A person is going to make a cake. They have five or ten pounds of really good, premium quality cake flour. However, something inexplicable happens in their head when they’re putting it together, they think: “Sure, I can use this really good flour and have a really good cake, or I can stretch it a little and make it only a little less good by substituting a cup of sand for a cup of that really valuable flour…”

Corrollary disease: “This flour is soooo good that if I add a lot more of it, the cake will be that much better.”

DADHACKER
(2002/12/30)

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: The meme that D&D is all about “killing monsters and taking their stuff” is a caustic one.

In recent years, however, this meme has only gotten stronger, largely due to the design methodology flowing out of Wizards of the Coast. (Although there’s certainly a feedback-loop between WotC and the echo-chamber CharOp branch of the fandom which exacerbates the problem.) Pointing to the core design of 4th Edition is trivial, but it can also be clearly seen in the growing predominance of My Precious Encounters(TM) in WotC’s adventure design both before and after the switch to 4th Edition.

Wizards clearly thinks they’ve identified some really awesome flour, and they’re just going to keep pouring more and more of it into their cake mix.

In Treasure Maps & The Unknown I mentioned that setting “kill all the monsters” as the default goal of an adventure inherently funnels everything in the game through the combat system, drastically narrowing the range of potential gameplay. More generally, I’ve talked in the past about the fact that D&D used to support a “big tent” of playing styles and gameplay options and that WotC’s quest to “fix the math” and “find the sweet spot” has systematically shrunk that tent.

Unsurprisingly people left outside of D&D’s shrinking tent have been turning to other games in droves, reportedly allowing Pathfinder to tie or out-sell D&D in recent months. (A level of competition D&D has never experienced except when it was briefly out of print during TSR’s near-bankruptcy.)

But I digress. For right now, I want to delve a little deeper into the significant, debilitating effects of setting “kill all the monsters” at the sole pinnacle of D&D gameplay.

EXTRA CREDIT: CHOICE AND CONFLICT

Let me start with this:

The video is very well done, but if you don’t want to watch the whole video, allow me to summarize the key points. It’s talking about the importance of choice (“good games feature choice at every moment”), and in order to better understand choice it breaks player actions down into several categories:

1. Autonomic Actions. (Breathing, keeping your heart beating, etc.)

2. Reactions. (Pulling your hand away from a flame.)

3. Calculations. (Decisions based solely on reason: A choice between options in which there is a clear correct answer. For example, buying a game for $40 instead of $60 when it’s the exact same game. Or, in a more complicated fashion, choosing not to place your hand on a hot oven.)

4. True Choices. (Requiring the overcoming of internal conflict.)

“Without internal conflict there is no choice, only decisions.”

Or, to put it another way, true choice requires you to have two objectives which are put into conflict with each other. You have to choose whether to pursue Objective A while risking or abandoning Objective B, or vice versa.

The problem with many games, as the video points out, is that the player is frequently presented with only a single objective (or several objectives which don’t conflict with each other). At that point, there is no choice: There is only the calculation of the best possible method of achieving your objective and/or the testing of physical skill in order to achieve that outcome.

One type of choice you see in many game is an “incomplete information problem” — where calculations are turned into choices by forcing the player to make the decision before they have enough information to make a reliable calculation. (Tangent: You’ll occasionally see discussions where people claim that you can’t have meaningful choice unless the players are completely informed about what each choice means, but this is not generally true. And it’s only specifically true in the case of a complete tabula rasa in which the choice is nothing more than a random number generation — but such tabula rasa states are so utterly unlikely in any sort of real gameplay that it’s not really worth wasting our time fretting about them.)

The other type of choice, and the one I’m most concerned with here, is the “incomparable”. This is often found in character creation systems, where you have to choose between two options which cannot be directly compared with each other.

“The problem with many games,” as the video says. “Is that they mask calculations as incomparables.”

The example they point to is World of Warcraft, in which the talent trees of character advancement appear to contain a multitude of choices. But experienced players know that these talent trees conflate down to just a handful of “best builds”. Why? Because virtually all of your choices on the talent tree are aimed at increasing your DPS or your healing output.

In other words, the “choices” on the talent trees are not fundamentally different. They are all ways of achieving one particular goal, and therefore there will almost certainly end up being one or two “best ways” to achieve that goal (calculation).

CONFLICT

You see where I’m going with this, right?

When you focus the entirety of D&D on combat mechanics, you are simplifying the game down to a single goal. The effects of this are clear:

First, it creates a market for “best builds”. More than that, when certain builds become sufficiently “best” they effectively break the game: You either play those builds or you’re being outclassed by those who are playing those builds. (If you’re supporting multiple goals, on the other hand, the problem is lessened: There may be a “best build for X”, but since X isn’t the totality of the game it doesn’t invalidate other character builds. Which isn’t to say that you need to toss concept balance out on its ear, but it does significantly reduce the pressure to turn everything into identical, bland pablum.)

