Posts from March 2010

Three things you may have noticed in yesterday’s post, about the long-ago encounter with the vampire queen.

1) The average level of the characters in the party was around 4th-5th level. We were fighting a vampire with access to magic-user spells, a bunch of ghouls, and I think a wraith were in the fray as well. In a straight-up fight, we were completely outmatched. Fortunately, we fought dirty, and the little trick with the makeshift holy water made the odds a bit better.

2) We still didn’t win the fight, at least not in conventional terms. The vampire queen survived, as did probably half the ghouls. We only got rid of the wraith with a lucky turning roll by my cleric, killed a few ghouls, and mostly stalled until the thief got the sword we wanted. Then we ran. We considered it a win, even though in terms of the fight, we would’ve been killed if we stayed around a couple rounds longer.

3) John’s druid was – thanks to a deck of many things – several levels higher than the rest of us. I think he was 8th-level (that’s what pulling the Sun card will get you!) while the rest of us were 4th. But the same deck also killed another player’s character when he pulled the Skull card, and another lost all of his magic items and treasure when he pulled the Ruin card. For the most part, that deck was extraordinarily cruel to our group.

In short? An unbalanced group, and an unbalanced encounter.

Shockingly, the campaign worked very, very well.

I’ll be the first to say that designing encounters for 1st-edition AD&D could be a complete bitch. There wasn’t anything solid to look at when you wanted to see what 4th-level characters could handle. Some 5 HD monsters worked better than others, some would have weird powers that would make them ten times as powerful as another otherwise equivalent monster, some sucked as lone monsters but were great in groups … experience, built by trial and error, was the best guide towards developing your own personal “challenge rating” for monsters. And it wasn’t always pretty. I know I ran one or two adventures where the monsters started “missing” just to give the players the opportunity to retreat, since the players were about to otherwise get slaughtered (and they knew it). I had no qualms about having monsters kill people’s characters; I just never wanted it to be because the DM (me) designed a lousy encounter.

However, I will say this – the attitude kept you on your toes, and led for much more of a variety in encounters. Oftentimes, the encounters weren’t too powerful, they were too weak … but in the context of an adventure, they made sense. I remember one adventure when the same group (more or less), a couple of levels higher, had to storm a stronghold of a warlord. The warlord was a tough son-of-a-bitch who rode a blue dragon, or something like it that was hideously tough, and some of his main henchmen were extremely powerful as well.

As for the guardians of the stronghold , patrolling its walls? Orcs. Ordinary, shabby, 6 hp orcs. Our fighters could kill them with a single swing of the sword (adding up bonuses for Strength and their magic weapons, they automatically dealt 6 hp of damage, if not more.) Unless the fighters rolled a 1, the orcs died. The trick was to do it quietly, so they didn’t warn their masters. We never looked at having to kill lowly orcs as a waste of time or a pain in the ass; it was part of the adventure.

On the other side of that, we got fights like the warlord. And the vampire queen. Foes that we weren’t sure if we could take in a fight or not. There were encounters – some, not often, but enough – where we were overmatched, and we had to retreat to stay alive. And that was taken as a given. Resource management and tactics played a part in things, but there was always a chance that no matter how well we approached an encounter, no matter how clever our tactics, no matter is every character and every hireling was at full strength, our characters were going to die if we fought until the bitter end.

(This didn't necessarily mean we were expected to die when we were overmatched, by the way. Sometimes it was a not-too-subtle way of saying that we were missing something, like a particular magic item. Sometimes it meant coming back for revenge at a higher level. Sometimes it meant getting more hirelings and henchmen. And, sometimes, it meant talking with your enemy was a far better idea than drawing your sword.)

We entered virtually encounter not knowing if we’d survive or not, and damn it, it was exciting. We usually lived, but there was enough character deaths from opponents who were too powerful or the ever-lamentable failed save vs. poison to know that our characters lived in a dangerous, violent world. Just surviving a trip through a dungeon was great; surviving and grabbing the treasure was awesome.

When Third Edition D&D came around, I remember spotting the Challenge Ratings that had been assigned to each monster. I remember reading about Encounter Levels, and nodding my head. Thank Crom. No more need to agonize over whether mixing a bulette with six hobgoblins would be too tough for a party of 5th-level characters, or whether a fight in the graveyard would be better with five ghouls or eight. On the face of it – and I still believe this – knowing how to balance encounters in a game is a Very, Very Good Thing.

But …

The problem – again, just in my opinion – came when players began expecting encounters to be balanced, and when the adventures published for the game took that into consideration.

