The Alexandrian

OD&D - Volume 2Last year I began a series of posts regarding my reactions to the original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Recently a post on Delta’s D&D Hotspot tweaked me to comment on one of the issues I didn’t discuss in the original series: The timekeeping and movement rules.

Here’s the most pertinent passage from Volume 3: Underworld & Wilderness Adventures:

THE MOVE/TURN IN THE UNDERWORLD:

In the underworld all distances are in feet, so wherever distances are given in inches convert them to tens of feet.

Movement (distances given in Vol. 1) is in segments of approximately ten minutes. Thus it takes ten minutes to move about two moves — 120 feet for a fully-armored character. Two moves constitute a turn, except in flight/pursuit situations where the moves/turn will be doubled (and no mapping allowed).

[…]

Melee is fast and furious. There are ten rounds of combat per turn.

I have now introduced close to two dozen people to the OD&D rules. This almost always involves walking them through the major cruxes of the rules, but even in cases where a more rapid acclimation is called for, I still make a point of reading this passage to them: That way they can fully appreciate the archaeological reconstruction of the rulebooks necessary to actually play this game.

What can we conclude from this passage?

2 moves = 4 flight/pursuit moves = 1 turn = 1 segment = 10 rounds = 10 minutes

The fact that “turn” and “segment” are used interchangeably is somewhat confusing, but what makes the passage really tricky is that they actually aren’t used interchangeably. If you can move the “distance given in Vol. 1” in one segment of 10 minutes, what does it mean that you can also make two moves in a turn of 10 minutes?

Making this even more confusing is the phrase “120 feet for a fully-armored character”. The phrase “fully-armored” means absolutely nothing in the context of the rules and the default speed for a character is 12″ = 120 feet. So if you interpret that passage to mean that a character with a 12″ movement moves 120 feet in two moves that take 1 turn, then it follows that a “move” (in the context of this passage, anyway) actually equals 1/2 the character’s speed. Which would mean that:

1 move = 1 segment = 0.5 turns

But that’s probably not what it means. What “fully-armored” probably means is the “speed of an Armored Footman (6″/turn) which is referenced as part of an example in Volume 1. (Which is not, actually, the speed of a character fully-armored character unless they’re also carrying a bunch of other equipment. Unless, of course, you decide to interpret this example as a new rule that actually implies that armor alone — separate from weight carried — can affect the speed of a character.).

But that still doesn’t clear up how:

1 segment = 1 move = 10 minutes

and

1 turn = 2 moves = 10 minutes

Can both be true. (They obviously can’t.)

MOVE TURNS vs. MELEE TURNS

But we’re not done yet.

Although the title of this section as it appears on page 8 of Volume 3 is THE MOVE/TURN IN THE UNDERWORLD, on the table of contents for this volume it appears as “The Move Turn in the Underworld”.

This separate coining of the phrase “move turn” could probably be safely ignored, if it wasn’t for Supplement 1: Greyhawk. In this supplement, Gygax casually introduces the term “melee turn”. For example, on page 6 the duration of the Monster Summoning I spell is listed as: “Duration: 6 melee turns”.

Furthrmore, on page 18 of Supplement 1, giant snakes are given damage of “2-8/turn of constriction”. The use of the term “turn” here can’t possibly mean 10 minutes, can it?

TURNS vs. FULL TURNS

And then we come to Supplement 2: Blackmoor, which was written by Dave Arneson. On page 1, in describing the abilities of monks, he writes: “…has a 75% chance of stunning the opponent for from 3-12 turns”. Much like the giant snake from Supplement 1, it seems unlikely that Arneson means that the monk can stun opponents for 30 to 120 minutes.

And this suspicion seems confirmed when, on the next page, he writes that 5th level monks can “perfectly simulate death” for a duration of time equal to “a six sided die x level for the number of full turns”.

Should we interpret “full turn” to mean something different than “turn” from the previous page? Context certainly seems to suggest it.

