In OD&D time is measured in turns (10 minutes) and rounds (1 minute), with 10 rounds per turn. You check for wandering monsters at the end of every turn, with an encounter being indicated on the role of a 6 on 1d6. Hence, the probability of a random encounter is:

Hanging around in the dungeon obviously isn’t conducive to a long or healthy life. (Not that this should come as any sort of surprise.)

However, it should be noted that — if the PCs are in a position where the wandering monster would not necessarily be aware of them — surprise is achieved 33% of the time (1 or 2 on 1d6). There’s really no way to calculate this into the numbers above (because too much depends on circumstance), but certainly in practice I found that this gave the PCs a not infrequent ability to avoid the wandering monsters. (Particularly once they realized what was going on and made certain preparations — like shutting the doors to a room while searching it — which would make it possible.)

What the 16% chance of an encounter every 10 minutes really boils down to, however, is a very active dungeon complex: The monsters are not just sitting in their rooms waiting for the PCs to kick down the door. (This is a topic I’ll probably be re-visiting in later essay.)

Working out the probabilities for wandering monster mechanics can tell you a lot about the nature of the setting. (And, conversely, when you’re designing a setting you should work out the probabilities to make sure you’re doing what you think you’re doing.)

For example, I’ve been homebrewing a structure for 3rd Edition wilderness exploratory adventures. The strucutre is based around a 4 hour watch (with 6 watches per day). The length of the watch was chosen because it’s convenient for the hex scales I’m using for my wilderness map.

Since I’ll be setting up random encounters for the various wilderness regions, I whipped up this quick cheat sheet for the probabilities involved:

(I may eventually end up standardizing these checks to X in 1d20 — 2 in 1d20 is identical to 1 in 1d10 and 3 in 1d20 is fairly equivalent to 1 in 1d6 — but I wanted to start off with a more traditional approach.)

Obviously, the higher the probability the more likely the PCs’ journey will be interrupted. If I set the probability very high (2 in 1d6), then I’m virtually guaranteeing that their progress will be slowed to a crawl. If I set the probability very low (1 in 1d20), then I’m allowing them to potentially move through an entire region without ever meaningfully interacting with its contents.

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Interesting fact about the basic rules for experience point awards in OD&D: They don’t actually exist.

Instead you have to intuit them out of an example on pg. 18 of Volume 1: Men & Magic, which states that you would get 7,700 XP for killing a troll with 7,000 gp of treasure: 7,000 XP for the 7,000 GP + 700 for killing the troll (which is a 7th level monster).

From this example you are forced to intuit that PCs receive 1 XP per gold piece of treasure and 100 XP per level of a defeated monster. (A monster’s level is basically determined by its Hit Dice.)

The one hard-and-fast rule regarding XP is that: “Gains in experience points will be relative; thus an 8th level Magic-User operating on the 5th dungeon level would be awarded 5/8 experience. […] Experience points are never awarded above a 1 for 1 basis, so even if a character defeats a higher level monster he will not receive experience points above the total of treasure combined with the monster’s kill value.” But even this rule is somewhat vague, because in places it refers to “dungeon level” and in other places it refers to the “level of the monster”.

(It should be noted that the level of the dungeon was assumed to be correlated to its difficulty — with the first level of the dungeon appropriate for 1st level characters and so forth. But even in these early days it was acknowledged that harder foes could sometimes be found on upper levels and less powerful foes on lower levels, so there remains a real and meaningful difference.)

(This entire concept of adjusted XP would disappear from the game for awhile, before returning in 3rd Edition… where for reasons I’ve never quite been able to understand they mucked around with the math until it made no sense and required a chart look-up.)

Note, however, that the passage is clear that the adjustment is on a per character basis. The 8th level Magic-User has their experience adjusted, but if they were adventuring with a 4th level Fighter the fighter would not have their rewards so adjusted.

Writing this up now, I also just realized that there is also no provision given for dividing the experience award. If a party of 16 characters defeats a troll, they should all get the full XP award for it apparently. The players in my Caverns of Thracia one-shot are going to be pissed.

