Why Are Kobolds So Slow?

My players had a bad run-in with some kobolds tonight.  The party threw some flaming oil into a room where the kobolds were, killing two and prompting a failed morale roll.  The kobolds retreated out of the room and set up an ambush down the hall.  The players spent some time hemming and hawing before over-extending and rushing down the hall, causing the fighter to get surrounded and dropped by kobold spearmen.  It looked like the situation might spiral out of control but the party won initiative, allowing them to get the critical sleep off.

I hadn't realize just how slow kobolds are until I was retreating down the hall with them.  They're as slow as a man in plate but they only have AC 12!  It's kind of remarkable.

Goblins are also quite slow, at 60' speed.

One explanation, the in-world explanation, is that they're short and have stubby little legs.  But halflings get 90' speed in the monster entry (and 120' as PCs)...

I'm thinking maybe there's a game-reason.  Kobolds and goblins are the weakest and first humanoid monsters most players meet.  They're the ones players are most likely to over-extend into.  Their lack of speed limits their ability to pursue and punish player over-extensions - they might get the fighter and the cleric, but the MU and the thief might actually be able to outrun them if things go bad.

Orcs, on the other hand, have 120' speed - a big step up.  This might be a bigger deal than the full 1 HD in making them more threatening to low-level parties than goblins.  When you start meeting orcs, the training wheels are off and they can give a good chase even if you're lightly-encumbered.

It's kind of an interesting alternate lens on differentiating weak humanoids from my previous approach - maybe the significant mechanical differences are already there, and I've just overlooked them.

Notes from Three Sessions of OSE

I've gotten a weekly-ish game off the ground at the office after work lately.  We'll see if it survives the 4th of July disruption. I've done a lot of theorizing since the last time I actually ran a game and figured it might be fun to keep a kind of scorecard around how well those theories are working in practice.

Wandering monsters as lurking threat - this has worked great.  I don't think they've met a wandering monster head-on yet; instead they hear doors opening and closing and motion in the distance and they haul ass to get away from it or hunker down and hope it wanders somewhere else.  There is one group of enemies who they have heard and seen tracks of but never met face-to-face, which have developed a fearsome reputation which may or may not be accurate.  The monster you don't see is much scarier than the monster you do see.

15-room dungeons - mixed success.  I've built two levels in this style with a third in progress.  Their exploration of the dungeon has been very slow; in three sessions I think they've seen seven rooms, so about half of the first level.  Consequently I have been somewhat lazy with prepping further material.  I do think 15 rooms is a good size to play with a theme without it overstaying its welcome, at least on the DM side; I can come up with 15 interesting ideas riffing on a theme, but 30 would be pushing it.  Whether it overstays its welcome on the player side remains to be seen I think.  I do think the 160ft by 160ft level/tile size that I proposed in that post is too small; the first level, which I built to that size, feels a bit cramped to me.  The second level is a bit larger, maybe 200x200 and feels more right, at least to my sense of how a dungeon level should feel.

How 1st level play is supposed to work - Seems accurate so far.  I started them off with 3d6x100 XP each, which made 2nd level clerics and thieves possible from the start but in practice nobody rolled one.  The cleric and thief just leveled at the end of this last session.  They have been playing very cautiously; in three sessions they have evaded three? random encounters, successfully retreated from two combats (one via closing a door in front of enemies without fingers, the other by blocking a passage with oil - they are learning), and only fought and won two combats (one via sleep and the other via strength of arms, at the cost of the life of one fighter).  The great bulk of the treasure they have recovered so far was from a special/puzzle room where one possible outcome was treasure and another was giant spiders.  So I think our limited impression agrees with the idea that first level is "won" on unguarded treasure.  It's been interesting to see how at first level, characters can be broadly divided into "MUs (with sleep)" and "everyone else, who are bags of HP, AC, and mundane equipment".

Resting in the dungeon - too soon to tell. I've provided securable areas to do this in, and have informed the players that resting in the dungeon will require rations and clean water if they want to go overnight and recover spells, but they haven't done it yet.  I'm still not totally sure how wandering monster rolls will work with this, but I do have one or two things on the table for the second level that may pose a threat to bunkering characters.

No henchmen - This is working well I think; players are assuming their own risks and playing more cautiously than the hireling meatgrinder games we had with ACKS.  I'm almost loathe to introduce henchmen now, but I think by the time PCs start hitting 3rd level, having 2nd level replacements on deck rather than having to go back to 1st will make a lot of sense.

Infravision and mapping - Too soon to tell.  I haven't allowed demihuman classes yet, since they weren't in the OSE quickstart rules.  We almost had an elf the other day; the fighter and the MU both couldn't make that day but we had a new player who rolled Int and Str both around 14.

Getting Started with Gauntlets

I keep putting off actually building gauntlet dungeons.  I've been thinking a little about why that is.  What are the hard problems here that I've quietly, subconsciously hemming and hawing over for like two years now?

One troublesome thing is that I feel like if I'm going to build levels that test the presence and effective use of certain classes, I should keep those levels sort of "balanced" between each other, so that certain classes don't feel like they're useless.  This almost implies a horizontal dungeon structure - if class-check levels are in series with descending dungeon level, then some class is still going to feel shafted or "dependent" on another class to get them down to where they shine.  And this also dilutes the viability of weird party comps which I was hoping for from class-focused levels.

