You want to know what manner of man is Joshua,
What manner of man, you want to know....
A man of the moment is Joshua,
and when the moment leads, there do I go!
I live to love, I love to live!
One of the things that I really like about Original Edition Delta (Dan Collins’ restatement/mild reworking of Original White-box D&D) is how he adjusted the attack bonus charts for men attacking monsters to make a smoother progression as characters level up. The original chart divided Fighting Men into groups of three levels, e.g. 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, and then had the number you had to roll to hit each armor class improve by 2, 3, or 4 each successive category. I have literally no idea why Gygax & Arneson did it that way, unless it was desperation to save space in the tiny booklets. To make it worse, the instructions told you to rework the columns into groups of 4 or 5 for Clerics and Magic Users. Apparently they couldn’t even spare the space for two extra header rows! Though I’m not sure I’d have the patience to do much better with nothing more than a typewriter to do the layout.
I’ve been playing a bunch of Old School Essentials lately, which reworks this so that instead of a clunky chart, each character class lists its bonus to hit/THAC0 (for ascending/descending Armor Class), in a beautifully laid-out, easy to read fashion thanks to modern tools, more space, and a better graphic design sense than Gary had.
OSE Fighter Progression Chart
Unfortunately, it keeps the odd, bumpy progression so characters can go level after level with nothing improving except their hit dice or maybe spells for spell-casting classes. I found I really missed Dan’s approach to it, which ended up nearly the same place give or take a pip on a d20 at each level break, so I implemented a similar progression as a house rule in my game. If you’d like to do the same, here you go. Just replace the Thac0/Attack Bonus listed in the OSE Class tables with the bonus from the appropriate column in the following. Dwarves, Halflings, and Elves advance as fighters (in OSE every three levels). I tried to stick as closely as I could to matching the OSE tables, particularly when it came to the earliest level that the character got the improvement for their “band”, e.g. if a Thief got the +5 bonus at Level 9 I tried to preserve that.
Smoother Attack Progression for OSE
Unfortunately, WordPress’ stupid custom html doesn’t show the table correctly except in preview mode, so I used an image. The actual sheet as a web page is available here, if you need it.
Random thought that occurred to me about spell memorization and spell-books in D&D. As we all know, the traditional way of doing it requires that Wizards “memorize” their spells each day and they require access to their spell book to do it. The whole thing, while probably motivated by game-play aspects of limiting wizards and making them make strategic choices, is clearly influenced by the way magic works in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books where the spells are some kind of alien math that are “so cogent that Turjan’s1 brain could know but four at a time.” So when GMs are looking for a rationalization for the weirdness of it, that’s usually what they reach for. GMs and players too bothered by the weirdness generally remove the spell books entirely, so that spells learned are permanently known, and limits on how many times they can be cast are approached another way, such as by spell points or “slots.”
But what if it wasn’t that the spell, forcibly impressed on the wizard’s puny human brain, is magically erased when cast, but rather the formula such as the words, gestures and intonation that need to be used are so complex to figure out they require a concordance of astrological and mystical tables and a whole bunch of long-hand calculations such that you have to have your reference book and a fair bit of time to do the calculations before you can next cast the spell? What if you needed to know the exact date you are going to cast the spell to have any hope of solving the formulas and doing the look-ups to succeed. What you’re memorizing is that day’s solution once you’ve calculated it, and you don’t literally forget it, but it’s no longer of any use once you’ve cast the spell (because the formulas also depend on whether you’ve already cast it that day or not). Maybe you can’t just sit down and re-memorize the spell even if you’re carrying the book because doing so at any other time than the specific time in the morning the tables were compiled for is just too complex for mere mortals.
This seems like a good explanation for why the spell-book of a 1st level Magic User with only one spell (if you’re using Basic D&D/OSE by-the-book) is still a hefty tome but a higher level wizard with dozens of spells doesn’t require a library in his backpack. The bulk of the volume is the charts and concordances necessary for all spells, while the specific constants and formulas for any given spell are comparatively slight. That would also explain why a scroll is just a single sheet of paper but that can be enough to add a spell to your book (assuming you’re using that common convention). If you allow Magic Users to keep a spell memorized until they cast it, you could easily tweak the assumption to be that it’s the day that you sit down to memorize the spell that needs to be worked into the calculation, not the day it’s going to be cast.