There’s also a recommendation that “no more experience points be awarded for any single adventure than will suffice to move the character upwards one level”, with an associated example suggesting that the character should max out 1 XP shy of gaining a second level from the same adventure.

XP FOR TREASURE

The practice of giving XP is much maligned. I criticized it myself when I was young. The logic usually goes something like this:

(1) “How does earning money improve your skills?”

(2) “Treasure itself is a reward. Why should you be rewarded for getting a reward?”

The answer is simple: Treasure was seen as an analog for accomplishment. The goal of the game was not, in fact, to go into a dungeon and fight with monsters. Fighting with monsters was, in fact, a really bad idea. Fighting monsters could get you killed. What you wanted to do was get the treasure without fighting the monsters.

By rewarding the bulk of XP for treasure, the game encouraged smart, strategic play instead of hack ‘n slash play. Combat was implicitly a means to an end, not the end itself. (I know that in the BECMI Basic Set, at least, it was explicitly made so. Whenever someone tries to tell you that D&D is a game about “killing things and taking their stuff”, keep that in mind.)

And this was intentional. Upon discovering that 100 XP per HD was encouraging players to treat monsters as a source of walking XP (instead of fearing them as deadly dangers), Gygax promptly revised the XP rules in Supplement 1: Greyhawk. Low level awards were drastically reduced (1 and 2 HD monsters, for example, were reduced to just 1/10th of their former reward) and experience awards were now explicitly divided among all party members. Hirelings and retainers were also given a full share (although they only benefited from half their portion).

Depending on how you read the rules, if you were in a group with a total of 10 characters (PCs and hirelings both) you could actually see your XP rewards for killing a 1 HD monster reduced to 1/100th its former level upon adopting the rules in Supplement 1: Greyhawk!

THE GENERAL PHILOSOPHY OF XP

This still leaves the objection that there’s no innate connection between finding a pot of gold and improving your sword-swinging ability. But this is almost utterly irrelevant because experience points — like virtually all character creation mechanics — are abstracted to the point of being virutally indistinguishable from a completely dissociated mechanic. Experience point awards are simply not any kind of meaningful model of actual learning or self-improvement in the real world — it doesn’t matter whether you give them for treasure, killing monsters, roleplaying, or just time served.

A few games (most notably RuneQuest) abandons them entirely and attempt to adopt associated mechanics that more meaningfully model the learning process. (For example, by improving skills that are used or trained.)

But if you choose to keep XP awards (and, like other dissociated character creation mechanics, I find nothing particularly problematic about them), then I think it’s important to acknowledge their role:

(1) They’re an efficient way of saying this is important. They can be an important part of the formal or informal social contract that says, “This is one of our primary goals.” If the primary source of XP is killing things, then you’re saying, “Killing things is going to be a focus of the game.”

(2) They’re a concrete way of setting and rewarding specific goals.

Of course, it’s also possible to over-emphasize the importance of these things. XP awards may feature an important part of the risk-vs-reward dynamic at the game table, but there are other rewards to be had — both in-character and out-of-character.

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There’s a kerfluffle of sorts rumbling the blogosphere regarding the importance of character backgrounds. It got started at Lamentations of the Flame Princess, where James Edward Raggi IV wrote:

Role-playing is not the characterization and speaking in voices and inventing a background and developing a persona that’s a unique little snowflake. Your character’s personality and “what would my character do based on that personality?” are add-on extras completely irrelevant (yet can enhance and perhaps make the effort enjoyable in the first place, make no mistake about what I’m saying here) to the basic activity of role-playing.

Fighting Man Level 1

ST 12, IN 8, WI 10, CN 9, DX 10, CH 9

That’s your character and your role, right there.

This contention was responded to by Bat in the Attic and was, in turn, followed up by the Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope (which is where I first stumbled into the fray). This led me to a quick conclusion:

These guys all have better blog titles than I do.

