Old D&D editions and clones - Lamentation of the Flame Princess

A few years back everyone was publishing games in boxes. Brave Halfling announced a boxed set of Swords&Wizardry, and a crazy American living in Finland announced he was publishing his own game, in a box. I took down my copy of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess box, and re-read it. I love boxed games!

It's interesting to think about what the intended audience is for a game. It used to be standard procedure to include a short section in the beginning of the rules about "What is a role playing game". Considering how common it seems to be to learn to play from someone else, the uselessness of those sections have of course been debated. LotfP consists of not only two books of rules, one book of GM advice and two adventures, it also includes a booklet called "Tutorial". Four years later I wonder how many read that booklet and learned something from it? I do applaud James Raggi for trying to grow the hobby, but I wonder if that booklet was of any use to anyone?

The game is clearly based on D&D. There are classes and armor class, and there are spells per level. Very much D&D. There are some nice tweaks to the D&D baseline, like the Specialist class. I have never really understood the big fuzz about the Thief class, but the Specialist feels like a nice take on it. It's customizable and can be the basis for many fantasy tropes and roles. Another invention is a simple and usable encumbrance system. I like that Intelligence is used for spell saves, and not only giving additional languages. I never found all those languages very useful. After someone invented "common" all that bathwater followed after the baby out the window. Maybe it was the other way around. Whatever.

Then there's the fiddly bits. Lots of fiddly bits. You'll find rules for different combat actions, different AC if you're in melee or in ranged combat and rules for investments and the very old school saving throw system of nonsensical categories from the early seventies in the American mid west. No condition is passed by unmentioned and there are rules for excavating, foraging and lots more. My lasting impression is a little bit like when I read Dark Dungeons or the complete Mentzer sets of D&D. Everything is covered. A more modern comparison would be the revised 3rd ed. D&D. In a way I guess it would make excellent sense if this is a game for a newbie. Whatever you want to know is in there. You're covered, calm down and get on with the game!

When I get to the Referee book, this impression is kind of reinforced. I think most of the advice is very good. Solid and functional suggestions for how to create encounters, adventures and campaigns. There is one thing that stand out, though. James puts a lot of emphasize on how important it is with NPCs. This I find interesting. Clearly James is very old school in his approach to GM when he suggests extreme detachment and fair adjudication of situations. In alignment with the Story Now moniker, his style is very much Story After. It's a post-modern Story, laid on the events in hindsight. It's taking the game part and simulation part very seriously, but putting an emphasis on the NPC I have not seen in many other old school games. I have played the game only once, with the designer himself as Referee. That scenario was all about interacting with the world and the NPCs. When I compare that to some of his other published scenarios they feel very different, being mostly empty places or mysteries placed in your way to explore and trigger like a bomb.

My way of running a game is very much by the seat of my pants. I grab a setting book, a couple of pre-made adventures and modify on the fly very much dependent on Story Now or "wouldn't it be cool to throw this in now, given the context?". I find the approach to the game in the rules and in the advice leave me with awe and admiration. But, it does not make my wheels spin.

This is not a bad game, and some parts are excellent. But having read it, I don't feel engaged. I think my unplanned chaos way of refereeing could use some of the cold analytic approach in the Referee book. Apart from that, I will put this game back on the shelf without any further play. Should the opportunity arise to play with James again, I'd grab that seat in an instant, though!

...and the box is a beauty!

Old D&D editions and clones - AD&D

Way back in the days, I got to take a peek at the game books used by the older brother of one of my class mates and gaming buddy. It was a hardcover volume, and I still remember to this very day that the illustrations struck me as very silly and amateurish. That book was the 1st ed AD&D Players Handbook.

Many years later and I talk to a guy who once he got that game started up a game, and the game is still running, even though the game sessions now are a year or so apart, was started in those early days. That coincided with WotC releasing 3rd ed. D&D and I felt inspired, and bought the game. So I guess AD&D has been a game that has influenced me, pushed me toward other games and coloured my perception of things.

Still, I have never played the game.

I tried to gather some players some years back when I scrounged up a bunch of Rob Kuntz modules, but never managed to get enough for a whole party. It stayed the un-played edition.

I took down one of my two copies of the PHB and perused it. Yeah, I have two copies of a game I've never played. I have three copies of the 2nd ed. DragonQuest and I haven't played that either. Why are you looking at me like that? Anyway. I took down my copy of the PHB, and decided to check it out. Fiddly bits. Dozens of fiddly bits. You come to the section on how to make a character, and it starts with how to roll up your stats. Is this power gaming or what? You are told you need superior stats, and oh do you need them. Multiple bizarre little things are calculated off those stats, like how good you are at lifting gates. Some stats are even rolled with both d6 and a percentile score. Involved is the word.