I kind of like this for a more down-to-Earth explanation of most of the odder features of the traditional D&D spells system. It’s not that I particularly object to spells as alien mental constructs as much as that definitely flavors the world in a particular Dying Earth way, and I don’t always want that flavor in my setting. Now, if you really follow the logic of the rationalization, it does have some implications that are slightly different from the by-the-book traditional method…like you might be able to memorize a spell and keep it around if you did the calculations to be able to cast it on a specific future date. You could, of course, patch that by saying the calculations get too complex more than at most a day in advance, or you could roll with it. Maybe you don’t dare take your spell-book along, but you believe you won’t have to use certain of your spells until you reach your destination three days hence. I think that might be an interesting consideration for a wizard.
1- Turjan being one of Earth’s mightiest magicians in those latter times.
I’ve been rereading the Hobbit, for the first time in maybe thirty years, and I can’t help but be struck by it being possibly the most D&D thing I’ve ever read… including some books that were directly set in D&D worlds. It’s not just the moments where something in the early D&D rules was clearly taken from bits in the book, like “Oh, werebears can summon normal bears because Beorn the skin-changer could” or that the whole bit about intelligence and ego in magic swords probably spun out of the one line about Glamdring being “bright as blue flame for delight in the killing [of the Great Goblin]”, it’s much more fundamental: this is D&D at its core.
This is what a party looks like, even if early accounts are to be believed in the numbers of adventurers: 13 dwarves, a hobbit, and a wizard; this is what motivates them: gold and to a lesser extent adventure, maybe a little bit of back-story; these are the places they go: across dangerous countryside where there is no king or law, through giant spider-infested forests, into subterranean lairs that stretch beneath entire mountain ranges where live goblins and worse, into lost mines inhabited by dragons. But most of all, these are the shenanigans that PC’s get up to: uncovering secret routes on a treasure map; discovering magic swords in a monster’s pile of loot; hiding while giants fight; killing goblins with sword and magic; nearly getting burned alive by clever, ruthless goblins; using rope, grappling hook, and convenient boat to try to solve the puzzle of crossing the creepy magical river; escaping via a hare-brained plan to hide in barrels to float downriver; discovering a secret door that is revealed once a year; running away from a dragon; aid in defeating a dragon through something they discovered while adventuring. Honestly, I could probably pull something from nearly every chapter. And throughout it all, what’s at stake is primarily their survival and whether they’ll actually emerge wealthy at the other end. Despite the presence of a prophecy, they aren’t the destined ones, the fate of the world doesn’t hang in the balance, and while arguably the party’s greed and foolishness after their success semi-accidentally led to a better outcome than if they’d stayed home they are not really the heroes of the Southlands.
Much more than The Lord of The Rings, but also more than the stories of Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, The Hobbit is what it’s all about.
Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree, By caves where never sun has shone, By streams that never find the sea; Over snow by winter sown, And through the merry flowers of June, Over grass and over stone, And under mountains in the moon.
I think when it comes to RPG books, it’s good to have an eclectic mix of art styles in the illustrations. The early D&D books were aces at this, ranging from the actual cartoons of Tom Wham, to the grounded illustrations of Dave Trampier, to the trippy works of Errol Otus. I think this kind of diversity is important because you never know what will strike a chord and provide inspiration for a game. Books that have a very clear “house style”, like some of the later editions of D&D, have a harder time of this, imo. If it hits, it hits, but if it doesn’t there may not be anything in the whole book that really sparks your imagination.
Now some of the time, like maybe a setting guide or something based on some specific IP like StarWars, setting tight boundaries on the tone and imagery might be exactly what you want. But I think in the general case, you want to have the art run the gamut.