I'm not really sure how I feel about building "wide" dungeon levels with sublevels testing individual classes.  Maybe this is an overreaction to being burnt on Rathell, the widest single level I've ever run.  I'm not sure how much patience / tolerance players will have for a single level of difficulty, even if it presents somewhat varied challenges.  On the other hand, it might make finding a path down more special (or more intimidating).

One solution to these two concerns / conflicting requirements is thinking more finely-grained about class-check levels and mixing class checks within single, smaller levels.  Rather than making a level (for example) a thief check or a cleric check, throw in individual elements that are cleric or thief checks.  A level might have a bunch of locks and a bunch of shriekers, testing thief for open locks and cleric for silence, or it might have a bunch of traps and undead, checking thief for trapfinding and cleric for turning (or cleric for find traps...).  So thinking about classes as bundles of features that are individually tested, and making testing multiple classes within a single level the standard.

This sounds pretty easy for thief, MU, and cleric - thief has a bunch of skills (which "come online" at varying rates), and MU and cleric have huge banks of spells to test individually.  Fighter is the tough one.  Clerics can pass AC checks just as well as the fighter, thieves can pass magic sword checks just as well as the fighter.  Cleaving checks (if one's game even has cleaves) are often passable by MUs with sleep, fireball, etc.  Max HP is a strange thing to test; I guess you could kinda do the 5e death spell thing, conditioning effects on max HP?  Rejigger sleep and cloudkill to work off of max HP rather than HD?  That's actually a really funny thought.  Conditioning effects on a 4e-style "bloodied" status when people are at half, so having bigger HP pools changes when those effects kick in?

I suppose one thing fighters are likely to have that most other characters will neglect (or at least not be raising through ability score tradeoffs) is just brute Strength.  Bring out the stuck doors, the portcullises that need lifted, the columns that need toppled, the stones that need carried, the chains that need pulled or broken.  This idea is growing on me - what sort of funhouse dungeon is complete without some strongman competition events?  So your MU has ogre power, fine, it's only three turns, Fafhrd here can flex those thews all day long.

Another angle on classes, if one were to build multiple smaller (say) 3-level dungeons, would be to tightly-class-theme individual dungeons.  Then you're not blocked on getting to the Thief Level by having to pass the Cleric Level.  And it's a pleasing idea from the in-world perspective; the legendary thief is gonna build a three-level gauntlet of traps and locks and sheer walls to make sure that whoever gets his gold is a worthy successor, you know?  The ruined temple of the Krolm is a gauntlet of strength and hit points and cleaving, it will take a lot of lore and prep to get into the sanctum of the Old Archmagos, etc.  The undead angle on clerics is a bit odd; maybe it's what is being kept in rather than out.  Or holy places with features intended to keep the unfaithful out have fallen to darkness.

Returning to "test multiple class features within a single megadungeon level", though, the other difficulty I have is in the very first level of a gauntlet megadungeon, for completely new players.  You just know their party composition is going to get messed up by casualties and you might not want them to rely on hirelings to patch it up.  I would almost be tempted to put "big scores" behind checks on individual class "core feature" like sleep and turning - getting a cleric or MU to the right place and recognizing that that's the right time (eg, to not have blown your sleep on a piddly random encounter) is a good start and a behavior we want to reinforce.  Other than that, maybe fundamentals of practice are the thing to focus on, like basic mapping?  A caller check, around "can the caller successfully interrupt impulsive players about to do something stupid?"  Maybe checks on mundane gear are also a good theme; most of that stuff is well within the purchasing power of first-level characters and mundane gear checks aren't dependent on having any particular class still alive.

Maybe that's an interesting solution to the first-level problem.  For seasoned veterans, a dungeon level with few monsters focused on mundane gear "puzzles" could be a bit dull.  But for people who have never played before, just successfully executing on the basics of dungeon exploration and random encounters could be a stimulating challenge even without having to worry about tackling serious (eg humanoid) lairs.

So then maybe the second level introduces humanoid faction play and gets more serious about mapping, logistics, traps...  What would be a good "capstone" for a three-level 'tutorial' gauntlet dungeon, I wonder?

Grim Dawn's Dungeon Blockers and Ye Olde Evil Doors

Grim Dawn does a couple of things in its dungeon that are sometimes annoying but fundamentally clever.  There are no randomly-generated maps in Grim Dawn.  The closest thing is a randomly-generated infinite dungeon, but each level is drawn from a pool of fixed level maps.  Given that a typical character runs through all of the campaign content in the game several times, in the traditional Diablo model, one would expect players to develop highly-efficient routes through the campaign area maps.

In order to prevent these repeatedly-traversed campaign zones from becoming stale without having to resort to random generation (with the difficulties that that would entail, like nonsensical outputs), the Grim Dawn devs have put places on some maps (mostly dungeons and towns, but a few wilderness areas) where random blockers can appear.  Piled of burning garbage, doorways that are full of rocks, that sort of thing.  They have the potential to appear in a fairly small number of carefully-selected spots in each dungeon, they're re-randomized per session (save and reload, basically, which also returns you to town), and generally you can't see them until you get fairly close to the spot they're blocking.  What all this means is that you can't consistently run optimal routes that you plan out before entering the dungeon.  There's a good chance that any such planned route will be blocked and you'll have to detour off it and then find a way back onto it, and your detour might also be blocked!  This means that finding paths remains gameplay even with hundreds of hours in the game and tens of runs through each area.  There are real choices and problem-solving in path-selection even when you have perfect knowledge of the unrandomized parts of the underlying level.  So despite having a constant underlying structure, navigating these areas remains engaging.