Second, you can “fix the math” all you want in an effort to make all builds equal. It doesn’t change the fact that you’ve eliminated meaningful choice from the core mechanics of your game. (It should go without saying, of course, that you can eliminate large swaths of meaningful choice while still leaving some choices intact.)

In short, you are reducing your game to a mere calculation.

CHOICE

In considering the importance of choice in game design, take a moment to ponder the meaningful distinction between Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe. (The former has meaningful choices; the latter is a mere calculation.) Or the distinction between War and Poker. (The former is pure chance; the latter has meaningful choice.)

With that being said, of course, choice isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of game design. For example, we embrace an element of chance in poker just as we embrace it in a typical RPG’s combat system.

But I do believe that, when compared to other games, choice is peculiarly important for roleplaying games. Because, in my opinion, choice is the defining quality of roleplaying games. I think the best definition of “roleplaying” is, in fact, “making choices as if you were your character”.

So when you begin removing choice from a roleplaying game, you are removing the entire reason for playing an RPG in the first place.

In “(Re)-Running the Megadungeon” I talked about how to keep a dungeon complex fresh by restocking the room key and using wandering monster tables as a form of low-tech procedural content generation. In “Wandering Adventures” I talked about how the OD&D wandering monster tables could be used to generate entire adventures. Now I want to build on those ideas by touching on the basic concept of factions in the dungeon.

To immediately boil the idea down to its core: If your dungeon has a life beyond the activities of the PCs, it is much easier to revitalize the dungeon between delves. The life of the dungeon will naturally generate the ideas necessary to restock the dungeon (and, thus, carry a lot of the weight for you). This becomes even easier if the dungeon contains multiple, independent factions. (And even moreso if these factions are openly hostile to each other.)

Nor does this have to be something that you need heavily pre-plan. It can largely just be a matter of keeping one eye on it during your restocking process: “Okay, the PCs killed 70% of the orc population on Level 3. Who can take advantage of that? What will the Orc King’s response be? Actually, wait, they killed the Orc King. Have the orcs broken into factions? Could the Red Prince (I just made that name up) have allied with the goblins on Level 2 to push his claims? How will the other orcs feel about being asked to co-exist with lowly goblins? Will they turn to the Voodoo Necromancer (just made that up, too) who was once the Orc King’s advisor?” That’s about 15 seconds of brain-storming. Follow it up with a couple minutes of actual prep and you’ve got orc-and-goblin warbands with faces painted bright crimson squaring off against orc warriors ‘roided out on alchemical strength-boosters wearing the bone fetishes of the Voodoo Necromancer. It doesn’t even really matter if the PCs get involved in the actual politics of the situation: Even if they just hack their way through these orcish factions, they’ll (a) recognize that the dungeon has changed in their absence and (b) get some unique and interesting hacking out of it.

(You can see a similar real-play example of this in Delve Seven of “(Re-)Running the Megadungeon” when the elementalist gets killed.)

So, obviously, there’s nothing wrong with winging it. In the process of winging it, however, I’ve found it generally useful to prep two key pieces of information:

1. Identify each faction.
2. Identify the territory controlled by each faction.

Most of the time, it’s not necessary to get really obsessive with this. For example, in the Caverns of Thracia I don’t really have much more than a general sense that “the cultists control this chunk of the map”, “the lizardmen control these rooms”, “the anubians are based out of this complex”, and the like.

My understanding of the complex is fairly amorphous, and putting more detail into it is probably counter-productive: It’s unlikely to ever be noticed by players, it’ll bog down your prep, and it’s rarely representative of the fairly amorphous nature of contested territory. Precision will also tend to bog down your ability to flexibly interpret the results from your random encounter tables.

(Of course, if you’re designing a scenario in which particular focus or importance is placed on factional play, more detail may be merited.)

RANDOM FACTION INTERACTION TABLES

With that being said, it might be valuable to build some quick, light tools that will allow you to procedurally generate the ebbing shifts of factional fortunes in the dungeon. For this purpose, let’s turn to the Caves of Chaos from the classic B2 Keep on the Borderlands.

For those unfamiliar with this module, the Caves of Chaos are particularly useful for this purpose because they’ve already been conveniently split into factions: Essentially you’ve got a small valley full of caves, with each cave leading to an interconnected system of caverns and serving as the lair for one of several chaotic factions. The factions are:

(“Wandering Adventurers” refers to an NPC party entering the Caves of Chaos.)

FACTION CONFLICT CHECK: After each visit to the caves by a party of PCs, make a faction conflict check. Roll 1d6. On a roll of 6, conflict has broken out between the factions. Roll twice on the faction table to determine which two factions have come into conflict. (If you roll the same number twice, either re-roll or assume some sort of civil strife.) Then roll on the Conflict Resolution Table:

Stalemate Skirmish: The factions are largely unaffected by the conflict. Their forces may have been reinforced, or you may wish to subtract 1 or 2 members from one of their encounters. (The conflict may leave them ripe for alliances against their recent foes; or leave a chamber showing recent signs of conflict; or a couple of corpses tossed onto the valley floor to be feasted on by the owlbear.)