(Not that I’m changing or anything, but “Lamentations of the Flame Princess” sounds like a fantasy metal band and “Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope” pretty much screams old school fun.)

Truth be told, however, I also drew a pertinent conclusion: To whit, I think the post on Lamentations of the Flame Princess was (intentionally or not) engaging in the worst type of One True Wayism. Specifically, the type that precludes a clear-headed consideration and open discussion of character backgrounds and how they can be used.

With that in mind, here are a few random thoughts off the top of my head. Each of these thoughts really just skims the surface of some pretty interesting stuff, and perhaps some day I’ll be able to return and muse upon them appropriately. But for now I’m interested to see what kind of discussion they prompt.

First, there’s the difference between crafting a character and discovering a character. Each poses unique benefits, challenges, advantages, and disadvantages. In some ways this can be considered analogous to the difference between, say, playing Hamlet and performing in improv theater.

(Of course, to some extent all characters are developed during play, right? No matter how much detail you develop before play begins, there’ll always be something new to discover once you start playing the character in new situations — if for no other reason than that we all grow and change.)

Second, let’s consider the distinction between a character you create entirely by yourself; a completely pregenerated character; and a character created through collaboration (with either your GM and/or the other players in your group).

(Frankly, this is an area of really interesting gradations. There are different types of collaboration, for example: Some are driven mechanically, others socially. Different issue: Even if you’re given a completely pregenerated character, doesn’t it become a collaboration as soon as you interpret it and begin playing it? And how does that tie back into our first topic of discussion?)

Third, the impact that the expected longevity of the character has on these issues. For my Ptolus campaign my players and I collaborated on character histories that were intimately connected to the setting in various ways. These ranged anywhere from 1-3 pages, depending on the player and the character. In my OD&D campaign using the Caverns of Thracia, OTOH, we expected character mortality to be high (it was) and the entire group only got about 3 sentences of background before the fur started to fly.

(On the other hand, as much as OD&D’s short-lived characters encourage you to skimp on your character’s backgrounds, a 1st level Fighting-Man in OD&D is known as a Veteran. That title pretty much insists that even a beginning character has an interesting and meaningful background. A veteran of what? is the inevitable, unavoidable, and evocative question.)

Fourth, there’s the issue of how character backgrounds can be developed and used (by both the player and the GM). The short version is: There are lots and lots of ways to use them. And there are also lots and lots of ways to abuse them.

(Which is why you’ll get plenty of horror stories talking about both (a) the guy who showed up with nothing but a stat block (and played nothing but a stat block) and (b) the guy with a 15 page character background of Mary Sue-ist excess.

Of course, on the flip-side, you’ll also hear great stories about (a) the guy who took nothing but a stat block and turned it into the Most Memorable Character Ever(TM) and (b) the guy who developed a 15 page character background giving the GM all kinds of useful hooks and providing dramatic fodder for some of the most moving roleplaying you’ve ever seen.)

Fifth, we could discuss various mechanical ways of developing character background. For example, there’s Traveller‘s terms of service which uses a gambling mechanic to simultaneously generate a character’s mechanical statistics and provide a framework for fleshing out their background. Or GURPS which bribes you with extra points for making your characters more interesting (by way of disadvantages). Or what about those systems which replace a skill system with a background system (so that what a character can do depends on concrete experience and not just abstract measurements of aptitude)?

(And is mechanizing the development of a background good or bad? I would argue that the more appropriate question is: Good for what? These types of mechanics can provide raw fodder to inspire improvisations that you might not have otherwise considered. In other cases, such mechanics provide a common framework for the group to creatively collaborate. Sometimes that’s what you need. Sometimes it isn’t.)

I think the biggest point I want to make here is that this isn’t really an issue of right-and-wrong. And, in my opinion, trying to frame it in those terms is to waste a lot of time needlessly tilting at windmills.

I mentioned earlier in this series of reactions that, while I respect and admire Gary Gygax for many reasons, that doesn’t change one simple truth:

He should never have been allowed to organize a rulebook.