The thing is, much of this first saw the light of day in the OD&D Supplement I - Greyhawk, and you understand that Gary and Rob must have loved fiddly bits. In their campaign there were so many subsystems and extra house rules added on top of OD&D that the game beneath was barely visible. This is a game for people who love a game, not a tool for creating stories in secondary worlds.

I actually don't have a problem with lot of rules. I have played MERP, and own more than one edition of Rolemaster. I have both Burning Wheel and Burning Empires, and would even consider running them. But, then there are rules. Let's take a look at Surprise. That section of the rules begin by telling you what surprise is, and then suggests you roll a d6, or a d8 explains that then there's a 1 in 8 or a 1 in 6 chance. Then there's a nice table to show how many time increments difference there is in rolling difference sets of results on those dice. It's both simple and extremely convoluted at the same time. Say whatever you will about Rolemaster or Burning Empires, but they are far more consistent and thus handle the weight of those rules quite differently.

Sometimes I catch the wonder, the fantasy and the strange beneath the over- and under-explained rules. I see why some of this caught the imagination. There was arcane mysteries to be unlocked in this mysterious tome, and since I love Call of Cthulhu you can guess why that speaks to me. But, I still don't want to run this game. Playing D&D as a game - as a challenge for the players, not their characters -  would be a different challenge. Maybe one day, but I would probably chuck much of that Gygaxian cruft. It's just not my style.

How to have a moving combat

A while ago we had a game session in our irregular D&D game, and it made me realize that as mechanics went, it was a very clunky game session. I wondered at the time if there was a better way to model what was happening in the fiction, and how the rules might steer you away from something that makes sense in the fiction, but would not be fun or work well in the game mechanics you're using.

We were travelling in a boat, with one PC rowing like crazy since his STR is way better than the rest of the characters. The rest were tasked with protecting a NPC also in the boat, and we were all trying to reach the middle of this lake as fast as possible. That was the easy part. Don't let that fool you, it became a stumbling block for game mechanics as well. More on that later. Now for the dramatic part.

As we sat in that boat, a hundred or so of tiny red dragons circled ahead, and they started to swoop down and attack us. Picture this in your mind.

Picture now in your mind a battle mat, minis on the table for the characters. Now you have to place, and move, all those critters attacking us. Yes. Picture that.

So how on earth do you handle the fact that the boat and its passengers are moving constantly and thus leave the flying creatures behind and new ones come swooping in and you have to keep track of which one is which, and who has gotten 4 hits, 2 hits or maybe is under the influence of a Slow spell? Our DM was kind enough to limit our attackers to just 20, but it was still quite a circus. Also, it was slow moving and it felt quite clunky.

Of course, you could decide that the error here was to bring out the minis and the battle mat in the first place. But, would you do better by trying to just describe all that in vague terms? It would probably be even harder to remember which dragon was hit, and for how much. Maybe the relative movement could have been easier that way, but I'm not sure.

I guess you can tell that 3rd ed D&D was not a great match for this. If I had been the DM, I probably would have tried to figure out a way to change the narrative instead of the rules. But, the setting were set up and I liked the fact that the cool part of what was happening in the setting did happen, regardless of the rules. Thinking about it, I wondered what kind of rules set would handle this.

I pondered some rules I know, and some which people usually grasp for to model wild and woolly action scenes with. Doing a chase in Savage Worlds sounds like it could work quite nice, especially with the new chase rules in SW Deluxe. But, having used those rules I feel they are only slightly less painful than the alternative, not pleasant. Picking another favourite in the gaming scene online, Fate, don't solve it either. You could use Zones and maybe abstractly make the movement easier to handle that way, but the damage tracking would still be there. Frankly I'm not sure the chase would not have been a bit bland in Fate, really. I have not checked the Toolkit book for any rules about chases, though. BRP would probably be just as cumbersome as D&D.

So no great and simple solution readily available, eh?

What was it I wrote about the rowing? Yeah, you know what? There are no numbers in the book about how fast you move in a boat. Seriously? No data? Sailing? Rowing? Nothing. You have to make it up, and guess if that turned into a show stopper as well... While I felt the DM handled the scene as well as could be expected when the action finally started, I really wanted to scream when people slowly and politely discussed how fast beasts and boat should be able to move.

The session left me with the question of how to better model this, and I've still to find the answer.

D&D character generation. Return of an old... friend?

So, tonight I made my first new D&D character in a while! Some friends of a friend have been playing in a campaign for the last five or six years, and now they had an opening. Never being one to pass an opportunity to play, I jumped at it.