Faction Damaged: A damaged faction has suffered losses equal to roughly 25% of their strength. Subtract 1d4 members from each encounter (keyed or random) with that faction.

Faction Crippled: A crippled faction has suffered loses equal to roughly 50% of their strength. Eliminate entire encounters or subtract 1d12 members from each encounter (keyed or random) with that faction.

Faction Destroyed: A destroyed faction has been eliminated. Their lair may lie empty, be occupied by the other faction involved in the conflict, or restocked randomly. Their population has been killed, driven off, or enslaved.

Factions Unite: The two factions have allied with each other. (One of the leaders may have been killed. The alliance may be for some short-term goal. Or the populations might be fully intermixed between the lairs.)

USING THE TABLES

Like a random encounter table, the output here is designed to be flexibly interpreted. Once again, the Caves of Chaos are great for this sort of thing because it already includes some short notes regarding the relationships between the factions. (For example, the owlbear is described as having recently munched on some gnolls. The two orc chieftains have a secret meeting room that only they know about. And so forth.)

Mostly for the fun of it, I’m going to roll up a couple actual examples using these tables. We’ll start by assuming that I’ve just rolled a “6” on my Faction Conflict Check and go from there:

1. DETERMINE FACTIONS: I roll 1d12 twice, generating 9 and 5. That’s the Minotaur and the Ogre.

2. DETERMINE OUTCOME: I roll 1d8 and get 8. That’s Factions Unite.

3. INTERPRET RESULT: The Minotaur and the Ogre are the two solo factions in the Caves. (There’s only one Ogre and one Minotaur.) Scanning their entries, I see that the ogre is willing to sell his services to the highest bidder and the minotaur has a lot of money. So let’s say that the minotaur has hired the ogre for some purpose. What could it be? Well, the minotaur is willing to help the bugbears if they pay him in slaves. What if the bugbears cheated the minotaur and now he wants a little help to get the payment he feels is his due? That sets up a scenario where the PCs could arrive in the valley to see bugbears fleeing from their caves; or find bugbears shackled in the minotaur caverns; or just the minotaur and ogre huddling up in the minotaur’s cavern while they plot the glories of their revenge.

Let’s do it again:

1. DETERMINE FACTIONS: I roll 4 and 12. That’s Goblins and Wandering Adventurers.

2. DETERMINE OUTCOME: I roll a 5 for Both Factions Damaged.

3. INTERPRET RESULT: This one is pretty easy to figure out. A group of adventurers entered the goblin caverns, wreaked some havoc, and then got driven off.

4. GOBLIN ENCOUNTERS: There are 36 goblins total in this lair. A 25% loss would represent 9 goblins. I can represent this loss pretty easily be eliminating the wandering patrol of 6 goblins (the surviving goblins have bunkered down) and the 4 goblins guarding the store room.

5. ADVENTURERS: Where’d they go? Well, let’s say it was a party of 4 adventurers. One of them is dead and his corpse can be seen on a spike outside the goblins’ lair. The rest are either (a) camping nearby and looking for allies; (b) sold to the hobgoblin slavers; or (c) both.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It should be pretty easy to see how this simple system can be used to add a little quick spice to the complex between PC visitations. Combined with the ability to simply use some generic wandering monster tables to rapidly determine the new inhabitants of any lair complex emptied out by the PCs, it’s pretty easy to see how the Caves of Chaos could be easily used pretty much endlessly for low-level adventuring.

A few interesting factoids about the Blood Shield Bandits:

1. Several of the bandits worship a giant demi-goddess named Herathka. Their cult for this near-forgotten deity stems from the ancient shrine they discovered within a secret chamber hidden in the cave complex at one of their hideouts.

2. Before riding on a raid, Blood Shield bandits will pour a little alcohol on the ground in order to appease the godlings of mischief and mischance.

3. One of the 4th level fighters wears the mummified hand of his dead brother on a strap around his neck. The bandits believe it brings them good luck on their raids.

4. The bandits maintain small stashes of emergency supplies and gold scattered throughout the region. They’re marked by the symbol of a small raven that is carved into nearby tree trunks with small, coded symbols indicating the distance and direction of the stash.

5. Arik the Bold, a bandit lieutenant, has a fascination with all things arcane and magical. He particularly enoys collecting spellbooks, even though he can’t understand them at all.

6. On the night of a blue moon, the bandits burn a taper and watch for the winding sheet: On the morn they’ll ride on a great raid in the direction of the winding sheet’s bent. (The winding bent is an old folk belief. When a fragment of wax stands higher than the candle’s flame it’s known as a winding sheet. When it begins to bend under candle’s heat, the direction it bends is the winding bent.)

Back to Reactions to OD&D

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

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.