This seems like something which, obviously, could be adapted to OSR dungeons.  As DMs, we're under the same pressures to reuse content that Grim Dawn's devs were, and fully-procedural dungeons carry similar difficulties.  And it would be consistent with the No Homework ethos - no homework'd plan to traverse known parts of the dungeon will necessarily survive.  Reducing the rewards for homework is likely to reduce the amount of homework done.

Another clever, engaging thing that Grim Dawn does in its dungeons is find any excuse to have enemies "appear" in close proximity or behind you while you've engaged enemies in front of you.  Zombies, skeletons, and giant insects burrow out of the ground behind or around you.  Spiders drop from the ceiling.  Wraiths and outsiders materialize out of thin air.  Often these animations take long enough that if you're in motion, you can leave these appearing monsters in the dust and never have to deal with them.  This works great if you're running a nice planned path...  but when you run into a blocker and have to backtrack, or run into stern opposition, these guys can really catch up with you.  So blowing past them is a gamble, and they serve as a sort of potential energy mechanic.

But obviously, it would be silly to have goblins just appear out of nowhere near and behind you.  Unless...

Enter the much maligned stuck/evil door.  Obviously, goblins can come out of it on short notice!  And where better to place planned-path-breaking blockers than in doorways?  You could place your careful cut-points in hallways, but your dungeon already has all these doorways!  But it's not quite the same, because they're not blocked per-expedition, and a party can retry opening them.  Right?

Well...  not necessarily.  Looking at OD&D and the 1e DMG, it really isn't clear how long it takes to open a stuck/evil door, and doesn't explicitly say that it can be retried.  Not being able to retry forcing would give you a good reason to bring out the axes and exercise the door-breaking mechanic, so in a certain light the door-breaking mechanic's existence might be circumstantial evidence for rejecting retries on forcing doors.  And indeed there are apparently folks who play without permitting retries to open stuck doors - this post from Knight at the Opera, down in the "Dense Megadungeons" section, takes this position, and examines the effects on potential paths through the dungeon.  A door which the party failed to open on the first d6 roll was stuck closed to them for the rest of that expedition into the dungeon.  Knight at the Opera mapped out the paths that four expeditions had taken as a result of doors that they couldn't open.  Their patterns of exploration ended up deeper and more linear in structure than the patterns of dungeon exploration I'm used to seeing, because if they found a room with three doors, probably only one of them would open, so they explored where they were able, subject to door luck.  And obviously a door amenable to being opened by the party could then also be reopened within the same expedition (though it might require a roll that could be retried).

It's still not quite the same as Grim Dawn's dungeon blockers, but if you change the probabilities to something like 1 in 6 doors stuck (for the party) in any given expedition, I think you'd end up with a similar disruption of planned paths through explored areas and a similar excuse to have monsters sneak in behind parties, without wildly altering the pattern of exploration.  One complication is that you may want to leave all areas accessible during any given expedition, which could require sometimes rejecting a roll's result (if a stuck result would block the last path to an area).  But that's a rather principled sort of rejection of a random result, and one with good gameplay consequences (probably?).

Productively Repressed Novelists

Executive summary: Write stories about things that have already happened in your world prior to the PCs' involvement.  Cut those stories into bite-sized chunks and scatter them around adventure sites for PCs to find.

I've been playing a lot of Grim Dawn recently.  Possibly an unreasonable amount.  It's an ARPG in a "Victorian+magic" setting that has recently had an apocalypse.  Grim Dawn's main story is...  thin.  It's kind of a checklist of "oh no we've discovered a new threat to the surviving humans", with occasional choices in how to handle humans you meet on the road.  Most of these choices are reducible with experience to their mechanical outcomes.  In practice it's an excuse to go interesting places, vaporize monsters, and take their stuff.  This is fine by me - never let a narrative get in the way of gameplay.

Where Grim Dawn succeeds at storytelling is in its lore notes.  You find them scattered around the world and they give you many more perspectives on that world.  The baddies plotting, your NPC allies realizing apocalypse is coming, refugees fleeing the capital, regular folks turning to dark powers to survive, stubborn farmers refusing to leave their land, a civilization collapsing to a previous apocalypse, all of this stuff that happened before the game starts is delivered to the player in written notes.  It's the polar opposite of the exposition-dump; rather than getting a single long, boring account of the world from a third-person narrator, it's delivered in bits and pieces by a multitude of (sometimes unreliable and conflicting) in-world sources.

Grim Dawn does a couple things here that might be worth noting and stealing for tabletop RPGs.  The first is that notes are short and often serialized.  Rather than dropping a 12-paragraph story on you, they'll cut it up into four notes each of three paragraphs and scatter them around an area.  When you find part three first and read it, and realize there's no closure, you know that there must be more before and after.  It encourages you to explore the world to find the rest of the series of notes.  It leaves gaps for you to speculate into - to imagine into.  You wouldn't just show them the map - don't just show them the full lore!  (Does it strain disbelief to have pages of a diary scattered over a half-acre?  Maybe.  Is it worth it?  Probably, I think)

Reading lore notes in Grim Dawn also gives you XP.  I don't know that this is quite the right thing for a game like D&D, but selling lore notes to an historian for GP, by which you earn XP?  Hell yeah.  Some players may be excited about finding lore for its own sake, some may need a more concrete reward, but as long as the table as a whole's reaction to finding a lore note is "score!" you're headed in the right direction.  Make finding them gameplay, and reward that gameplay.

