been one of those "I'll get around to it one of these days" sort of things. I had a Roll20 account and had puttered around with it, but never seriously.

Then the pandemic hit.

I was stuck inside with nothing to do. An old gaming friend mentioned that he was organizing an online session via Facebook, so I responded. I needed something to do, and since we no longer lived in close proximity, this was a chance to reconnect more strongly.

The amusing thing about all of this was my setup. I actually filled out my character sheet by hand, so I had paper and dice in front of me. Voice chat was through the Discord app on my phone. I was accessing the website from a lunchbox laptop I had built around a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. I might have still had the Raspberry Pi Zero (the ultra-light version) installed, instead of the Model 3B that I upgraded to later.

I had only a modest amount of fun with that game (It was an established setting from a video game that I wasn't familiar with), but it did help me see how all of the pieces fit together. I started delving into Roll20 and actively figuring out how to import my overland map and all of my other maps.

I tried a direct import of the map images, but was only so successful. Getting the mapping tools to line up with the grid of the imported map was onerous. To the point that I just went ahead and used the Roll20 drawing tools to recreate the maps rather than keep trying to import them.

I was almost ready to try to run it when a small miracle occurred. My standard laptop decided to work again. So I was able to do everything on one machine. Voice chat on Discord, Roll20 for maps, die rolling and character sheet management. I was even able to get Twitch streaming into the mix, so I have a record of everything that happened in our sessions (except for the first 2. Oh well).

Now that things are reopening, I don't have players chomping at the bit to play anything to fill up their time. It's on a hiatus right now. But the material that I have accumulated is all there, so everything is still canon for the next time I'm able to get a group together.

RPGaDay 2020 #10 Stack

 My giant stack of RPG books is still in storage, so nothing to brag about on that front. And since I am staying with my in-laws, I haven't significantly added to the collection.

One thing I do have is stacks of notes for games that I could be running. And these notes are typically in virtual form. I've been using OneNote for quite some time, coupled with a timeline program to track the in-game calendar.

I've recently started experimenting with WorldAnvil because it offers more specialized tools than OneNote, including timelines. It's still something of a work in progress. Part of that is because a lot of my preliminary work was done in OneNote. The other part is that the history of the world is being developed as play progresses. The encounters that they have are determined randomly (though I have pre-rolled the encounters, exactly when and where they occur is still determined at the table).

Which creates another issue: Some of the content of my notes are details of play as it happens, and there's also an amount of content that is "behind the GM's screen," as it were. I think if I were to pay for the subscription, I could set that up to be filtered, so I could set up specific player-facing areas that the group could view (and possibly even edit), while keeping my GM notes private.

When I get enough steam to make another go at the project, I might just do that.

RPGaDay 2020 #9 Want

 I think the big thing that everyone wants right now is to game with their friends and groups in person again.

One of the reasons that I particularly want to get back to in-person gaming is that one of my other wants has recently been fulfilled. I've been a big fan of Fiasco ever since I figured out how to play it. I've got all of the official playsets published for the original version.

When the Kickstarter for the new, card-based version came up, I backed it. And just a few weeks ago, the box finally arrived. I made sure and got all of the card decks/playsets available at launch. While I also got the Roll20 version of the core set (and actually did try it out last week), I would have to pay extra for the Roll20 version of the other decks. So at least for now, I can play Poppleton Mall to my hearts content, but I'm waiting for meeting in person to try out Fiasco High.

RPGaDay 2020 #8 Light

 A slightly easier prompt for me right now.

Old School games tend to be very focused on the map. One of the core themes is exploration, so it only makes sense. I'm sure I've told the story of how my long-running megadungeon campaign finally fell apart because of issues with the map.

My worldbuilding campaign is no different. It's built primarily around a hexgrid overland map. If I were running this as an in-person game, that map would be something that I would bring to the session and lay out on the table. Everyone would be able to see the whole thing unless I took pains to conceal portions of the map.

As a digital map on Roll20, I have a bit more flexibility. The "Fog of War" feature is really great. I may be gushing about something stupid and obvious, but it's far better than what I could present at a physical table.

Along with exploration, it also touches on another theme of Old School gaming: Resource Management. Specifically time management. Taking time to explore and reveal sections of the map is time that the party could be using to accomplish other tasks. Only a small section of a very large map has been revealed, but as things progress, more and more of the world will come to light. (See what I did there?)

RPGaDay 2020 #7 Shade

I'm not one to throw shade and disparage others. Not very frequently, anyway. And I have no real reason to do so now.

Shade is also something that is in short supply right now. It's not only the height of summer, but I am living in beautiful San Diego. Clear, bright, sunny days are the norm right now. But when you find that slightly cooler, slightly more pleasant spot, it's so very nice.

Finding metaphorical shade is just as difficult to find as real shade thanks to the pandemic. Places of shelter where everything is just a little less intense and you can let yourself relax. My favorite spot of that type is the coffee shop. Typically Starbucks, but there was also the coffee shop where I joined that writer's club and played a couple of games.

Only tangentially related to gaming, I know, but I think we're all feeling kinda cooped up and eager for those opportunities to go outside our familiar four walls. 