Not playing at conventions, but conventions I’ve adopted in my games (mostly regardless of system or genre) to try to shape the play experience to encourage or avoid certain kinds of play at my table. These aren’t house-rules, most of them being meta-rules about what is and isn’t allowed by the GM or the players. Also most of these are guidelines, and might be relaxed on certain occasions or if everybody is agreeable.
No Player-vs-Player action. No attacking other PCs, no stealing from them, no actual intra-party conflict. “Pretend” intra-party conflict, where the players roleplay that their characters are squabbling like Legolas and Gimli, but pull together as a team when the action starts, is fine. But if tempers start to rise, I cut it off. There are a lot of players and groups where this kind of stuff is meat-and-potatoes to them, but I’ve been burned too many times by what’s started out as a bit of fun and escalated until it ruined the game for everybody, so I take a hard line on it now.
No Torture. Torture is something evil NPCs do off-screen to other NPCs, or a player might have as something that happened to their character as part of their back-story, but it never gets any play time. As a corollary, captured NPCs will always spill their guts to the PCs at the slightest encouragement; they may not know much, but I explicitly promise to the players that as GM I will never create a situation where they would be better off torturing a captive for the information they need regardless of how plausible they might find that in real life.
No Using PC’s Attachments Against Them. Unless the player volunteers for it, I promise as GM that if they form bonds or connections with various NPCs and locales, I’m not going to use that for cheap drama or as a way for an NPC villain to compel their cooperation. Yes, that cuts off a bunch of seemingly interesting stories and scenarios, but you know what also cuts off a bunch of interesting RP? Players refusing to form any bonds or connections with any of the setting for fear of having it held hostage or weaponized against them.1
Mercy Works. There’s a thing that some GMs like to do (and I admit I’ve done sometimes in the past) where if you let a bad-guy get away, it’ll come back to haunt you. It’s tempting because recurring villains are a staple of a lot of genre fiction, and the players having a back-story with the villain can be so satisfying, particularly when the players come to really hate the villain. He shows up again and they’re automatically invested. The same thing can happen with un-named mob monsters or bandits, where if you don’t kill them when you have the chance, they’ll just bother you another day. The problem is that players are usually very rational, and very ruthless, so unless you’re enforcing genre conventions that forbid it (e.g. codes against killing in super-hero games) the players learn to leave no living enemies… but that can really mess up the tone of the game, and I think contributes to murder-hoboism. It’s also relatively unrealistic, at least if you go by the history of warfare in our world. There were lots of reasons historically to take captives and not kill them, or to let fleeing soldiers get away, if for no other reason than it stiffens the resolve of the enemy to die rather than be captured but the structure of a lot of games (especially dungeon crawls) makes that difficult to implement. My solution to keep my players from committing war-crimes (or at least reduce their number) is to have the players’ intelligent foes be permanently defeated: if the players show mercy, they will never again oppose them (whether from fear or gratitude) and if the players are generous they might change their allegiance. They explicitly will not be constantly searching for ways to backstab the players. This one is a bit more squishy than the others, because it really depends on what it means to defeat the enemy. If they fail a morale check and rout, then yeah, they might regroup and be a problem later. What I’m really trying to prevent is pushing the players into feeling they have to slaughter helpless captives or go around the battle-field applying a coup de grâce against anybody who might merely be injured or unconscious.
Surrender is an Option. Bad-guys in my games will usually accept surrender, and it doesn’t mean the end of the PC who surrenders. Even for unintelligent monsters I might think about whether it would drag the victim back to its lair to eat later or something. There will usually be consequences, a ransom to be paid, or they’ll have to escape, but I try not to ruin the character for acting reasonably in the face of overwhelming force. At the very least I’d prefer that Death before Surrender! be a choice that says something about the character and not, well the GM is going to kill my character anyway so might as well go down fighting.
Naturally there are exceptions for game/genres where it’s an explicit part of the game; if you’re playing a super-hero game with the concept of a “Dependent NPC” like Aunt Mae who will get into trouble as a complication for the PCs heroic guise, then something happening like her getting engaged to Doc Ock is still on the table.