An initial fight in a D&D 3.5 adventure – or, for that matter, one in 4E – is almost never considered to be something lethal by players, unless it’s completely misplayed or everyone’s dice goes cold all at once. Balance has evolved the game, to a certain degree, into resource management. Players know that as long as they face reasonably-balanced encounters, they almost certainly can survive a couple of combat encounters before needing to heal up and memorize new spells.

And, in a modern gaming philosophy, they expect reasonably balanced encounters, since that’s what is presented and recommended in the rules, and that’s what gets featured in most modern adventures. Players usually don’t give any real thought to retreating from that first or second fight because it’s too tough, since according the “balanced” philosophy, it shouldn’t be too tough. If retreat becomes necessary, then the encounter’s labeled “unfair”. (Assuming the players recognize the need to retreat, of course; if they don’t, then there’s a Total Party Kill before the encounter’s labeled “unfair”.) If the encounter’s not balanced, then the thought is something is wrong, and that’s something I don’t agree with at all.

Other changes to the modern editions of D&D, made in the name of balance … yeah, I didn’t like those much, either. Poison that just causes damage, rather than killing characters outright? Ugh. The deck of many things somehow made the cut to Third Edition, but I wasn’t surprised to see it cut from 4E – Crom forbid that a party not be comprised of everyone from the same level. Ugh.

I totally get the basic premise – balance makes for better designed encounters, which can lead to better adventures. And nobody (well, almost nobody) is a big fan of having their character die simply because they botched one lousy saving throw. If you think balance is a good price to pay for making your adventures better, and makes the players at your table happier, well, I can’t – and won’t – argue with you. If you hate the randomness of the old school game systems, that’s totally fine.

My point is this – much like the rules of an old-school game versus those of a modern game, I think balance is better as a guideline, not a rule. Balance should help in creating adventures, but it shouldn’t be a given that all encounters must be reasonably balanced. Retreat isn’t always a bad thing. The adventures don’t always need to be fair in terms of design or rules. The simple fact that your character can die in any given encounter – to me – makes the game much more dangerous, and much more exciting. And, to me, that keeps the adventures more interesting, and makes the victories all the sweeter.

Just my opinion, though. Or, maybe the rantings of a gamer screaming GET OFF MY LAWN. So feel free to ignore them.

Although I guess I’m more of an old school gamer than I originally thought.

More and more lately, I keep finding myself trying to define what an old school game would be. Some people say it’s not something that can be defined; I don’t really agree with that. Some people define old school as simpler games; can’t agree with that, either. Just take a look at the character creation rules for Traveler sometime, or all the henchmen tables in the 1st-edition AD&D Dungeon Masters’ Guide – not simple. In fact, pretty clunky and rules-heavy at times.

Arriving at a simple definition of old school gaming isn’t something that’s painfully obvious (at least to me), so I decided to give it some thought. I’d previously taken a look at the various editions of D&D and AD&D, so I went back to that and tried specifically looking at the break from 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D to its more modern counterparts – to me, the dividing line comes somewhere in there. After knocking the idea around for a bit, what I concluded was this:

Old school – to me – means that the rules are firm guidelines, intended to mostly define how the game works, but do not ultimately decide how a situation works. The gamemaster is intended to be the final arbiter of how things work. In a more modern game system, the rules aren’t guidelines, they’re laws. The gamemaster’s job is to interpret those laws.

Let me give an example of this.

A very long, long, long time ago on a Tuesday night, in my friend Eric’s 1st-edition AD&D Tunnelworld campaign, our hardy band of adventurers encountered a Haigyptian vampire queen beneath a pyramid. The vampire queen had several ghoulish friends with her, and our party was outmatched and outnumbered. We were there, ostensibly, to parley with her in order to acquire a magic sword from her, or something like that. I think Eric’s plan was that we would agree to go on a quest for her, get some cool artifact, and return to the pyramid after we’d gained a few levels and were capable of taking her on. But, like all good villains do, Eric had her start monologuing at us, so we started plotting ideas.

I was playing a cleric (about 4th-level, I think), my friend John was playing a druid (a deck of many things had him a couple of levels higher than the rest of us). We hit upon the same idea at about the same time.

“Hey, did you know create water is a ranged spell? Only takes one round to cast it.”

“If we create water over her head, and bless it, would that be holy water?”

“Holy water does what – 1d6 points of damage for a direct hit from a vial, 1 point for a splash, something like that?”

“It says we can create a couple of gallons of water with a create water spell.”

“How much water is in a vial?”

“The book says 4 ounces.”

“How many ounces in, say, 4 gallons?”

Pause, for some math.

“Holy shit.”

“Let’s do it.”

So, when the monologue was completed, we announced our plan to Eric. We wanted to dump several gallons of holy water on the vampire queen’s head.