Write? Sure. Like James Maliszewski (although perhaps not to quite the same fervent degree) I’m actually a fan of his prose and I find his style to be very evocative. But once he’s done writing, it’s time to call in the professional editors to clean up the mess.

Let me give you just two examples. First, from page 19 of Volume 1: Men & Magic, is the section “Level Above Those Listed”, which comes immediately on the heels of the various class progression tables:

Levels Above those Listed: Progressions of Dice for Accumulative Hits, Fighting Capability, and Spells & Levels may not be evident. An 11th level Lord would get 10 +3 dice and fight as he did at the 10th level; but at 12th level, he could get 11 + 1 dice and fight at Superhero + 2. At 13th level dice would be 11 + 3 with Fighting Capability at Superhero + 2. A 17th level Wizard would get 9 + 3 dice and fight as a 16th level, just as an 18th level Wizard would get dice of 10 + 1 with no change in Fighting Capabilities — the change coming at the 19th level, fighting then being done at Wizard + 3. An 11th level Patriarch would get dice of 7 + 3 with Fighting Capability unchanged; at 12th level dice would be 8 + 1 with no change in fighting; and at 13th level the Patriarch would get 8 + 2 and fight as a Superhero – the next change in Fighting Capability coming at the 17th level.

Spell progression for Magic-Users is: 17th level Wizard — 6, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5; 18th level Wizard — sizes across the board; and so on. Spell progression for Clerics is: 11th level Patriarch – 4, 4, 4, 3, 3; 12th level Patriarch — fours across the board; 13th level Patriarch — 5, 5, 5, 4, 4; and so on.

Umm… couldn’t you have just put that info on the actual class tables? I mean, you still didn’t bother to actually explain the methodology behind the progressions, so all you’ve accomplished is to take a big chunk of information and arbitrarily convey it through a different (and much more confusing) method.

The second example is the “chapter” dedicated to spell descriptions. And like every edition of the game except for 3rd Edition, the spells are grouped together according to their level.

Was there ever a less useful method of organizing that material? The only way to find the spell you’re looking for is if you’ve memorized the level of the spell. So you’re basically demanding people to achieve system mastery just to find information in the rulebook.

And then it stuck around for the next 25+ years as some sort of horrible “legacy”.

Admittedly, part of my objection here is philosophical. In organizing a rulebook you have to look at how that rulebook will be used. When it comes to roleplaying manuals, there are three uses:

(1) Learning the game
(2) Character creation
(3) Playing the game

Problems arise because these uses are not always compatible with each other. For example, organizing spells by spell level is useful for character creation because you want to quickly know which spells you can use to fill your available spell slots. On the other hand, it’s completely frakkin’ useless when you’re actually playing the game and trying to figure out how a particular spell works.

I believe that there are usually ways to structure the manual so that all three uses can be satisfied simultaneously. It can be difficult and sometimes it might mean repeating information, but it can almost always be done. And if push really does come to shove, then I think it’s better to favor utility in playing the game.

(Why? Because you spend more time playing the game than you do creating a character.)

As an example of how to do it right, you can look at 3rd Edition’s method for handling spells. There are spell lists which groups the spells together according to level (which provides the necessary utility for character creation), but then the spell descriptions themselves are completely alphabetical (which makes it easy to find the specific spell that you’re looking for). So you get the best of both worlds and full utility out of your rulebook.

(4th Edition, of course, promptly went back to doing it the stupid way. It doesn’t have spells, but they arranged all the powers by level.)

Back to Reactions to OD&D

Shamus Young has posted his proposal for an interesting Learning Mechanic at Twenty Sided. Here’s how he describes the goal of the mechanic:

Most gameplay mechanics are set up so that characters learn and grow from success. The more success, the more XP. I wanted a mechanic that would simulate an activity that was inherently driven by trial-and-error, and where (this is the important part) the character got gradually better at the activity as time went on. Learning would be fast at first, but progress would be slow. Later on, learning would slower, but success would be more frequent.

He recommends the mechanic for tasks like translating a tome written in an archaic language; finding the cure for a zombie plague; breeding animals; and the like.