RPGaDaY 2020 # 6 Couple

I've already told the story of how gaming brought my wife and I together. And we've gamed with numerous other couples throughout our gaming careers.

A couple, of course, doesn't have to mean a couple of people. It can also be a couple of things.

My kingdom building campaign has an inn as the home base. I could have been a jerk and just dropped the party into the middle of that forest I mentioned yesterday and forced them to find/make shelter and food, but that would have been a bit much. The inn also allows me to do my old school troupe style thing by serving as a central point that characters convene at to begin and end the session. (The inn is also magic, offering nearly infinite character storage space.)

Inns back in the olden days often had colorful names that were 2 things. I got a random name for the inn when I was just starting out, which was the Serpent and Unicorn Inn. The name of the inn was these two things for a good long time.

Then I got out into the world, at least a little bit, and joined a D&D game run by a pretty cool guy named Julian. The tavern in the starting area of his campaign was simply known as the Food & Drink Inn. Another combination of 2 things.

It was perfect! I had been trying to design the world with as little intention as possible. My goal was not to push a plot onto the players, but to let them find and create the plot themselves. By giving the 1 established, created thing in the setting the most boring, generic name in existence, it really helped set the tone I was going for.

RPGaDay #5 Forest

I'm sure I could go metaphorical with this prompt, "missing the forest for the trees" or similar, but I'm not.

Well, it's not an actual forest, either. It's a forest hex on a map that I'm using for my worldbuilding campaign. The map I'm using is actually randomly generated with Hexographer. My intention was to place the initial starting point at the center of this map, but it turned out that dead center was in the middle of a body of water. So my starting point is just a little bit south of the middle of the map.It's actually a pretty sizeable forest. Way more than just one hex, or even 2. It's so big that the party has not uncovered it all yet.

There's one other important detail about this forest. It's very new. The trees are fully grown, but animals haven't really moved in. The ground underneath the trees is simply dirt. There are none of the elements that would make it proper soil. The earthworms have only begun their digging. No fallen leaves from last year to enrich the soil.

As near as anyone can tell, everything in this forest was created maybe 2 weeks ago (Day 1 of the campaign).

RPGadAY 2020 #4 Tribute

Tributes aren't something that I really do. I'm more about the homage.

In my mind, a tribute is specific, while homage is general. For example, if I were to run a Star Trek campaign in which the characters went to a specific planet originally visited by the Enterprise and had to deal with a problem that was directly connected to the events of that original episode, that would be a tribute. But if my starship crew went to a different planet that had a problem that was similar to the original episode, that would be an homage.

I think it's especially important to lean into homage rather than tribute when dealing with an existing property, like Star Trek or Oz. There's a tendency to cling to the source material that can stifle creativity. And in both of these franchises, novelty is life. Make sure there are similarities and connections to what has come before, but resist the urge to re-hash and revisit what has gone before.

RPGaDay 2020 #3 Thread (Actually Vision)

I've got nothing on today's prompt, so I'm going to save it for later.

One of my big stumbling blocks for this blog is that I've felt the need to have a Vision in order to post something. Not a prophetic vision, but some sort of Big Idea that I must Send Out to the Cosmos.

At least part of the issue is that my gaming life has really slowed down, so I don't have observations from my last session or previews of my next to keep you all entertained.

During the most severe part of the lockdown (We're still not through the woods yet as I type this), I actually did run some sessions of my OSR worldbuilding campaign that I kept saying I would do. Maybe through this month (and hopefully beyond), I'll share some observations and maybe even updates on this campaign.

RPGaDay 2020 #2 Change

The only sure thing in life is change, as my last post demonstrates.

It's always interesting to go back and look at the ways I've run my games in the past. It's not always been a smooth transition, and not always an improvement. That's an important thing to remember.

I think my biggest "failed experiment" was using the Beat Chart that appeared in Dream Park as well as other products by R. Talsorian Games. On the surface, it was a pretty nifty idea: Mix up the types of scenes in your game so it's not just a series of fights, or endless talking or what-have-you.

The problem occurred because I was always planning too linearly. And maybe because I had at least one player who liked to push the story off the rails. And every session, every adventure, I would be sure that they would follow the steps that I had planned and everything would go like it "should." But it never did.

Before that time, my sessions were very loosely structured. I would go in with one or two good ideas and let my players react to what I put in front of them. Once I realized that the Beat Chart wasn't working for me, I tried to go back to that, but it wound up being too loose.

The next game I ran was the megadungeon, which was a complete break from the prior style of gaming. Which I've already talked about at length, so here's where we break off.

RPGaDay 2020 #1 Beginning

As per usual, I've been terrible keeping up the blog. But every time August rolls around, I at least have to try to complete the RPGaDay challenge.

It's hard to find something new to say on the subject of beginnings. It's one of my recurring themes on this blog. How to be a new player. How to be a new Game Master. How to start a campaign. Good games to play if you're just starting out (Hint: I wrote one).

I think the one sort of beginning I haven't really talked about is starting over. I'm not sure if I have any advice on the subject because I still feel like I'm in the middle of the process.