After a brief amount of shock, Eric went through the Dungeon Master’s Guide to see if our plan was even viable, and we pored over our Players’ Handbooks. We really didn’t think the plan would work – it seemed way too easy (and we hadn’t really grasped the concept of ‘broken rules’ as yet, so that notion didn’t occur to us, either.)

Now, here’s the part that helps define old school. Technically, we couldn’t do it. Page 114 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide actually explains the creation of holy water (it’s a ritual that takes hours, spells like purify water are also needed, etc.) But we never found that rule in the book that particular night. Nor, quite honestly, did we look terribly long for it. We were used to the rulebooks not covering exactly what we wanted to do, so we didn’t assume the rules for making holy water must be in the book. Were this D&D 3.5, for example, or 4E, I think we would’ve pored over the books for hours if needed, looking for the precise rules to fit what we were attempting. We would’ve been more determined to have the rules of the game precisely define our actions.

Instead, after maybe fifteen minutes of looking over rulebooks and failing to find what we wanted, Eric made the decision. He thought it seemed ridiculous to just be able to make the equivalent of a holy water atomic bomb over a vampire, so he said we couldn’t do that. However, he basically gave us the equivalent of a Dexterity check (roll your Dex or less on a d20) to cast our spells without being noticed … and then our makeshift holy water would do 6d6 points of damage, or something like that. If we wanted to go through with this plan, that’s how things would work.

So we agreed to it. And we pulled off the plan, such as it was, and much to our own amazement. We rolled really well with the damage, fought the vampire queen and her ghouls long enough for our thief to sneak off undetected and snag the magic sword we were supposed to negotiate for, and then we all ran like hell. We didn’t kill the queen, but we caused enough mayhem to get the treasure. (In what I always thought was a great touch, we encountered the vampire queen again later on in the campaign, with her formerly beautiful face covered by a jewel-encrusted silver mask, as the holy water had horribly burned her flesh.)

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “You can do that with 3.5 and 4E as well.”

Well, yeah … but both systems are designed to more precisely define what you can and can’t do. They’re intended to be the laws defining the game world, not be guidelines. If you ignore the rules in 3.5 and 4E, well, you’re ignoring a lot. But if you’re playing Holmes/Moldvay Basic D&D, or 1st-Edition AD&D … the game’s a lot less dependent on the rules. They might be overly complex or cumbersome at times, but they’re not meant to necessarily describe how every possible action in the game works. In those earlier games, the rules are intended to help shape the game, not rigidly define it.

Another example of this, perhaps.

You have a character in a game. You’re chasing after a villain in a grand ballroom. You want to leap off a balcony, grab onto a chandelier, jump to the ground, and take a swing at the villain before he can escape.

In 3.5, if you’ve got the right combination of skills and feats, you can pull this off. You probably even have a good idea of if you’ll be successful or not. If you don’t have the right combination of skills and feats, you know right away if you can do this or not.

In 4E, same thing. You may even have class powers that help (or not), and the DM may choose to frame this as a Skill Challenge.

In more old school games … there’s no hard and fast rules for this. It might come down more to the DM saying “you can’t do that”, and that’s the end of it. However, in most games I’ve played, the DM may allow this with some rudimentary sort of check (roll under your Dex, make a saving throw vs. Dragon Breath, whatever). I tend to personally prefer this, only because this method – to me – often better serves the adventure at hand. A wizard in 3.5 and 4E would never try this in a million years, only because the odds of achieving all of the appropriate skill checks (and having all of the appropriate feats) are next to none. A magic-user from an older game, though … well, the odds might be low, but at least there’s a chance.

Old school games tend to be a little more wide open, which inspires creativity. It’s probably the thing about D&D 4E that I find the most disappointing – the powers, to me, limit what your characters can do. In running mid-level fighters in 1st-edition AD&D, I found myself trying all sorts of crazy tactics in battle, unsure if they would work … and that was part of the fun of it. In 4E, you try to figure out how to maximize the use of your at-wills, your encounter and your daily powers … and you tend not to stray too far from them, as you’re giving up too much by doing so. Can your 4E fighter do other things in combat? Absolutely. But the rules aren’t designed to actively support that openness, and they don’t encourage trying new things.

I don’t say this in any way to knock newer games. (Hell, I just started running a 4E campaign of my own!) Old-school games have plenty of their own issues. For me, there isn’t a dream edition of D&D or AD&D – each has their own merits and flaws.

But there’s something I personally prefer to the old-school approach, which is probably more of a gaming philosophy than anything else. I prefer DMs working with players to achieve crazy things, like dumping several gallons of holy water on a vampire queen’s head, with the rules meant as something to guide a game, rather than be the game. And for what it's worth, I personally think old school games lend themselves better to achieving moments like that.