Finally, Grim Dawn is never pushy with the lore notes.  When you mechanically "read" a lore note and get the XP, it gets copied into your quest log and remains available there.  Maybe you only have an hour to play tonight and you need to grab that next portal, so you're not doing any reading.  No worries, it'll be there next time when you've beaten the boss and are taking a breather in town to rebalance your gear.  This is kind of a confident move on Grim Dawn's part; when a game makes you sit through cutscenes and exposition, it is because they're worried about what will happen if you miss something.  Grim Dawn says "whatever man, if you miss a lore note or never get around to reading all the ones you do find, it's fine.  My core gameplay is strong enough to bear it."  Just so - don't read lore notes to your players like boxed text!  Pass them a paper copy and make the page on the campaign wiki visible to them.  If they want one guy to skim and summarize, fine!  If they want to read it aloud, fine!  If they just want to pass it to the one guy who cares about lore (who becomes the party archivist), fine!

Taken all together, Grim Dawn's approach to lore notes strikes me as an eminently appropriate attitude for lore-delivery in tabletop games, especially OSR games.  In exploration-driven games, it is a given that players will miss stuff - you have to be OK with that anyway.  In a game that keeps AD&D's apocalypse, having surviving lore in the written word rather than being able to ask people questions about the world makes sense.  And stories about the past of the world don't step on the toes of player agency; you can have your well-structured narratives and character development, just separated from your emergent narrative by time.

In conclusion: if you must novelize, OSR DMs, serial-novelize the history leading up to the PCs, not their current actions, and scatter your serial in adventure sites.

Clean-up Blips - Janitorial Random Encounters

I had a dream last night that I was a rat-man in a dungeon that human adventurers invaded.  Lacking the strength to confront them and their hunting-cats directly, I worked to douse their light sources, lead them into ambushes, and change the environment behind them to make it more confusing.

It occurs to me that this is basically the life of a sensor-blip-style random encounter, where they linger in the dungeon near parties rather than moving to confront them directly.  And the idea of having random encounters behind the party "clean up" the dungeon is one I hadn't considered before; I know the idea of "dungeon clean-up crew" monsters appeared in some of the older books, but I took it as an ecological consideration, something that happened between adventures rather than during.  It amuses me, the image of a crew of ratman janitors armed with a mops and buckets, doing their part to fight the humans by hauling away the bodies, cleaning up the blood, erasing the chalk or charcoal graffiti, trying to put out the oil fires, maybe even moving the furniture around so that they'll have a harder time finding their way back out of the dungeon.

Out of Characters? Play the Monsters

Had a discussion recently about how to handle players whose characters have died during a dungeon crawl.  One traditional solution, back even to Gygax, is to have new characters appear in the dungeon at the first plausible opportunity, maybe having been captured by monsters or being the remnants of another adventuring party.

I don't really like that solution though.  At the very least it messes with the resource management game, to have new characters at full HP, full spells, and full equipment joining the party in the middle of the dungeon as a matter of course.  As an infrequent thing, I wouldn't mind too much - meet another party, roll well on reaction, join up, fine.  If it were accompanied by some resource exhaustion on the incoming character, that might be fine too.  But the stated policy of many DMs, to have new characters join the party at the next possible excuse, does not seem like a policy that I would want to make known to my past (occasionally exploitative) players, particularly in the presence of the Reserve XP rule allowing them to bring in new characters of higher than 1st level.

Maybe the problem here is really Reserve XP.

But in any case, that's not the thought that I came to share.  As I mentioned last post, Beyond the Black Gate has been on my mind.  Another post of his which has been influential on my thought was about Arneson's impartiality, and this bit sprang to mind:

He would go so far, sometimes, as letting the players roll the dice for both sides of a conflict. Once, when the party's boat was a attacked by a horde of lizardmen, he told us how many there were, their armor class, their hit points, what they needed to hit us, and so on. They were stupid, he explained, and fanatic, and would fight to the death, so we should be able to take care of that ourselves, and he was going to go get a coke and he'd be back in a few minutes to check on us. Half of the players grinned at his audacity (me included), while the other half looked around for the hidden cameras or waited for the punch line.

And Boot Hill's bit about having players with no stake in a particular fight play the opposing NPCs is also fresh.  So...

If a player with all dead characters has finished rolling up their next one and is now bored, let them run some of the monsters in combat.  Heck, maybe let them direct some random encounters out around the edge of torchlight.  I could see this being tricky to do well given partial information - presumably you don't want to show the player the ground-truth dungeon map, because his next incarnation may well come back to this section.  But I think having them run, say, an humanoid champion and his goons in a combat is probably pretty reasonable.

When I was first starting to learn to DM, my father did something similar, I think, introducing me to monster statblocks and letting me run a few of them in combat.  Granted, that was in 3rd Edition, where the statblocks were a lot more complex, but I still think this might be a reasonable avenue to help players get familiar with how things work on the other side of the screen.

Undercity Dungeons and Turning City Maps into Dungeons

I got to thinking about dungeons under cities last night.  I'm not sure why exactly; I think it might've been that I've been thinking about variable corridor width since the gauntlets post, and it linked up with variable road width, the difference between broad streets and narrow alleys.

Many ancient cities were built on the ruins of older settlements, and if you repeated this process multiple times then it makes sense for an undercity dungeon to have multiple levels, with each deeper layer being the buried ruins of an older settlement.