At the risk of turning this into a blog for commenting on Delta’s blog, here are some thoughts on a post of his back in March about the big error in the infamous Greyhawk and AD&D Weapons vs AC charts.
Basically, Dan observed that there’s a fundamental error in the way the chart was derived from Chainmail to convert it to the d20 “alternative” combat system in original Dungeons and Dragons (specifically the Greyhawk supplement), and that chart was just reproduced and elaborated on in AD&D. The error was in converting Chainmail’s chart showing with this weapon vs. this type of armor roll this number on 2d6 to kill the target into D&D’s roll this on d20 to hit the target, they forgot to adjust for the armor class! Basically, the difficulty of hitting the armor is baked into the Chainmail table, but it’s a completely separate consideration in OD&D, so that e.g. in Chainmail a mace has pretty much the same chance of killing regardless of armor (roll 8 or better), that’s presented in Greyhawk as a mace has no bonus vs. any particular armor so the mace gets worse and worse chance of hitting as armor gets better! Oopsie.
So what would a “correct” version of the Weapon vs. AC chart for Greyhawk look like? That is, one that preserves the logic worked into the Chainmail chart as to which weapons are better against which armors, which seem to have at least rough approximation of what weapons historically were preferred against which prevailing types of armor.
The Chainmail Man-to-Man combat chart looks like this:
Armor Class
No Armor
Leather
Shield
Leather+ Shield
Chain
Chain+ Shield
Plate
Plate+ Shield
Weapon
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
Dagger
6
7
8
8
9
10
12
12
Hand Axe
7
7
8
9
10
10
11
12
Mace
8
8
8
9
8
8
7
8
Sword
7
8
8
9
8
9
10
11
Battle Axe
8
8
8
8
7
7
9
10
Morn. Star
6
6
7
7
6
7
8
8
Flail
7
7
7
7
6
7
6
7
Spear
8
8
9
9
10
10
11
12
Pole arms
6
6
6
7
7
8
9
10
Halbard
8
8
8
7
6
6
7
8
2 Hnd. Swd
6
6
6
6
5
5
6
7
Mtd. Lance
5
5
5
5
6
7
8
9
Pike
8
8
8
8
8
8
9
10
Chainmail Man-to-Man combat
The first thing we have to deal with is all the target numbers in this chart represent kills; in Chainmail there were no hit-points or variable weapon damages. So this chart represents both the deadliness of the weapon and its ability to penetrate various types of armor.
What I’m going to do is assume that the relative deadliness of the weapon is represented by the target number vs. unarmored men, while the penetration ability of the weapon vs the various armors is thus the difference between its “normal” ability to kill an unarmored man and its lessened ability to kill armored men. This normalization gives the following chart of how much worse a weapon is against the various ACs relative to its ability to kill an unarmored man; we’ll presume that in D&D that ability to kill an unarmored man is represented by the weapon damage, from d4 to d12 or whatever.
Armor Class
No Armor
Leather
Shield
Leather+ Shield
Chain
Chain+ Shield
Plate
Plate+ Shield
Weapon
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
Dagger
0
-1
-2
-2
-3
-4
-6
-6
Hand Axe
0
0
-1
-2
-3
-3
-4
-5
Mace
0
0
0
-1
0
0
1
0
Sword
0
-1
-1
-2
-1
-2
-3
-4
Battle Axe
0
0
0
0
1
1
-1
-2
Morn. Star
0
0
-1
-1
0
-1
-2
-2
Flail
0
0
0
0
1
0
1
0
Spear
0
0
-1
-1
-2
-2
-3
-4
Pole arms
0
0
0
-1
-1
-2
-3
-4
Halbard
0
0
0
1
2
2
1
0
2 Hnd. Swd
0
0
0
0
1
1
0
-1
Mtd. Lance
0
0
0
0
-1
-2
-3
-4
Pike
0
0
0
0
0
0
-1
-2
Normalized
So here we see the relative values of armor against a given weapon. Against a mace, no armor really helps, though leather + shield is a tiny bit better than unarmored and plate is a tiny bit worse. Swords, though, quickly become ineffective against heavier armors, which take a two-handed sword to punch through. Mounted lances and spears are almost completely ineffective against plate + shield combination. This all seems plausibly historically accurate.