Have you made a character in 3rd ed. D&D recently? I can tell you I haven't. I bought the book when they were new, never got on the revised bandwaggon, and ran a campaign for some years. I don't even remember how long time it was! Five years? Three?

I at once felt how some things in that game didn't make sense, already at the character generation step. Many skills are kind of wonky, and the cross class system is clunky. Also, the feat tree is something of a mess. The fact that I got to generate a level 8 character to be on par with the rest of the party might have made it fiddlier than usual, though.

Tinkerer as I am, I started thinking how you could streamline things. How about you take out the hierarchical system for the feats, making it all flat? How about you remove some skills like Use Rope and Escape Artist and merge agile manoeuvres into a few sensible skills, and social interaction skills into active and passive ones? There are many loose ends to start pulling on! I still really like the idea of metamagical feats, though.

I ended up with a multi-classed human Rogue 3/Wizard 5 character. It will be interesting to see how it feels in play!

The minutiae of gaming - training costs

In my latest post I talked about keeping track of the small stuff. Thinking on how I could have used taxes, fees and encumbrance made me remember my 3rd ed. D&D campaign.

That campaign was strongly influenced by the "Third editions rules, first edition feel" that was the motto of Necromancer Games. Some of that broke down when treasure entered the equation. I did use encumbrance rules and while they didn't stop any of my players, it at least slowed them down.

One oddity which was rampant when the campaign finally ended, was that gold no longer was worth it's weight in gold! Yeah, I know how absurd that sounds.

My players had realized that money was worthless unless you could use it to buy magic items, so unless it was gold in the thousands it was not worth picking up. You could probably make a case against selling and buying magic items from that, but I thought about something else in relation to my last blog post.

If encumbrance means so little when you have Handy Haversack and Bags of Holding, would exchange fees and taxes do much either? Basically, why bother?

To bring this together with my experiences of another game with checks and balances regarding money, I will relate this to my Megadungeon campaign in Tunnels & Trolls. In that campaign you didn't get xp for gold. That used to be in an older edition, but it was taken out due to the Monte Haul effect (so Ken St Andre told me). You did have to pay for magical training, though.

After having played a bit, there were not much incentive any longer to go adventuring in order to buy stuff. When you have the best armour there is, and the best weapon you can use you have to look further.This campaign did not break down due to two things. I was blessed with very good players who took upon themselves to create bigger and greater goals, like starting a tavern and a university. Almost like the old D&D rules for starting to build a stronghold. The second thing was that higher level spells still cost and arm and a leg to pay for training.

The lesson of this is that even if you don't use a rule like xp for gold, it's still a good idea to use training costs.

(edit: fixed a broken link)

Restarting old campaigns - my first old school campaign

Many of us have fond memories of old campaigns, where fun was had by all and the dice were hot and the action over the top. For most of us, those stay as memories. Then again, you might get the idea to restart that group again. If it was great before, all you need is the same game, players and a set-up for action, right? It should work, it did last time.

When I've read online about restarted campaigns, there seem to be a consensus on how to do it. Don't. But, right now I'm still pondering it. I am bored to tears by the fact that some of my attempts at starting some gaming have failed miserabl, and now something have changed. Somebody have asked  me to run a game.

Back when 3rd ed was new, I had just bought it for the discounted initial price. My intent was to have it for reference, and to make it easier to do conversions. But, on ENWorld there was a thread about each of some of the classic TSR modules for AD&D. I read about the A series, the D series and a few more. Since I had read a review somehwhere of the 2nd ed Slavers module, and bought it, I was interested in the A modules. I got rid of the 2nd ed stuff, bought the older ones and decided that since 3rd ed actually looked like a proper game (it had skills) I should try to actually use it. All those people had fun with A1-A4, right?

Apart from the skill centric game view (I still have BRP in my veins), I missed a few other things. Running A1 was fun, and it wasn't a bad game. It wasn't at all like the stories of how it played back then, but we keept going. It was to be the founding of a campaign that lasted almost five years. My longest, so far. We played a bunch of Necromancer modules (1st ed feel, right?) and had battled our way to Erelhei-Cinlu.

Now I look back at it, and there so much of it that I don't want to go back to. The Attacks of Opportunity, and the enormous amount of data to keep track of for NPCs are two important things. But, it's gaming and right now I'm starved. Should I eat mouldy bread, since it's offered? Maybe it's not even mould, just a funny discolouring.

While I'm waiting for more invitations to games which suit my present taste better, I'm seriously thinking of how I could make a restarted 3rd ed game less painful. It must be possible, right? God knows. Until I make up my mind I'm thinking of writing something about the A series, since I have run them now. I became a better DM by doing it. Some of those amusing stories are now mine to tell, and even if the rules had their problems we did have fun.