In a recent comment exchange with jdh417 regarding (Re-)Running the Megadungeon, I spoke about wandering monster encounters in OD&D:

Practical experiment: OD&D says there’s a 1 in 6 chance of a wandering monster every 10 minutes in the dungeon. There’s only a 1 in 6 chance chance per day outside of the dungeon. Try following those rules strictly for a few sessions. You don’t even have to tell your players what you’re doing: They will find a way to get out of the dungeon.

(In practice, my OD&D game has dropped back to a 1 in 10 chance per turn. And, as I noted, this will drop even further if they’ve cleared a section of the dungeon. I’ll also reduce check rates if they’ve secured themselves or hidden themselves in some way, allowing for potential “camp in the dungeon overnight” scenarios. But I think the only way for a megadungeon to work is if the players can never feel completely safe while they’re inside it.)

But in quickly re-checking the OD&D rules for wandering monsters in the wilderness in order to make sure my memory was accurate for the details, I realized that I had been inadvertently glossing over a potentially fascinating distinction. From Volume 3: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, pg. 17-18:

At the end of day (turn) the referee will check to see if a monster has been encountered. The matrix below is for travel afoot or mounted. For travel afloat or in the air two die rolls are made — a 5 on the first one indicates an adventure in the mid-point of the day with waterbourne or aerial monsters; a 6 on the second die roll indicates that there is a normal adventure at the end of the day, and the table below is used.

What I want to call your particular attention to here is the phrase “the second die roll indicates that there is a normal adventure at the end of the day”.

See, the random charts which follow don’t include any information on the number of creatures encountered. They just determine type. Which presumably means that you should use the “Number Appearing” column from Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure. (Which is confirmed when you reference that volume and discover that this column is, in fact, marked with a footnote which reads, in part: “used primarily only for out-door encounters”.)

And that’s when the whole thing starts to make sense.

ROLLING A WANDERING MONSTER

Let me demonstrate by way of example. Allow me to roll up an actual wandering monster for a group of PCs traveling through a forest:

(1) I roll 1d8 and consult the “Woods” column to determine the type of encounter. I roll a 6, which is Men.

(2) I roll a 1d12 on the “Men” table. (This table includes four columns, one of which is “Desert (Mars)” and includes Red Martians, Tharks, Black Martians, Yellow Martians, and White Martians. Goddamn, that’s awesome. BID.) I use the “Typical” column, roll a 5, and get a result of “Bandits”.

(3) Now I flip over to Volume 2 and look up “Bandits”. There isn’t an individual listing on the Monster Type table, but “Men” appears generically. The Number Appearing for Men is 30-300, so I roll 1d10 x 30 and get 150.

(4) I flip to the description of Bandits on page 5:

BANDITS: Although Bandits are normal men, they will have leaders who are supernormal fighters, magical types, or clerical types. For every 30 bandits there will be one 4th level Fighting-Man; for every 50 bandits there will be in addition one 5th or 6th level fighter (die 1-3 = 5th level, die 4-6 = 6th level); for every 100 bandits there will be in addition one 8th or 9th level fighter (die 1-3 = 8th, die 4-6 = 9th). If there are over 200 bandits there will be a 50% chance for a Magic-User (die 1-4 = 10th level, die 5, 6 = 11th level) and a 25% chance for a Cleric of the 8th level. If there are exactly 300 bandits there will absolutely be a Magic-User, and the chance for a Cleric goes up to 50%. There is also a chance that there will be magical accouterments for the super-normal types […]

(5) So I have 150 bandits: That means I’ve got five 4th-level fighters. I also have three 5th- or 6th-level fighters, which turn out to be (roll) one 5th-level and two 6th-level fighters. And their leader will be an 8th-level fighter.

(6) The table for determining “magical accouterments” says that each fighter has a 5% chance per level to have a magical item, and I should check for armor, shield and sword. For the sake of this example, let’s just check for our 8th-level leader: 8 x 5 = 40% chance. Armor roll is 58, no armor. Shield roll is 33, so he has a magic shield. And sword roll is 44, so no sword.

(7) I flip to the Treasure tables. There isn’t a separate table for shields, but on pg. 24 there’s a table for Armor which includes shields. I roll three times on the table before generating a result (65) which includes a Shield +1.

(Weird note: There’s an example in the rulebook for how to generate bandits. It starts with, “Assume 183 bandits are encountered.” Which made me realize you could actually generate the number of bandits with 30d10. I did so just for kicks and generated… exactly 183 bandits.)

Total result? The Blood Shield Bandits, named after their fiery-haired leader who carries a shield of bright crimson into battle.

THE BANDIT ADVENTURE

My point with all this is that the OD&D rules for wandering monsters in the wilderness are not rules for generating random encounters in the sense commonly understood by later editions: These rules do not generate a single combat encounter. They are procedurally generating an entire adventure.

What does this adventure look like?

Probably something like this:

The Victorious Battle over the Bandits at Huanghua

In no small part because these rules are meant to gel with high-level play where the PCs are expected to be local baronial lords leading small feudal armies.

But even at lower levels, the encounter tables are telling you that you’re entering an area currently plagued by a large tribe of bandits. Does that mean getting waylaid on the road? Being forcibly deputized by the local lordling to deal with the problem? Being hired by a wealthy merchant whose daughter has been kidnapped? Being press-ganged by the bandits themselves and tasked with kidnapping the merchant’s wealthy daughter? All of the above? A dozen or so dice rolls have me pretty much brimming over with ideas.

In any case, the point is that you’re generating an adventure, just like the book says — something that the players can engage or ignore; bypass or be ambushed by; become embroiled with or skim past.