Finally, though, we have to convert this to d20, taking into account the way armor class is worked into the target number to hit on a d20 (the crucial step the author(s) of that section of Greyhawk forgot). This yields the following chart of modifiers that preserve the penetrating power of weapons from the Chainmail rules:
Armor Class
No Armor
Leather
Shield
Leather+ Shield
Chain
Chain+ Shield
Plate
Plate+ Shield
Weapon
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
Dagger
0
0
0
1
1
1
0
1
Hand Axe
0
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
Mace
0
1
2
2
4
5
7
7
Sword
0
0
1
1
3
3
3
3
Battle Axe
0
1
2
3
5
6
5
5
Morn. Star
0
1
1
2
4
4
4
5
Flail
0
1
2
3
5
5
7
7
Spear
0
1
1
2
2
3
3
3
Pole arms
0
1
2
2
3
3
3
3
Halbard
0
1
2
4
6
7
7
7
2 Hnd. Swd
0
1
2
3
5
6
6
6
Mtd. Lance
0
1
2
3
3
3
3
3
Pike
0
1
2
3
4
5
5
5
Weapon vs Armor Adjustment Corrected
And here we see, as intended, against an unarmored foe a 1st level Fighting Man armed with a mace would need to roll a 10 to hit, and against somebody with plate + shield would need… a 10 to hit. (To Hit of 17 from the Men Attacking Matrix in original D&D, with a bonus on the roll of +7) Armed with a dagger he’d need the same 10 to hit an unarmored man, but a 16 vs plate armor + shield.
Is it worth it? Frankly, I have my doubts. If Gygax himself never bothered with it, it’s hard to see the added complication of the table lookup every time you switch weapons or foes (assuming they’re not all equipped identically) adds that much. On the other hand, it is kind of logical that you ought to prefer the weapons that were historically favored against particularly heavy armors. One thing that is clear to me, though, is that if you want to have that kind of mechanic in your game you’re better off starting with the Chainmail assumptions and not their mistranslation.
Dan Collins of Delta’s D&D Hotspot has a new post on what he calls “Cleaving Through the Ages”, where he goes into the history of making multiple attacks against low-level foes through every edition of D&D, as well as the pre-history in Chainmail. And an exhaustive round-up it is, too. Without repeating it here, the basic idea is that ever since Chainmail, every edition has had some variant of a rule that allowed Fighters (and usually only Fighters) to plow through multiple opponents in a round. Among other observations, this turns out to be an important balancing factor in very early editions between the PCs and the huge numbers, into the hundreds, of 1 Hit Die enemies they might encounter in the wilderness according to the standard encounter charts. In Chainmail and OD&D, a heroic figure could attack as many 1 Hit Die enemies as the hero had Hit Dice (more or less, you can see Dan’s post for the gory details), potentially eliminating them all at once.
Later editions tended to tone it down, and often made it contingent upon success: If you hit the enemy and you killed the enemy, then you could immediately try to hit another adjacent enemy until you either failed to kill one or ran out of enemies. It’s this version that’s usually called “Cleave” in D&D and its kin. Personally I like the name “Sweep” since that’s what we used to call it back in the day.
There are a couple of problems with this, but for me the biggest one has always been it just takes too long to resolve at the table. One PC getting multiple actions on a turn always has the potential to make things drag, and it’s exacerbated when there’s potentially a big disparity in the number of actions. An 8th-level fighter getting 8 attacks vs a wizard’s one (maybe) spell can drag on, and making it so that they have to be resolved in order and you have to determine for each attack how much damage it did and whether that kills the foe before making the next attack and then updating the HP on the final foe makes the worst case even worse, even if often it’ll cut the round short before every last foe is attacked.