Here’s how he describes the mechanic:

The player writes down all the numbers from 1 to 20 on a notecard. Every time they roll a number, that number will be crossed out on the card. If they roll a 15, then they cross out 15.

Each attempt needs to simulate a stretch of in-game time. Hours of labwork, meditation, tinkering, writing on the chalkboard, or whatever is required.

When they make an attempt, they roll the d20. If the resulting number is already crossed out, then the action was a success and they get their reward. If not, they still get to cross out the number they rolled, which will improve their chances next time around. Using a d20, they have no chance of success on their first attempt, and a 5% chance on their next attempt. Every failure improves their chances by 5%, and every success moves them closer to their goal. You decide ahead of time how many successes it will take to reach their overall goal. (For our game, I had the book broken into 13 sections. So the character finished the translation after 13 successes.)

I like the basic concept of this mechanic a lot. It’s similar to a complex skill check, but offers the specific benefits Shamus describes: At first, learning happens fast but progress is slow. Later, learning is slow but progress is fast.

STREAMLINING THE MECHANIC

The idea of keeping a notecard and crossing off number is a nifty gimmick, but if you want to streamline things then you can simplify this mechanic:

Roll 1d20. If the result is equal to or lower than the number of failed attempts you’ve made, you score a success. When you achieve the requisite number of successes, you succeed at the task.

I recommend checking out Shamus’ article directly, as he includes a probability chart useful for determining how many successes a task should require.

It should be noted that, by default, the problems handled by this mechanic are always soluble — given enough time, you will eventually solve them. There is no possiblity of absolute failure. In addition, the mechanic doesn’t account for skill. For some problems these may be seen as features. For other problems they’re bugs. Let’s take a look at how the mechanic might be made more flexible and robust.

EXTENDING THE MECHANIC

PROGRESSIVE SUCCESS: Each success can yield additional information or some other tangible benefit. (A cure that works against the bite of a specific zombie; several pages of translated text; a slightly improved animal.) The mechanic is specifically designed to model tasks which don’t feature all-or-nothing successes.

ROADBLOCK: After a certain number of successes, progress in the task may only be possible when some other prerequisite is met (additional biological samples, a different type of natural resource, etc.). In many cases, the nature of the roadblock may not be known until the roadblock is reached.

VARIABLE DIE TYPES: For tasks of greater or lesser difficulty, you could vary the die type. (With a 1d4 you learn everything about the project rapidly and then gather successes rapidly. On the other hand, with a 1d100 your learning curve takes considerably longer.)

INTRACTABLE PROBLEMS: For problems that could prove intractable for a character, simply set the maximum number of possible attempts. If the character has not achieved success after X attempts, then they’ve exhausted their insight into the problem. (Having multiple people working on a problem like this is useful not only because it speeds up resolution, but also because it gives greater insight into the problem — as represented by more potential checks.)

FACTORING SKILL, METHOD 1: You can factor the character’s skill into the attempt by limiting the number of possible attempts based on their skill. In D&D, off-the-cuff, I’d recommend something along the lines of 10 + skill modifier attempts.

FACTORING SKILL, METHOD 2: You can also make character skill a factor by simply setting a minimum skill requirement. A particular problem, for example, might require a minimum Knowledge (history) bonus of +10. (The drawback of this method is that it still doesn’t allow for any variation in completion time based on character skill. A character with a +10 bonus is just as capable of solving the problem as a character with a +50 bonus.)

FACTORING SKILL, METHOD 3: Set a DC for the task. Each d20 roll becomes an actual skill check. If the character succeeds on the check, the roll counts double. In other words, depending on the die roll, it either counts as two successes or as two failed attempts. (If you’re combining this method with an intractable problem, however, each die roll still only counts as one attempt against the maximum number of possible attempts.)

DISCLAIMER

I’m just spitballing some ideas here. I have not actually run any kind of mathematical analysis on this mechanic (although, as I noted, Shamus Young did provide useful charts for the core mechanic).