I moved to the San Diego area a year and a half ago. 800 miles from all of my established gaming friends. Any friends, really.

It's been pretty uphill, but some good gaming has taken place. I wouldn't say that I had fully settled in because I wasn't running a regular campaign. Being a GM is in my blood now. I'd run a few session of this or that. Usually something pretty light that didn't take a lot of work. I know I've mentioned some big dream campaigns, but those take big effort to implement.

Then the virus hit. All in-person gaming was canceled for the foreseeable future. It wasn't until it became absolutely necessary that I took to online gaming. Starting over all over again.

I'm adapting. I continue to adapt. But it is not easy and not always fun.

Happy 10th Anniversary!

What a long strange trip it's been!

I don't know if anyone still reads this, but I would be remiss if I didn't do something to mark this day. Ten years ago today, I released Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road over at Lulu.com.

The traditional gift for the 10th anniversary is Tin, which connects very amusingly with Oz, as everyone knows. Not only is the Tin Woodman a fan favorite character, but he also had a long lost "brother" in the form of the Tin Soldier. As a gift to my many fans, I have reduced the price of the Adventures in Oz Characters Pack, featuring the Tin Woodman, to $0.00. That's right, it's now free permanently!

Who Needs Players?

The simple answer, of course, is that there is no game without players. For a very long time, I wouldn't even consider planning for a game if I didn't have a play group. My diverse tastes made me even more cautious. I didn't want to have a campaign half-written if nobody wanted to take the first step and learn new rules.

The downside of this strategy is that I wound up running games under-prepared. Almost criminally so. I've commented on this blog many years ago about how my players would exploit my lack of preparation as a sort of "fast forward" through my scenarios.

So, what has me thinking about this now? Back in July, I found a writing club meeting at a coffee shop. (Actually, I was at the coffee shop scouting it as a place to run a game. The writing club just happened to be there.) I wound up joining and used the place and time to work on my RPGaDay blog posts. That's why I was able to finish that project despite an awful lot of blog silence previously.

But with August over and all entries completed, I needed something else to write during that time. I decided to work on my campaign notes for my ever-in-the-future Star Trek campaign. I've had the ideas for the campaign for over 5 years but without prospective players, I held off on developing it too deeply.

             One thing I very much wanted to avoid was the temptation of excessive world building. I don’t know how many books on my shelf are full of setting details that aren’t useful. At least not to me. Strange customs that would only be relevant if I was going to force my players to navigate them instead of just making an Etiquette roll to avoid the whole thing (which they would, given the opportunity). Fashion descriptions that mark characters as being rich or poor or from this country or that when all I’m really going to say is “This NPC looks rich or poor or from this country or that.”

            What I did was just start writing the adventure scenarios just like I would if it was a game I was actively running. But instead of having to rush to have something done by this upcoming Monday, I have the time to let my adventure stew until some Monday (or whatever day that group decides on) in the future.

            The big advantage is that I have more time to buttress my plots. When I only had the week between sessions to sketch out the plot, it tended to be weak, with lots of opportunities for “plot clipping” as I previously mentioned. By sitting on ideas and letting them stew, I can look at them from more angles and close the plot holes that I find. Sometimes, instead of simply plugging holes and filling in details, I realize that the story I’m trying to tell requires a different plot structure.

            It also means that I’m doing more world-building. I still avoid world-building for the sake of world-building, but taking the time to flesh out my plots means that world details get filled in. For example, for the Star Trek campaign I want to run, I have a planet where science is a religion. The plot centers on a religious/technological artifact. Quite logically, it would be guarded by something like the Pope’s Swiss Guard. If I only had a week, I might not have put much thought into them. With the pressure off, I can flesh them out a bit more. There might even be a future adventure on this planet where the Star Guard are a major player.

            For my “ultimate sandbox” D&D game, I’m doing everything randomly. The map is randomly generated. I’ve got some randomly generated dungeons for the players to explore. I’m even pre-rolling some random encounters. Originally, this was to reduce the time I spent rolling dice and looking things up in play. But because I have the time to reflect on things, some of these encounters are turning into stories of their own.

            One of the craziest things I’ve rolled up yet is an encounter with four boring beetles (the kind that dig holes, not the kind that are dull). The beetles are in their lair, which means that they are adjacent to their treasure, which includes such randomly determined things as sheep and horses along with other commodities. Boring beetles are the most intelligent of the beetles and the bestiary I’m using even says that they can have a hive consciousness that is quite intelligent indeed. So, I make a reaction roll to determine what they think of anyone who attempts to enter their lair and I get “Friendly.” Instead of a simple monster fight, I get beetles that are intelligent and potentially keeping livestock and other commodities that are friendly and welcoming towards visitors.

            Of course, the point of the ultimate sandbox is to give the players freedom of action in the world and see what they do with it. While they could interact with the beetles and maybe even trade with them, there’s also nothing stopping them from killing them and loading all those commodities onto the horses and laying claim to them. But from my perspective, my world just got that much more interesting because of that potential, whether it gets realized or not.

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.