On the other hand, something along those lines has been part of every edition of D&D and really is needed to let the fighter’s keep up with the later-game area-of-effect spells that casters get. Carving through hordes of creatures one per round is for the birds.
So what should we do? My favored approach is to look all the way back to Chainmail, where you just roll one d6 per the PC’s hit dice and if you hit the appropriate target number you eliminate the foe. Against 1 HD foes this is pretty justifiable: in OD&D all weapons do 1d6 so the average will exactly kill a 1 HD enemy. You can roll them all at once, count the successes, and cross off or remove that many foes, so minimal book-keeping. If, as seems reasonable, when you’re using variable damage dice for weapons you say you can’t cleave with a small weapon (i.e. no d4 weapons), then it’s at least 50-50 that any hit kills, and more likely than not if you have any Strength or magic bonuses at all.
But how does that stack up against the normal (aka “alternative”) combat system using d20s to hit? I mean, you could roll a fistful of d20s and count successes whenever you got better than 15, 16, or whatever based on the foe’s armor class, but that seems…a bit fiddly? What would it look like if you wanted to use d6 for that, like the good old days? Would it be that different?
As it turns out, no. Take a look at the following chart, showing what an ordinary man with no bonuses needs to hit the various armor classes (for simplicity using Dan’s Target-20 system)1.
AC
Armor
To hit on d20
To Hit on d6
THD6 rounded
THD6 truncated
The Heck with Shields
2
plate + shield
18
6
6
6
6
3
plate
17
5.67
6
5
6
4
chain + shield
16
5.33
5
5
5
5
chain
15
5
5
5
5
6
leather + shield
14
4.67
5
4
4
7
leather
13
4.33
4
4
4
8
shield
12
4
4
4
3
9
unarmored
11
3.67
4
3
3
Roll needed for a 1 Hit Kill
If you divide it by three to reduce the max needed 18 to a 6, you get the To Hit on d6 column. Then, depending on whether you round or truncate that result you get some pretty easy to understand patterns. Either plate needs a 6, chain needs a 5, anything less needs a 4, or only plate and shield needs a 6, combos down to chain needs a 5, down to naked is 4, and naked is 3. A final option is to fudge it and say we don’t care about shields: Plate 6, Chain 5, Leather 4, Unarmored 3. I’m a little bit torn between saying come on, at least pick up a shield and saying chain and plate really ought to be different, but in the end any of these seems perfectly workable since it’ll be really rare to have a situation where the 1 HD foes have mixed kits. Most likely you just write down the single target number for the whole lot of them and you’re done with it.
So that’s my current plan for handling Cleaving/Sweeps in all the D&D-like games I run. Against 1 HD foes (or likely against any foes where your average damage is a 1 Hit kill) just roll d6s against the target number based on their armor and sweep them off the board.
Justification for this, if needed, comes from the fact that at least the earliest versions specified that the attacks were carried out using the normal man row of the table, and that in any case allowing for both multiple attacks and bonuses to the attacks is a form of double-dipping.
One thing I tend to do in D&D-esque games is treat the Strength attribute as indicating size as well. (Other games, such as Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing and its kin have a separate Size attribute.) It seems to me, though, that there’s a bunch of pretty good arguments that the two are at least highly correlated, if not one and the same.
In most combat sports, from boxing and wrestling to taekwondo, as well as sheer strength-based sports like weight lifting, competitors are divided into weight classes for both health and safety reasons as well as to make the competitions more fair (and interesting). The average winner of the World’s Strongest Man competition stands 6′ 4″ and weighs in at 390 pounds!
Moreover, at least in the earliest editions of D&D starting with Supplement I Greyhawk, the two biggest mechanical differences from exceptionally high or low strength scores are to-hit, damage, and carrying capacity. To-hit I think makes perfect sense as reach, which is a huge factor in hand-to-hand combat, as does damage as function of mass (again thinking about weight classes in combat sports). Carrying capacity is a little less clear, in that the additional weight of your body seems to count against your maximum carrying capacity, at least over distances1, but since the bonuses tend to be linear while body weight increases exponentially, I call it good enough for D&D.