It’s therefore tempting, I think, to suggest that Arneson was using “turn vs. full turn” in the same sense that Gygax was using “round vs. turn” or “melee turn vs. move turn”.

If this were actually the case, it would go a long way towards explaining why this terminology is so hopelessly confused in OD&D: You had at least two different authors using the term “turn” with at least two completely inverted meanings.

Perhaps the central crux can be found when we hit Arneson’s description of the giant squid (page16): “Squids tire easily; there is a 50% chance that they will withdraw after three rounds of melee, with a 5% increase each turn thereafter.”

Here Arneson displays knowledge of the term “round”, but does his use of the term “turn” in immediate juxtaposition indicate that he’s using the terms interchangeably? To my eyes it seems almost certain, but perhaps others would disagree.

NO METHOD IN THE MADNESS

But perhaps I’m simply trying to impose rationality onto something which is fundamentally irrational. There’s certainly a fair degree of evidence that Arneson and Gygax simply used the term “turn” to mean whatever the hell they felt like it should mean. For example, on page 43 of Blackmoor:

There is a 1 in 6 chance that when entering passages marked with a dashed line or when crossing one of the bridges that 1-3 trolls will be encountered. Any fighting will bring an additional 1-3 trolls every turn the fight exists.

Arneson surely can’t have meant that 1d3 new trolls should endlessly show up every single round, right? There’s no way such a combat could ever end.

Similarly, on page 18 of Volume 3 we can read as part of the rules for large party movement:

Turn: Each move will constitute one day. Each day is considered a turn.

Which is, at the very least, suggestive that they considered “turn” to be a useful catch-all phrase and that its proper meaning is supposed to be intuited from context. (For another example of the same, consider dungeon levels, character levels, and spell levels.)

And all of this analysis ignores that neither Gygax nor Arneson were the sole authors contributing to the supplements.

HOW I PLAY

Every so often I’ll see someone praise the “elegance” or “simplicity” of OD&D. Whenever that happens, I think about passages like this and I laugh and laugh and laugh.

Here’s how we’ve been playing these rules:

1 turn = 10 minutes = 10 rounds = 2 moves

1 segment = 5 minutes = 1 move

(This matches the definition of “segment” to mean 1 move, but obviously contradicts the definition of “segment” to mean 10 minutes. We picked this interpretation because having a second term synonymous with turn didn’t seem useful, but there’s potential utility in having a term that means basically “half a turn” or possibly “an interrupted turn”.)

Speed is defined in inches according to the encumbrance table (which has its own interpretative issues, but let’s ignore those for now):

1 move = speed x 10 feet

1 turn = 2 moves = speed x 20 feet

Running = double speed

Now comes the tricky question of how far you can move in a single round. The logic here seems pretty clear: A round is 1/10th the length of a turn, ergo you can move 1/10th as far. Which mean that total movement in a round is:

1 round of combat = speed x 2 feet

In practice, we say that people get two moves per round (just as you get two moves per turn), so:

1 round = 2 combat moves = speed x 2 feet

1 combat move = speed in feet

Further, we concluded that you could either move twice or move and attack, because why else would the rules give you two smaller moves instead of just one big move? There must be some reason why you can split them up like that. As an alternative solution, we briefly played with the idea of giving each player two “actions” which they could either use to move or attack, but eventually decided against it.)

How have others interpreted these rules?

HOLMES: Holmes’s revision/clean-up of the rules in 1977 used the same values for turn-based movement. But he radically revised combat. The 1977 Basic Set states, “Each turn is ten minutes except during combat where there are ten melee rounds per turn, each round lasting ten seconds.” (Or is that not a revision after all? Assuming that there’s a “combat turn” which lasts for one minute and is divided up into 10 rounds of 6 seconds each would be another way of resolving the inconsistent use of the term “turn” in the OD&D manuals and supplements.) This has a minimal impact on how far characters can move in a single round, but the exact values are no longer calculable from the base values: “Movement (if any) is usually at a sprint; an unarmored man can move 20 feet per melee round, a fully armored man only 10 feet.”