READING WITH FRESH EYES

Delving into the OD&D manuals continues to be a rewarding experience. I’m constantly amazed at how often I’ll realize that what I’m reading could actually mean something completely different and that I’m only defaulting to reading it in a particular way because of the conditioning imposed by thirty-plus years of RPGs which all went a different way.

In part, this gets back to my discussion of OD&D as the Ur-Game — a mirage that doesn’t actually exist because the rulebooks are open to so many different interpretations.

What fascinates me is the idea of the road that wasn’t traveled: All those passages whose enigmas were refined to read as “A” when they could have just as easily been read as “B”. (With “B” being potentially just as interesting.)

Since the OD&D PDFs are no longer legally available, people have occasionally asked me which OSR clone I recommend to take its place. The truth is that I don’t recommend any of them. OD&D is a severely flawed game, and all of the clones I’ve looked at have generally inherited its flaws while simultaneously (and probably necessarily) whitewashing out the ambiguities which I find rewarding to explore.

(UPDATE: The OD&D PDFs are once again legally available!)

Interesting Facts About the Blood Shield Bandits

Back to Reactions to OD&D

The Super PSTW Adventure RPG succeeds at being both fun and funny while simultaneously delivering a completely devastating critique of modern video games. It also doesn’t overstay its welcome, taking only a few minutes to play.

Check it out.

Obstacles in roleplaying games do not exist in order to prevent a PC from doing something. They exist in order to challenge the players to come up with an interesting way of doing it.

(This thought occurred to me as I was reading Flawless by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell in which they describe a diamond heist in ’76 in which the thieves tunneled into the vault from the sewer. They tested for the presence of a seismic alarm using an alarm clock and hauled away the excavated dirt in a Landrover they drove through the sewer tunnels. Then they welded the vault door shut from the inside and threw a Bastille Day looting party. That vault door didn’t exist to protect the jewels. It existed to make those thieves look cool.)

(Not to be confused with Alejandro.)

Alejandra: If you are still reading my blog, please call or e-mail me. None of the contact info I have for you is working any more, so I’m throwing this out into the cold void of the ‘net in the hope that you’ll see it.

Everybody else should feel free to ignore this. Or make Lady Gaga jokes in the comments. Whatever works for you.

My work on converting the archives of the Alexandrian over the past few days have been something of a trip down memory lane as I go digging through material I wrote up to half a decade ago. And occasionally stumbling across comments that I don’t think I ever saw because of the broken and disjointed commenting system on the old site.

One discovery that particularly caught my eye came in response  to the Keep on the Shadowfell: Analyzing the Design series I wrote as a precursor to my remix of the module in 2008. A couple people mentioned that the specific traps I had been talking about in 2008 had been “fixed to a large extent” when WotC revised the module for its release as a freebie PDF.

I was curious enough to check it out.

And discovered that they’d fixed almost nothing. The only two improvements I can identify are:

1. They allowed Arcana and Thievery checks to stack for the purposes of disabling the dragon statues. (A suggestion I’d made in my original remix notes.)

2. They made it clear when the arcane walls of the Whirlpool Trap would activate (“when a creature moves into the 4-square-by-4-square area between the statues”) and the location of the walls once they appear:

But there are two problems with this “solution”:

First, as I discussed in my original essay on the matter, you’ve designed the trap so that it can’t be affected by anyone outside of the trap. (In order to disable the trap, you have to destroy the cherubs. And you can’t attack the cherubs if they’re on the other side of the wall.) They’ve removed the explicit references in the module itself to characters doing the impossible, but that doesn’t remove the larger design concerns:

(a) It’s not fun. In general, this means you will have one character inside the trap who needs to make several attacks against the cherub vases while everyone else sits around and watches.

(b) What happens if the character trapped inside the whirlpool is killed? As far as I can tell, the arcane walls just remain in place for the rest of eternity. (They can’t come down until the cherubs are destroyed; and the cherubs can’t be destroyed by anyone who isn’t caught in the trap.) Not only does this mean there’s no way to retrieve your fallen comrade’s battered body, it also means that the only path for reaching the Big Bad Boss of Keep on the Shadowfell is now blocked by two permanent walls of arcane energy.

Second, the trap breaks the rules. The Quick-Start Rules included in the original Keep on the Shadowfell included “Barriers” as one of the types of Area of Effect:

Barrier: A barrier runs along the edge of a specified number of squares. A barrier must cross at least one edge of the origin square.

This was problematic because the core rulebooks didn’t include “Barriers” and instead included rules for “Walls”:

Wall: A wall fills a specified number of contiguous squares within range, starting from an origin square. Each square of the wall must share a side — not just a corner — with at least one other square of the wall, but a square can share no more than two sides with other squares in the wall (this limitation does apply when stacking squares on top of each other). You can shape the wall however you like within those limitations. A solid wall, such as a wall of ice, cannot be created in occupied squares.

The original version of the trap was problematic in any case because it used the keyword “wall” to describe the arcane cage, and one just had to kind of assume that it meant “barrier” if you were using the Quick-Start Rules. You’ll note, however, that the revised version of the module is clearly using the rules for a “barrier” in its diagram.

So… no problem, right? The Quick-Start rules describe “barriers” and this trap, designed to be used with the Quick-Start Rules, now clearly follows those rules.

Except (and this is my favorite bit) somebody noticed that the rules for “barriers” were outdated and should never have been published in the first place, and so the revised Quick-Start Rules designed to be used with the revised version of Keep on the Shadowfell… don’t include the rules for barriers. The entire section was cut.

(Did they bother to replace these rules with the rules for walls which were supposed to be there in the first place? Don’t be silly. Of course they didn’t.)

So you have a trap which explicitly creates walls, but they don’t follow the rules for walls… and it doesn’t really matter anyway, because the Quick-Start Rules didn’t bother including rules for walls.