As a quick approximation for human, you can look up Strength in the following chart. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to apply adjustments for non-humans, and of course you might decide that any particular character is a bit bigger or smaller than the chart indicates. 2 Or you might decide (as my long-time Friday night GM did) to just roll size separately on 3d6.
Distribution of Body Weight and Height . It’s actually pretty hard to look up data on raw weights instead of BMI, and I’m not particularly confident that the standard deviations in weights correlate exactly with standard deviations in height as the chart would indicate, but whaddaya want for nothing?
For the first Gygax Day, back in 2008, I wanted to try running a one-shot purely Old School D&D adventure in his honor. I didn’t have a copy of OD&D, so I ended up using the Mentzer Basic and a free dungeon that had a good reputation that had been put together by the folks on the Dragonsfoot forums.
It did not go well.
Basically, I had lost all my chops at running D&D, and had not yet steeped myself in the wisdom of the OSR and identifying what was good about the old school way. Despite the fact that I had in days gone by been part of that Old School, my expectations as to what the rules would cover and wouldn’t and my habits of DMing had changed so much over the intervening years that the whole thing was incredibly awkward. The players were frustrated by not having skill checks to rely on to interpret the world, that the dungeon seemed so arbitrary, that they didn’t have their usual ability to craft the characters and backstory for roleplaying opportunities. Most of the players had started playing with Vampire: The Masquerade, or even later, so they didn’t have any nostalgia or even knowledge of the older styles of play. I was frustrated that I couldn’t really keep the momentum of the game up, there were too many times when I thought I had to look something up and it turned out there wasn’t a rule for it, or there was but not where I expected, or it didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t help that I had gotten it into my head that I really wanted to try it “rules as written” instead of just winging something that was inspired by those old dungeon crawls that I remembered fondly.
After that one-shot they were pretty much done with that. I still felt there was something that I was missing; I knew that even if D&D wasn’t everything you could want in an RPG, back when we played D&D regularly it was tense and exciting. It certainly shouldn’t have been boring. It was around then that I began reading a bunch of blogs that focused on old-school play, especially Grognardia and Jeff’s Gameblog.
I began thinking a lot about Old School play, and what I could take from it, and what we had the most fun with back then. It was also around then, maybe a bit before, that my friend Mac’s kids were old enough to be interested in playing D&D (in her household, all RPGs were “D&D”… she’s the DM of the AD&D campaign I mentioned before, that had been running since she was in high school). Playing as a player with them, and later as a DM, let me see thing from a fresh perspective, with players brand new to role playing, including my then new bride, who played with us and had even less exposure to RPGs than the kids had. Seeing them play, and contrasting how confusing my wife had been finding the much more open-ended and free-form RPGs that she’d been trying with my regular group with the much more structured play and environment of Mac’s dungeon-delves, and how things suddenly “clicked” for her gave me a healthy new respect for the “outmoded” design choices of Old School Dungeons and Dragons. Limiting the new player’s choice when creating a character to what class given your randomly rolled stats was brilliant compared to “What do you want to play? we can help you design anything!” Ditto for leveling up. Constraining the decisions you need to make when interacting with the environment initially to things like “do you want to go left towards where you hear the noise of growling, or right towards where you see the cobwebs?” really helped my wife in particular understand her “role” in making decisions for her character, where analogies to improv theater or storytelling left her confused and timid about not “making a mistake” regardless of how many times the other players had reassured her that there was no wrong answer to the question “what do you do next?”
Over the next few years I continued to toy around with D&D-related OSR stuff, mostly in as a player in on-line campaigns, or running games using Michael Curtis’ Stonehell dungeon for the kids. I was fiddling a lot with different retro-clone rulesets or kitbashing my own, because there always seemed to be things that just didn’t sit right with me with how these versions of D&D worked… I could play in them or even run them and have fun, but they always seemed like compromises between what I would have preferred running and what the players I was with wanted and expected.