Obviously placement beneath a population center has some nice properties for a campaign tentpole megadungeon besides just explaining its existence; low-level parties don't need to brave the wilderness to get there, the loop to resupply and return to the dungeon is tighter, and you have a ready source of rival adventuring parties.  But I think taking each layer / level as a layer of past settlement has further advantages which are less often talked about.

If you take a neighborhood as your basis for a dungeon level, rather than a single building, it might get a lot easier to manage mentally.  You can give your corridors street names and your rooms addresses.  Assigning functions to rooms should be easier here than in my traditional Dwarf Fortress-style dungeons, because you can reuse functions - each settlement was an independent layer, so each layer should have somewhere that was a granary or a forge, for example, versus a highly-vertical Dwarf Fortress-style dungeon where you have one granary or forge area for the whole dungeon.  So you need fewer ideas, and you can get mileage out of your everyday experience of the simple necessities of life as a civilian, versus trying to think of what dwarves would need in their fortresses or what evil wizards need in their towers.

I think the main difficulty might be dealing with density.  If you look at maps of Pompeii or Herculaneum, they're pretty dense, with many houses sharing walls.  This isn't how most people live in the modern West, but it would make for great dungeoneering.

Tell me this doesn't look like a dungeon map

Another interesting difference from typical dungeon maps is that when you have long, straight roads-turned-corridors, it becomes relatively easy to get close to any single point in the dungeon, versus having a mess of twisty corridors where all routes are circuitous.  I'm not sure that's a desirable property, but it might be worth experimenting with.  Certainly there were pre-industrial settlements with road patterns that would make mapping hell for the players (more hub-and-spoke than grid).  Playing with road patterns would be an interesting way to differentiate levels.

This does get away from the fantastical funhouse megadungeon and back towards the realistic ruins end of the dungeon spectrum though.  Still, it might be fun to throw a level with city-esque topology (of long, wide, straight corridors with branching narrow alleys and dense blocks of "housing") into a funhouse megadungeon.

So does anyone know of good sources of more line maps of archaeological cities like that one?

The Rumor Mill

Someone in discord asked recently how you'd go about generating rumors on the fly in response to PCs hiring level 0 men to canvass taverns and listen to all the gossip.  

 

Rumors should be plausible, but improbable; unreliable, but occasionally prophetic.  Part of the fun of rumors and gossip is guessing at what is true and what is false.  But generating facts about the world is hard, especially facts that might be known (or believed) in town, but are still relevant to adventurers.

 

I have three ideas in mind, depending on what structures you're using to keep track of of the state of the world.

1. Clocks

If you're using something like Dungeon World's clocks, then gathering rumors is a good way to reveal the existence of a clock or part of its state.

2. Trouble queue

If you have a trouble queue and there's an event that is about to be popped from it, having an ear to the ground might alert the players to that incoming event before it arrives.  Maybe take the top element and two others from deeper in the queue; the two from deep in the queue are false leads that look like they could be indicators of near-term action by those enemies, while the one from the top is the truth.

3. The Renegade Crowns Approach

Make lists of each of the following:

1. Dungeon power centers
• Rival low-level adventuring parties (3-5)
• Humanoid lair leaders in the local dungeon (3-5) 
• The dragon on level 7
  
2. Local (town to county-scale) power centers
• The local head priest and the temple
  
• The local thieves' guilds and their leaders
• Black market merchants
  
• The count and his guards
  
• The coven
• Local humanoid wilderness lair leaders 
• Small mercenary bands
  
• etc
  
3. Regional powers
• The duke
• The patriarch
• The archmage
  
• The khan next door
• The evil overlord
• Smaug, Godzilla, Cthulhu, or other kaiju-with-cult
  
• etc
  

Generally a rumor is likely to have legs if it is juicy, and rumors are juicy when they're interpersonal.  Roll 1d3 to pick which of those three lists to start with.  Roll on that list to pick one of the parties in the rumor.  Roll 1d6 to determine which list the other party is from; 1-2 they're from one list "down" the social order, 3-4 from the same list, and 5-6 from one list "above" the original party.  If there is no list above or below, just use the original party's list.  Then roll a party from the second list.  If it's the same as the first party, then the interaction was internal to that group.  If neither of the parties is welcome in town, consider rolling again (it would be weird for there to be a rumor about two beastman bands fighting in the dungon, but not totally implausible).  

Once you've determined the two parties involved in the rumor, make a roll to determine the alleged nature of their recent interaction:

1. Bloodshed or plotting thereof
   
2. Shouting and fisticuffs, or destruction or theft of property
3. Faux pas, snub, or other disrespect likely to have repercussions
   
4. Secret meeting
• ("Ol' Bargum said 'e saw the duke 'imself leaving the Vulgar Unicorn this morning...  Can't see why 'e'd be in there, but a bit early to be in the bottle, even for Bargum.")
  
5. Conspiracy against a third party (roll again for stratum and party)
   
6. Tryst or otherwise strong and secret alliance
   

Note that we don't want a 2d6 reaction-type roll here, with a strong central tendency.  We want scandal, suspicion, big highs and big lows which might be blown a little out of proportion.  Rolling lots of ambivalent 7s on 2d6 would just make our job of making up an explanation harder.

 

As an example: we might roll a 1 on the 1d3 and get a rival adventuring party, then a 6 for "one step up the ladder", roll the local high priest/temple on that list, and a 6 on the interaction.  Maybe the rival party's cleric is sleeping with the high priest to get cheap healing.  Maybe the rival party are secretly sworn servants of the temple.  Maybe they owe the high priest a life-debt or he has them under a geas.  If we had instead rolled 3 for "same social stratum" and then the same rival adventuring party, and then 6 again, maybe one of the "PCs" tried to seduce one of their party member's henchmen.

When your players receive rumors, roll several.  Secretly pick one to be true, then tell all of them, true and false, to your players.

Gauntlets and Embracing the Funhouse Dungeon

I was perusing my archives and came across this post on Dark Souls.  The section on gauntlets jumped out at me.  As noted previously, I've been considering trying to run an open-table OSE game, stealing bits from ACKS and elsewhere.  But I would need a dungeon.  I haven't been able to bring myself to make one.

My past dungeons have been fairly simulation-driven.  What was this place before, what was this room when it was inhabited.  And my players never really...  seemed to realize that background was there and make inferences based on it.  And because they were built to be "real", my dungeons tended to be similar to each other, most of the time.  I can point to definite similarities in the layout of the mountaintop monastery in the Bjornaborg campaign and the necromancer academy in the Shieldlands campaign, four years apart.

I think it was some combination of boredom and too much work that made me tired of making dungeons.  Rathell was a reaction against this, and I consider it a partial success - it was topologically interesting and fun to build and run NPC opposition in.  But it was too much Rathell.

Gauntlets provide an interesting out for "too much of the same".  Take a large dungeon.  Split it into "levels".  Jayquay connections between the levels.  Make the levels "test" different things.

• Class gauntlets - does your party have / have enough
• Clerics - undead (especially incorporeal), disease and poison
• Thieves - most dungeons are sort of thief-checks already.  Traps, locks, sheer surfaces, secret doors, enemies who sound alarms.
• Fighters - hard to say, because they are already so central / default.  I guess in ACKS where fighters cleave up, decent-sized groups of enemies who aren't big enough to waste a sleep on.
  
• Wizards - also hard to say, because they do too much.  Big non-undead lair fights where you need sleep, as a low-level example.
  
• Gear checks
• Ranged weapons - open areas with lots of broken terrain and pits and enemies who have ranged weapons 
• Melee - fog, lots of small rooms and tight corners
  
• Reach weapons - enemies who are dangerous to engage closely (poison blood, damage auras) or who have reach themselves
• Small weapons - confined spaces, enemies who grapple, enemies who swallow whole
  
• Iron spikes - areas with lots of portcullises and evil doors that shut by themselves unless spiked open
  
• Rope - pits
  
• Lanterns - wind that extinguishes torches (before continual light anyway)
  
• Axes, shovels, picks - wood, earthen, and stone barriers (or Barrowmaze's bricked-up doorways, for example)
  
• Lycanthropes and vampires already sort of fit this model as "gear check monsters" 
• And gargoyles and other enemies immune to nonmagic weapons
• Are shriekers and cave locusts silence 15' radius checks?
  
• Spell - maybe the right way to look at wizard checks is areas that get a lot easier if you have a particular spell available, and to consider it on a per-spell basis.  Detect Magic, Read Language, Dispel Magic, and the elemental resistances seem like sort of obvious ones.
  
• Culture / practice / adaptation checks
• Mapping - mazes, areas with lots of very similar rooms where it's easy to get lost if you don't map or do it badly
  
• Speed - areas with long hallways that take lots of time to traverse and "the park closes at sundown" areas.  Fast enemies who pursue.
  
• Encumbrance / carrying capacity - heavy treasure, heavy doors that need a lot of strength to open.
  
• Big party - 20' wide or wider hallways, where holding the line with just PCs isn't going to work
• Small party - 5' wide hallways, where large parties just get strung out and can't bring their power to bear on any particular point.
• Diplomacy - big sentient lairs who you can negotiate with but who are very dangerous if approached aggressively
• Courage / resolve - Strong but low-morale enemies, magic tricks that reward the first player to solve them (as also seen in Barrowmaze)
  
• Temperance (vs greed) - monkey traps, where the encumbrance is sufficient that if you try to take all of the loot you get got on the way out
  

And then you pick multiple.  So you might have a crypt with lots of locks and traps and undead which is a lot easier with both clerics and thieves, or a maze of narrow twisty passages full of portcullises which needs mapping, iron spikes, melee, and small parties to traverse efficiently.  And then if there's an area that your party is ill-suited for, you explore for routes that let you bypass it for areas that are better for you.

The interesting combinations are probably the ones that put you on the horns of dilemma.  Stacking both fog and lots of narrow corridors isn't very interesting, because they both encourage melee.  An area full of pits and portcullises and archers and high wind is interesting because you need a bunch of different gear and it all competes for encumbrance.

I'm not proposing to go maximalist with this.  Obviously players will find novel solutions, and that's good.  And there's no need to make every area so tightly-themed that (say) there are no living monsters in the crypt.  And if you can find a way for it to make sense within the world, great.  But using checks / testing as a source of inspiration for mixing things up sounds very useful.

I feel...  sort of dumb for not looking at designing dungeons for old-school play this way.  It's a very gamist lens.  It's very consistent with the conception of D&D as training.  It might also work especially well with an open table - if, on any particular day, you happen to get a weird party composition based on available players, that might allow them to punch through parts of the dungeon more easily than might be possible with a more normal / balanced composition.

And if you were a mad wizard building a funhouse dungeon to reward the best heroes, maybe this is what it would look like.  Proving they can do anything is part of proving they're the best.  It would probably work well with the Dungeon Dimensions too.

I worry a little about doing this though.  If your players know that you're doing this, does it detract from the immersion of the place?  But if they don't know that different parts of the dungeon will vary wildly in difficulty by party composition, then they're probably going to complain a lot when they beat their heads on stuff.  When they need a large party the one guy who doesn't like dealing with henchmen will be salty, and when they need a small party the guy who has all the henchmen will be salty.  I dunno.  Is it worth it?

If I write a blog post about it and spoil it, will I only get players who are already totally on-board with doing whatever is necessary to win, the players who "have no style at all", who don't benefit from this lesson, while players who might benefit from the challenge avoid the game?

The other predictable follow-on question: if this applies to building dungeons, does it apply to building wildernesses?

A final thought - looking at dungeons in this way, as structures composed of challenges first and foremost rather than places within a world being simulated, is very compatible with the sort of "multiple DMs, each of whom has their own megadungeon, running for a shared pool of players and characters" style of organization that was reportedly common back in the early days.

Reviewish: Arbiter of Worlds

Autarch recently put out a book of DMing advice, titled Arbiter of Worlds.  I picked it up because someone in the ACKS discord mentioned that it had a section on competitive player-group dynamics, which I have enjoyed in the past, and read it on the plane during holiday travel recently.  It has been a long time since I last read a DMing advice book (the last being How to Run, by Alexis, which I should probably finish and review at some point).

Impressions:

I agree with much of what he says about the functions of the DM / judge, their relative importance, and the importance of agency, and I think it's a pretty good statement of the position.  Reasonably concise (but longer than a blog post would bear) and well-argued.

His framing of the sandbox region as a story-web was interesting.  Much of the actionable advice on stocking a sandbox and linking things together was either repeated from ACKS or similar to the existing wilderness exploration literature (Western Marches on danger pockets and Treasure Tells a Story, for example), but the ACKS region-construction guidelines were elaborated on in the context of agency, and thinking of it as a planned web for potential emergent stories was interesting and different from how I usually do things (links emerging as a result of random treasure maps rolled during play).  One thing that I'd've liked to see was extrapolation of this structure into the dungeon, since I think it does generalize - a large, jayquayed, exploration-oriented dungeon could certainly have a structure of hooks/pointers within it, which point players into different parts of the dungeon.

I liked that he talked about his personal worldbuilding process and the player's guide and gazetteer outputs of that process.  Would be fine material for the Secrets chapter of ACKS 2e, if that ever happens.  Also waaay more work up front than I will ever do.

I was surprised that he uses triggers in his living worlds.  "When the players enter town X for the first time, they find signs for a tournament in three days", as opposed to "The tournament occurs annually on the 15th of Juntober, and signs are posted two weeks prior."  Less hard-simulationist than I expected (there was more to the living worlds section that that, but triggers were the biggest surprise to me).

I was a little disappointed to find that the social dynamic I enjoyed watching during the 2012 campaign wasn't quite covered by his categorization of group social norms into collective, competitive-collective, and individualist.  I think we fell somewhere between competitive-collective and individualist.  Maybe I should go back and really figure out what the norms we were playing by were, and get them down in writing.  It might've been an unstable equilibrium; it did break down eventually.

The discussion of limiting the powers of villains explains a lot of the changes to high-level spells in ACKS.

Canons of interpretation is a very lawyer way to look at the process of making rulings during play.  I think my process of rulings is somewhat more consequentialist - what is the function of this ambiguous rule, why is it here, what are the consequences for the system of each possible interpretation or change?  It's the "legacy software maintainer" perspective on rules changes (at work the other day I was dealing with a codebase that had comments that affected the function of the code.  Load-bearing comments.  Terrifying).  The canons seem to be mostly about dealing with the semantics of natural language.  Maybe they were developed in acknowledgement of the impossibility of understanding all the consequences of a ruling in a complex system.  Food for thought.

I found the focus on describing blows in combat in graphic detail surprising, but it explains the mortal wounds table pretty well.

Given that everyone comes into RPGs wanting to use their imagination, the reasons why combat devolves to simple mechanics are somewhat mysterious to me.  I think it may be because nothing is at stake.  It's hard to conjure up the energy for vivid imagery when it doesn't really matter.

Personally, I run very mechanical, low-description combat.  Playing 3.x, maybe it was because the stakes were low.  Playing ACKS, it might be habit carry-over, but it might also be because of the rules.  I don't want to describe a player's killing blow as decapitating a foe by fiat, because the correct procedure within the rules is to wait for the party to check him for mortal wounds if they decide they want a prisoner to interrogate or take hostage.  Maybe they'll want to RL&L him later, in which case a decapitation would close that course of action to them.  Detailed, fiat kill descriptions have implications for agency.

As a player, I also don't much like DMs who waste time on combat descriptions - I'd rather they kept combat moving quickly.  I've definitely had the "oh boy, here goes this R.A. Salvatore wannabe again, narrating every attack" feeling at the table before.  The clock's ticking towards end of session, we got places to be and stuff to steal, and it's only a six-to-ten-second combat round anyway.  I think there's value in keeping the combat loop tight, and descriptions are a very easy thing to cut.  I recognize that it's a wargamer perspective.