SWORDS & WIZARDRY: This retro clone of OD&D oddly chooses to explicitly contradict the OD&D movement rules by stating that a walking character (traveling at speed x 20 feet) cannot map or observe their surroundings carefully. It instead creates a new half-speed category where mapping is permitted. It also fails to provide any clarification of whether or not one can move and attack in a single combat round. It defines walking speed in a round as being equal to 1/10th walking speed in a turn, but it also defines a “combat” movement rate equal to 1/20th the walking speed in a turn (which would be equivalent to 1 combat move in my interpretation above).

(Looking through both Swords & Wizardry and Swords & Wizardry: White Box, I’m actually really surprised at how many rules they just make up out of wholecloth. Even more surprising are the number of rules which are just flat-out wrong. I often talk about how open to interpretation the OD&D rules, but S&W routinely ignores the stuff that isn’t open for interpretation. And even some of the stuff that is open to interpretation is instead rendered in some completely different way lying far outside the gray area of the original rules. I just always assumed that the retro clones would look more like clones and less like cousins.)

Back to Reactions to OD&D

3 Responses to “Reactions to OD&D – Turns, Rounds, and Segments… Oh My!”

  1. Justin Alexander says:

    ARCHIVED HALOSCAN COMMENTS

    Dave Cesarano
    I’ve always tried to make each dungeon I run a realistic environment. This means that I try to utilize game mechanics only as a tool of resolution or when something should be absolutely left to chance. Hence, I try to make each dungeon a place where noises carry, and if a fight breaks out, shouts for help will alert allies within the vicinity. I don’t give XP for treasure so much–that, I believe, fits more in a game where the players are detached from the world. I prefer immersive games, where treasure is actually its own reward because between adventures, spending the wealth in town is played out in character (buying and furnishing houses, drinking and wenching, having jewelry or clothing made, etc.–I’ve heard of a PC even running for mayor). I’ve also tried to roleplay the limitations of certain items. Have you ever realistically tried to carry a 10′ pole around indoors or up stairwells?

    I like wandering monsters, but I always prefer role-playing-intensive games with puzzle-solving and few (but deadly) encounters. I think the only times I run combat-heavy games are when I run Conan D20.

    I guess it depends on what your focus is. When people play OD&D, the focus is, by default, on exploring the dungeon environment. I prefer the focus to be on the world–it’s a different sort of exploration. It’s just my style. I can play as a character in OD&D games and have lots of fun, but it really isn’t my DM style.
    Monday, July 12, 2010, 5:53:42 PM


    Dave Cesarano
    This is one of the reasons I can’t run OD&D. Though I respect the Old School Renaissance, frustrating things like that, which are actually quite simple to handle normally, are presented in a confusing and frustrating manner. I remember when I started playing Palladium, and was thrilled to hear that each combat turn was 1 minute, broken into 10 rounds of 6 seconds each, and each melee attack literally represented one swing your character got (the more melees, the more swings per round). While that might seem complicated, compared to the obscurity and contradictions in the D&D books (which all but demanded house-rulings), this actually seemed simple and straightforward. OD&D is very much a game where the players are always fully aware that they’re just playing. I like it, but I rarely (if ever) find myself immersed in an OD&D game the way I would get immersed in later 2nd ed. AD&D games, or 3.X games. You’re always too aware of the mechanical features of OD&D to be able to really just slip into the game world.
    Sunday, July 11, 2010, 4:10:27 PM


    Justin Alexander
    It’s interesting reading this because my own experiences with OD&D are divergent. On the one hand, part of our experience at the table has been explicitly an exploration of a game document. Walking through the vagaries of character creation is part of the experience at our OD&D table, and it’s fun in a way that’s very analogous to the SCA or a RenFest: We are self-consciously recreating an historical epoch.

    On the other hand, part of that exploration for us has been a hard-coding of our own personal interpretation of the ruleset. When we run into a contradiction, we resolve it. So we enjoy each contradiction as an exploration of an historical document, but once it’s resolved we play with a consistent and non-intrusive ruleset. (In some cases, the version we hard-code has varied from session to session and play-group to play-group.)

    On the gripping hand, some of the mechanics in the game have been kind of revelatory. For example, I’ll almost certainly be adopting the concept that traps only trigger 1 in 6 or 1 in 4 times a character passes the trigger into my 3rd Edition games. (Not for every trap, but certainly for some of them.) Not only does it vary the target area for traps away from the lead scout, it also provides an elegant defusing of the “tap with a 10′ pole” solution to the pit trap problem (in which pit traps become a non-factor once the players discover 10′ poles). I’m also very fascinated by the effect that treasure-as-XP has on the dungeon crawling experience (encouraging players to avoid combat), particularly in combination with the high rate of wandering monsters (1 in 6 chance per turn, with a turn only covering a couple hundred feet of movement). It forces focus, discourages “strip the dungeon bare” play, and requires the players to push into the dungeon as an active complex.

    Note sure it means I’ll be using treasure-for-XP rules in 3rd edition, but there’s been some valuable lesson-learning in there. (And wandering monsters have already returned to my toolkit.)
    Monday, July 12, 2010, 1:03:47 AM


    Guest
    I think the source of the confusion in the original text (and hence eyour confusion) is that the term “turn” here has its roots in the turns of ordinary games — during a “turn” everybody gets to act. In other words fo ran RPG the “turn” is an artefcat of the simulation, and its length varies according to the way time (and space — see below) is discretized at any given moment.

    Just like numerical simulation of differential equations, during the game it is advantageous to vary the “time step”. During overland movement the “time step” is one day. In other words, during each “turn” of the game [think monopoly] each player gets to describe what his character will do for the day. Then, unless something unexpected happens which needs to be simulated on a finer time-scale, the DM will resolve the actions for the day, and then the next turn will take place on the next day.

    During underground movement the unit is 10 minutes, and during combat it is 1 minute, because we want to “zoom in” and see the action on this level of detail.

    Finally, there is a connection between time and space. If you only care about what happened on the time scale of one day, you also only care about geographical features that are large enough to matter during a day’s travel — villages, mountains, desert watering holes — but not about geographical features that are too small (small streams in a river delta).

    This explains why movement rate is specified in “inches” of map distance. Ths idea is that you have physical figurines moving on a map — and the scale of the map and the length of the turn are such that so many inches of the map correspond to how far the character can move in one turn. During overland movement, you want to be moving on a map where 12″ on the map are roughly how far a man can walk in a day. Such a map will show features that are relevant for coarse-grained simulation. During combat you want a much finer grid for the simulation — both in time (make decisions minute-by-minute) and in space (12″ on the map represent how far you can move during a combat round — and note that there are 1440 1-minute combat rounds per day).

    My guess is that at the start they used “turn” to simply mean that everyone got to do one thing. Later they started using different terms for turns that represented different game-time spans. The terminology was still divergent — each edition assigned different lengths to “turn”, “round” and “segment”. For example, AD&D has a 24-hour “day”, a 10-minute “turn”, a 1-minute “round” and a 6-second “segment”, but some version of TSR D&D had a 10-second “combat round”.
    Friday, July 09, 2010, 10:34:04 PM


    Lior
    Sorry — forgot to put my name on the post above.
    Friday, July 09, 2010, 10:34:46 PM


    Guest
    I think the source of the confusion in the original text (and hence eyour confusion) is that the term “turn” here has its roots in the turns of ordinary games — during a “turn” everybody gets to act. In other words fo ran RPG the “turn” is an artefcat of the simulation, and its length varies according to the way time (and space — see below) is discretized at any given moment.