Eventually 5th Edition came out, and my home group tried that with the Mines of Phandelver; it was reasonably fun, but I could see it would be a lot of work to GM as characters went up in level and got more and more abilities that the GM would have to pretty thoroughly understand. Maybe not as bad as the days of the old 3e “splat-books” where selling new game-bending rules and feats for the players to bring into the game became the business model, but way more than my ideal of being able to hold more-or-less everything in my head to run without having to look up rules at the table. When the party TPK’ed in the last session in the Mines, I was actually planning to keep running 5e, but we took a quick break to run a DCC adventure and all the players liked that more so the Out of the Abyss campaign I was planning for the TPK’ed party (they had mostly fallen to 0, not been killed outright) never got off the ground.
Fast forward to the present, where thanks to the pandemic we have to play online and I’m actually running the group through The Mines of Phandelver again. Originally I planned to call it Re:Phandelver and make use of the trope where the protagonist(s) fail at the end and then somehow wake up back in the past as their younger selves, but with all their memories of how things played out in the original timeline intact. Except it turned out none of them actually remembered what had happened when we played through the first time, not even which characters they’d played… so instead we’re doing in straight. The online tools really help with running the game, and using Roll20 with the maps and dynamic lighting is different and interesting. I can still foresee a time when the complication of high-level 5e play may wear me down, but hopefully this whole social distancing thing will be over before we reach that point.
The next phase of my involvement with D&D came decades later, barring a terrible AD&D campaign a friend of mine ran in college that I only participated in for a month or two, around the year 2000 when I started playing a heavily-house-ruled version of AD&D after I move to Pennsylvania, with a friend who’d been playing that same homebrew campaign-world since she was in high-school. She was one of those DMs who did all the rolling, and the the players were never sure what the rules actually were beyond what was on the character sheet. While I really loved getting together with these friends every week, I was actually kind of relieved on the weeks when we played board-games instead. The almost exclusive emphasis on dungeon crawling through fun-house dungeons, with turn-by-turn foot-by-foot mapping and minimal interaction between characters was pretty much everything I disliked in D&D. Eventually I learned to find the fun in it, mostly by trying to make each character memorable and distinct despite having basically no customization other than choosing a class (even race was restricted by a random roll for place of origin). Once her kids had all gone off to college we played D&D very rarely, though we still got together every Friday until the pandemic hit.
When Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition was released, originally, I wasn’t much interested. I felt I had moved on from D&D, and a lot of what I liked in RPGs I viewed as being in opposition to the design of D&D. Eventually, though I picked up a copy just to see what everybody was talking about, and while I wasn’t smitten with it, it did seem to be a significantly more “modern” design as far as character customization and detailed resolution went. I wasn’t going to immediately switch my home group over to it, but around 2005 I was open to running it online for some friends who were interested in trying it and were having trouble finding local gamers.
This was in the long, long ago before there was anything like Roll 20 or Fantasy Grounds, but I found a (now discontinued) program called ScreenMonkey from NBos that promised to be at least a step up from playing purely over AIM or irc, and we gave it a whirl. That campaign actually lasted almost three years, and was set in the Forgotten Realms. Eventually what made me tire of it was exactly that… I really didn’t know or care much about Forgotten Realms, but some players were very into it, which is why they’d asked for an FR campaign in the first place. There wasn’t any blow up, but the mismatch between the effort it took to provide them with what they were looking for each week and how much I enjoyed running FR-based materials created entirely from scratch caused me to put it on hiatus that became permanent.
Meanwhile at some point my home group *did* switch over to playing 3e, at least as one of the games in our rotation, mostly because my friend Russell liked it and my group really liked his GMing and the setting he’d created. We had some really fun and memorable adventures, but I eventually noticed that the crunch was a real drag on the players as they leveled up. It got to the point where when they reached a new level, they just handed their character sheets over to Doug, our rules monkey, to do all the grunt work leveling them up. When Russell’s job stopped being bi-coastal, the once a month game turned into once-in-a-blue-moon, and that was pretty much it for our 3e experience.
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers 