A fellow over on Reddit asked for feedback on a campaign in which an ancient curse prevented anyone from gaining XP and advancing past 1st level — a “world without heroes”. My random thoughts:

First, experience points are an abstract mechanic that represents the ability for people to learn and grow as individuals. If the world is literally “no XP is ever gained by anyone, ever” then, in terms of the game world, that means a world of horrible, almost automaton-like stasis.

Of course, if people can never learn anything more than the knowledge they’re born with, the human race is basically reduced back to base animals. So let’s make an exception for kids: If you’re a kid, you can still learn and be educated. But once you hit 16 or 18 (or whatever arbitrary age you want to set), the curse takes effect and the light in your eyes is snuffed out.

This opens the door a bit for child prodigies: The exceptional few who can achieve more than 1st level before they turn 18 and the curse hits them. Most of ’em still won’t get far, but you might get the occasional 3rd level character running around just to ease things up in your world-building a bit. (This could also give you a mechanism for your PCs: They’re actually just exceptional 16 year olds. But the clock is ticking for them: At 18, the light goes out. If they’re going to find a way to reverse the Curse, they’re going to have to do it before they join the grey mass of inertia-driven grown-ups around them.

SURVIVING IN A WORLD OF MONSTERS

The typical PC races are going to have a real tough time of it if the world is filled with CR 2-20 encounters and they’re all stuck at CR 1. Although the other races are also limited by the Curse, even something as simple as an ogre has a huge advantage in terms of natural selection in this world.

The obvious solution is that the PC races need to either transform themselves into something more powerful or they need to make powerful allies. A few possibilities off the top of my head:

(1) Most of the successful city-states have made pacts with demons. Basically, an entire city will auction off its souls to a demonic patron and that patron will, in exchange, protect them. A few “soul-free” might cling to the edges of civilization, but the lands of the civilized races have become dark and perverted places — a patchwork of demonic alliances waging fruitless and endless proxy wars.

(2) Vampires vs. Werewolves. Cliche? Sure. But undead and lycanthropic plagues are one of the few ways for humans to empower themselves in this milieu. Expect to see cities where vampires rule openly as an elite caste and freedom fighters attempting to overthrow the vampires willingly infect themselves with lycanthropy in order to have the strength to rebel.

(3) Or, vice versa, the nobles are all lycanthropes who, once per month, invoke their ancient rights of sanguis nocte and hunt through the city or countryside to feast upon their subjects.

(4) Or perhaps it’s a world in which human cities are built around plateaus of step-pyramids in which almost constant human sacrifices are carried out as part of the ritual magic required to keep the vast undead armies protecting the city under control.

(5) Dwarves survive because they have hidden themselves away behind vast layers of stone. Their cities are laced with countless traps — an endless layering of defenses which only fuels the well-earned dwarven paranoia. (Because they know, deep in their hearts, that some day a darkness will creep into their cities and they will be powerless to stop it. And the deeper they delve away from the terrors of the sunlit world, the closer to that darkness they come.) The rigidity of their caste structures coupled with the effects of the Curse over long centuries have reduced the majority of the dwarven population to an autonomous hivemind. (Ever read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson? Think about he describes the form human civilization took before we gained individual consciousness.)

(6) Things are not pretty for the elves. The woods they once ruled are filled with powerful dangers  they are no long capable of mastering and the ancient demesnes that once swore fealty to them are now more powerful than they. They are a broken and scattered people with no homeland to call their own.  It is said, however, that in the earliest days of the Curse some of the elves crafted refuges upon the Ethereal Plane before their craft was utterly lost to them. Its hard to say what may have happened to those trapped within,  having no way to return to the Material Plane when the arts of magic required for the passage were lost to them.

If you’d be interested in playing in a forum-based D&D adventure run by me, you should pop over to Basketweavers vs. The Sunless Citadel on theRPGSite and sign up. It’s first come, first serve. I’m hoping for a frequent updates schedule, so please be prepared to commit at least daily attention to the thread.

Fair warning, though: This is a bit of an odd bird. The run-thru is being motivated by a poster on theRPGSite named Mr. GC who is arguing vociferously that “basketweavers” — i.e., non-optimized characters — cannot play D&D. The opposing contention is that it’s absolutely trivial for non-optimized characters to play D&D, particularly if they’re adventuring in an open sandbox that allows them to select the challenges they want to face at any given moment.

In order to simulate that scenario, we’ll be using a very strange set of character creation guidelines set by Mr. GC for creating a party of “basketweavers” and then assuming that this particular party of “basketweavers” has selected The Sunless Citadel for their next adventure.

The particular version of The Sunless Citadel I’ll be using will be slightly modified from the original. But if you are familiar with the scenario, you may want to sit this one out.

This is a quick little thing I wrote up on Reddit a few days ago. The basic idea is that you’re looking to run a game with 1 DM and 1 or 2 players. Legends & Labyrinths includes a build point system which makes it very easy to build encounters for non-standard group compositions, but very small groups pose some unique challenges. It can also be useful to have some quick conversion guidelines for published adventures.

2 PLAYERS

So if you’re looking to DM for a group of 2 PCs:

(1) One of the PCs should be a cleric.

(2) Give them plentiful healing resources. At 1st level, a wand of cure light wounds with 15-20 charges should do it.

(3) Take any adventure designed for 1st level characters and do the following: For any encounter involving multiple creatures, halve their hit points and reduce their number by half. For any encounter involving a single creature, reduce them to minimum hit points.

And that’s it. You’re good to go.

For example, consider the encounters found in the first dozen keyed areas of The Sunless Citadel:

Area 1: 3 dire rats (5 hp) = 1 dire rat (3 hp)
Area 3: 1 dire rat (5 hp) = 1 dire rat (2 hp)
Area 5: 3 skeletons (6 hp) = 1 skeleton (3 hp)
Area 6: 1 dire rat (6 hp) = 1 dire rat (2 hp)
Area 10: 1 quasit (9 hp) = 1 quasit (3 hp)
Area 12: 1 dragonpriest (42 hp) = 1 dragonpriest (21 hp)

The reason this works is because encounters are designed for 4 PCs: If you halve the number of PCs it means that monsters will generally live twice as long and have only half as many targets to inflict damage on. That means that the difficulty of an encounter roughly quadruples if you halve the the number of PCs. So we adjust for that by halving the monster’s hit points (so that they survive half as long) and halving their numbers (which halves the number of actions the monsters can take each turn).

1 PLAYER

Adjusting for having only one player in D&D is a little tougher because there’s no margin for error: If a PC gets knocked unconscious in normal play, they can be revived by other members of the party. If a solo PC gets knocked unconscious, it’s an immediate game over.

Here’s what I recommend: Start the PC at 3rd level and then run them through 1st level adventures that have been adjusted as per the above. (You’ll probably want to have them use a cleric again. Or find some other way to make sure they have access to magical healing.)

I have done very little one-on-one stuff, but this method seems to work.

I just got done running the most heavily railroaded session in probably my last 15 years of gaming, including heavily forced scene transitions and huge dollops of illusionism.

(Context: It was a dream sequence being experienced by a comatose PC. They were taken through a highlight reel of their memories — both the ones they’ve experienced and the ones their amnesiac character has forgotten — with the other players jumping in to play current and former versions of themselves in a kaleidoscopic dreamscape.)

I bring this up because I think it’s given me a fresh appreciation for why combat encounters — particularly those in “delve format” adventures — have become so overwrought in the past 10 years: It’s because, in a culture of “storytelling” GMs with railroaded plots, the combat encounters are the only place where players can actually experience freedom; where their choices actually matter.

So you get a large class of players who are primarily focused on the combat encounters because that’s where they’re actually allowed to experience the true joy of roleplaying games (and, therefore, that’s where they have fun). And to cater to those desires, adventure design (and then game design) focuses more and more on making those encounters really exciting.

But then, as that cycle degrades into itself, we end up with a situation where the tail is wagging the dog: Where the railroaded plot that strings together the combat encounters becomes thinner and thinner as more and more effort is put into propping up the combat encounter tent poles.

(Insert obligatory references to the Don’t Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design.)

Over at Blog of Holding, Paul has just posted “The Cycle of Repudiation and Reclamation, and the 2nd Coming of 2nd Edition“: It puts forth his theory that a lost generation of 2nd Edition gamers, who have hitherto been silent, will emerge in the near future:

I predict that, within two years, some blogger will come along and express, with the persuasiveness of a Philotomy Juramont or James Mal, what was so special about the story-based, Elmister-infested, roleplaying-over-rollplaying Silver and Bronze Ages of D&D. We’ll learn why Spelljammer was actually awesome. THAC0 will stop being a punchline. People like Zeb Cook and Douglas Niles will finally get some praise for carrying the D&D banner for a while.

I started gaming in the summer of 1989: A brief period of BECMI followed by an almost immediate leap into 2nd Edition. So I’d be pretty much the definitional poster child for this “lost” generation.

But I think the reason no movement or “voice” has coalesced around this generation is that it’s never actually been been lost and it’s never really gone away.

For example, the OSR has been primarily driven by revisiting/rediscovering:

(1) Out of print systems

(2) Different ways of prepping and running adventure material

(3) Different ways of organizing your players and your campaign

And the exploration of these older ideas have resulted in the publication of new products using these lost methods. Many of which have also found new ways to explore these concepts.

With that in mind, let’s consider what these elements are during the 2nd Edition era:

• Narrative-oriented / scene-based adventures.
• Encyclopedic presentation of campaign settings.
• Splat books.
• Campaigns defined by a consistent group of 4-8 players who all attend each session.

And what you quickly realize is that the distinctive elements of the 2nd Edition era are still the distinctive elements of the bulk of the RPG industry. I mean, I basically just described Paizo’s entire focus and product line. There’s nothing to rediscover here: People never stopped publishing this stuff. People never stopped playing like this.

(I mean, yes, the late-3E/4E Delve Style adventures can be seen as beginning to depart from the classic narrative forms set by Call of Cthulhu and the original Dragonlance modules. But Paizo’s adventure paths are still being published every single month. And most other RPGs haven’t followed the path of 4E.)

So when you’re talking about something being “lost” from the 2nd Edition era, all you’re really talking about are the actual rules for 2nd Edition. And maybe a specific campaign setting that’s been allowed to malinger out of print.

And that simply isn’t enough material for a movement to really gain traction on. Particularly because 2nd Edition doesn’t actually have a lot of mechanical distinction from 1st Edition. Once you’ve said “let me count the ways I liked 2E” a couple of times, you’re basically asking a movement to coalesce around the glories of a proficiency system and three-hole punched monster manuals.

More likely would be strong communities forming around the out of print campaign worlds. But, of course, that’s already happened.

And to be perfectly clear here: I’m not trying to diss 2nd Edition. I actually think some of the best D&D products ever published were published during 2nd Edition.

What I’m saying, to sum up, is that the conceptual stuff from the era never went away: Which means there’s nothing “new” to rediscover and add to your games. And there’s no vacuum in the market waiting to be filled (because lots of people are still publishing products like that). So the only thing a “2ER” could be built around is a nostalgia for very specific products. And that’s why it hasn’t happened. And why it isn’t likely to happen.