    Just like numerical simulation of differential equations, during the game it is advantageous to vary the “time step”. During overland movement the “time step” is one day. In other words, during each “turn” of the game [think monopoly] each player gets to describe what his character will do for the day. Then, unless something unexpected happens which needs to be simulated on a finer time-scale, the DM will resolve the actions for the day, and then the next turn will take place on the next day.

    During underground movement the unit is 10 minutes, and during combat it is 1 minute, because we want to “zoom in” and see the action on this level of detail.

    Finally, there is a connection between time and space. If you only care about what happened on the time scale of one day, you also only care about geographical features that are large enough to matter during a day’s travel — villages, mountains, desert watering holes — but not about geographical features that are too small (small streams in a river delta).

    This explains why movement rate is specified in “inches” of map distance. Ths idea is that you have physical figurines moving on a map — and the scale of the map and the length of the turn are such that so many inches of the map correspond to how far the character can move in one turn. During overland movement, you want to be moving on a map where 12″ on the map are roughly how far a man can walk in a day. Such a map will show features that are relevant for coarse-grained simulation. During combat you want a much finer grid for the simulation — both in time (make decisions minute-by-minute) and in space (12″ on the map represent how far you can move during a combat round — and note that there are 1440 1-minute combat rounds per day).

    My guess is that at the start they used “turn” to simply mean that everyone got to do one thing. Later they started using different terms for turns that represented different game-time spans. The terminology was still divergent — each edition assigned different lengths to “turn”, “round” and “segment”. For example, AD&D has a 24-hour “day”, a 10-minute “turn”, a 1-minute “round” and a 6-second “segment”, but some version of TSR D&D had a 10-second “combat round”.
    Friday, July 09, 2010, 10:33:59 PM


    Justin Alexander
    My own personal relationship with wandering monsters basically has four stages:

    (1) I used ’em because the core rulebooks and adventure modules had ’em.

    (2) I turned my nose up at ’em because RPGs were about telling stories and wandering monsters were somehow anathema to that.

    (3) When I came back to D&D with 3rd Edition, I developed an “active complex” system for managing NPCs in buildings, dungeons, and similar complexes. (It’s nothing terribly complex: NPCs that will never leave their current locations are listed in the key. All other NPCs are NOT listed in the key, and are instead listed on a master location chart. Using the master location chart I can use a small map of the complex behind the screen along with counters to track the movement of all NPC groups in real-time.)

    (4) With Caverns of Thracia I’ve kind of rediscovered wandering monster tables as a unique tool. They allow for the simulation of highly active, living complexes with an incredibly minimal overhead. Are there cultist pilgrims visiting the ceremonial temples today? Is there a hunting part of beastmen heading to the surface from the lower levels? Do any lizardmen guards find the PCs lurking in the hallway while they’re prodding for secret doors? Properly designed wandering monster tables can answer all of these questions on-the-fly.

    I haven’t abandoned my “active complex” system of prep, either. There are situations where it’s still the best tool for the job. But I’ve found it’s really nice to put the random encounter tables back into my toolkit, because they are very effective at achieving effects which would be overly-difficult to achieve in any other way.
    Monday, July 12, 2010, 9:44:45 PM

  2. Dan Dare says:

    An interesting thing about mapping, its a compensation for not actually being there and being able to engage and visually remember stuff about your locations, and distances and layouts.

    Not allowing mapping might be realistic if you were talking about real pen and paper maps but player mapping is a surrogate for the experience.

  3. CountingWizard says:

    I believe segment may refer to the part of the turn in which actions occur. It’s a Chainmail reference; since Chainmail is the framework for the sequence of play.

    1. Initiative Segment
    2. Player 1 Move Segment
    3. Player 2 Move Segment
    3. Artillery Fire Segment
    4. Missile Fire Segment
    5. Melee Segment

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