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.
And the light bulb just went “on” for this old blogger.
Excellent post. It’s so very easy for me to forget that the early rules assumed that at high levels (well, what used to be high levels, anyway) PCs would be land-holding barons with what amounted to small armies at their disposal.
Wow, you said it exactly, regarding the clones. They keep the “growing pains” oddities of the still-forming rules (for some reason!), but throw out all the little interesting bits that we have come to mostly ignore or interpret a certain way over the years. Those are the things that make the original so great, looking back. I’m not sure it’s possible for the clones to capture it, but certainly none so far have even come close.
Exactly so, and well explaind. The I’ve often pointed out that OD&D is – particularly in the popular clones – interpreted in the light of later D&D. Sometimes that’s fine, but often it becomes a case of Gygax rewriting Arneson (or even sometimes himself) so the original intention is lost. Arneson talked about writing all those “adventure” tables and gave us some more approaches to generating an adventure (his phrase – Gygax preferred encounter) in the First Fantasy Campaign. A great deal of OD&D assumes the referee will be generating random adventures ala Blackmoor when traveling through the “wilderness” (the Outdoor Survival map) including, of course, radomly generated villages and castles. The game was as much a sandbox exploration for the DM as it was for the players.
Agreed; the removal of wandering monsters and the like creates a world which is empty except for Precious Encounters placed by the GM. Besides altering class balance, this also causes a host of problems including an unrealistic game world where everything revolves around the PCs and their current quest, and sharpening the divide between “story” and “sandbox” (which is a new concept; in 1e days you had both integrated into the major adventure series like slave lords, giant-drow-Lolth, etc.) .
I’m going back through your recent posts and even though I’m running a Moldvay Basic game (alongside a 4E game for what that’s worth) this is a step back past even the red book and it is bringing a lot of memories to the fore. I’m liking them a lot.
FWIW the reason the various clones remove some of the ambiguity is because a clone is, by definition, someone’s attempt to decipher the Ur-Game of OD&D into something they can play at their table. Every time a clone-author comes to one of those A or B passages, they have to pick one.
At a recent convention, a young fellow showed me how to play a new science-fiction game that had fired his imagination. Its rules encouraged the gamemaster to offer tokens to players as rewards for roleplaying their characters’ disadvantages and quirks; players could chip in these tokens to influence game events.
The explanation went well until I started asking about random events. The idea that a GM would want to choose things randomly was anethema to this fellow. I explained that such an approach made the game less predictable and took the onus of “balance” away from the GM. Players often expect encounters to be “level appropriate” or “balanced” when their GM has clearly planned them as part of their adventure. On the other hand, when they know that a random encounter or hazard could come in any power level, they adopt an entirely different mindset. Free of assumptions, they consider fights more carefully. They don’t assume victory is a right.
He thought I was nuts. “Why wouldn’t you want your players to have a challenging and balanced game? Randomness undermines your story.”
FWIW, AnyDice says the odds of getting 183 on a roll of 30d10 are 1.32%. Holy smokes.
[…] С оригиналом статьи Вы можете ознакомиться здесь. […]
[…] «Бродячих приключениях»(перевод) мы также обсудили как таблицы случайных […]
One of the things I did was I used the Random outdoor Adventure generator of the good old MM specifically the various sub men descriptions to randomly define the cults for various dragon cults sent to suss out a megadungeon as a place for Dragons to become legendary landowners. it resulted in very interesting diverse builds. oddly nothing similar was done or can be done with any of the other playable races.