Anyway, I expect that rather than the 300-style descriptions being advocated for, I'll stick with at most saga-style descriptions:

But when Egil sees this, he runs at Gunnar and makes a cut at him; Gunnar thrusts at him with the bill and struck him in the middle, and Gunnar hoists him up on the bill and hurls him out into Rangriver.

While I was happy to re-learn the term abduction, and I appreciate its importance in play when using random tables heavily, and I'm a Musashi enthusiast, I still thought that the repeated Musashi references in that chapter were kind of...  eh.  It's an acknowledgement of metis, but a somewhat opaque and unhelpful acknowledgement.

The mashups chapter was very different from how I hack up systems; an interesting perspective, but not what I expected.  I was a little disappointed, I think, because an earlier chapter referred to the mashups chapter for suggestions on system modification, and then it only covered a very specific method of modification.  It does dispel any doubt about parts of ACKS being Traveller-derived, though.

Conclusions:

Overall, I thought the kindle version was worth the $5 and three to four hours to read.  I think for ACKS DMs and players, it's a good look into why some things are the way they are, and how they were intended to be used.

I think the most interesting section to a broader slice of the OSR who are into "Rulings, not Rules" is the Canons of Interpretation.  This is probably the most unique part of the book; you can find other people talking about agency, or how to link pieces in a sandbox, or how to not wargame (or only sometimes wargame) your opposition, but nobody's talking about jurisprudence.  I think it would've been really interesting to see an alternate ordering of the chapters of this book, talking about the four roles of the DM and discussing those roles in order of priority, with the section on judging and rulings coming first, then worldbuilding, then playing the opposition, and finally concerns of storytelling.  I get why it's laid out the way it is, though; it's in opposition to the position that Guarantor of Fun and Storytelling are the central functions, and it has to deal with those before shifting into assertion.

I think the book is squarely aimed at the "new DM running 5e", and I think the ordering is pretty reasonable for that case.  I don't know how effective it would be at persuading DMs of that demographic to pursue agency, since I am not in that situation.  I speculate that it might be effective if they've had some negative experiences with low-agency play previously, but I dunno if it'll work otherwise; I think usually you already have to have a little doubt in your own position in order to be persuaded effectively.

Random Encounters and Space Hulk's Blips

Blindsight got me thinking about Space Hulk, which got me thinking about the blips.  Space Hulk has a mechanic where the alien player conceals his forces and moves them as "blips" on the human player's radar until they come into line of sight of a human unit.  It's a nice way to handle information asymmetry and partially hidden movement.  I think something like it might solve one of the issues with random encounters as they are played.

The way a random encounter in the dungeon goes in D&D (certainly in my games, at least) is usually something like this:

• Party is doing stuff
• DM rolls d6, 6 for random encounter
• DM generates wandering monsters
• Surprise roll
• Reaction roll
• Initiative roll
• Combat 
• Return to exploration loop

What's missing here is tension.  The encounter happens, it is resolved, it probably doesn't really link to anything else in the dungeon because it was just generated.  Resource costs are applied and then life goes on; there is no qualitative change unless the random encounter was on the way out while the party was already resource-exhausted.  It's almost like Bad Trap Syndrome, but with a combat intead.

The other thing missing here is that a rule has been ignored - the random encounter distance rule, another roll between generation and surprise.  Nominally should be 2d6 * 10 feet in the dungeon, in ACKS at least.  That's a long way (in expectation).  That's outside torch radius on average (30' of bright light, 20 more feet of shadowy illumination).  It's also outside of average monster infravision radius (60').  If you, like me, tend to not have 70' hallways, generally that's going to be around multiple corners or through multiple doors.  This is not typically a "the monsters come around the corner or through the doorway, roll for surprise" situation.

The reason this rule is ignored is straightforward - tracking runtime-generated state outside of PC line of sight is a hassle.  If you're using a graphpaper map, there isn't a good way to track groups of monsters moving through the dungeon.  Digital tools could probably handle this better.

But if you're willing to pay the price to track these 'blips' outside of PC detection range, the atmospheric and gameplay benefits are, I suspect, significant.  They turn random encounters from "fire and forget" into lingering threat, things just outside your vision, eyes reflecting your torchlight.  Waiting in the dark for you to make a mistake, stalking you, looking for an opportunity to pounce (or maybe just to eat your dead).  A heavily-armored party might not even be able to close with and engage such groups due to speed differences.  I suspect these lingering random encounters might encourage the use of thieves in the shadowed zone (where they can quickly pin down or drive off such enemies; pickets) and other "lightweight" play.  Multiple random encounters might lead to multiple groups of uncommitted creatures - morlocks ahead, morlocks behind, nowhere to run.  Depending on the monsters and the ecology of the dungeon, multiple "open" random encounters might fight among themselves (presenting an opportunity to players) or join forces.  Players might detect them with listening or detect evil...  blips on the paladin-scanner.

These things in the dark become a source of tension, a source of potential energy for the dungeon.  The other shoe, ready to drop.

On reflection, this difference in use is reflected in the old naming - "wandering monster" instead of "random encounter".

What's the Point?

This is, ultimately, the question I've been wrestling with for the last year or so.  Why play D&D?  Especially OSR/TSR D&D, with encumbrance, logistics, prime requisites, and PC death.

This is an attempt at an answer.  It's only about half-coherent, and I can't tell whether it's obvious or just obviously wrong.  I don't love it, and I don't expect you to, but I figured I'd get a rough draft out.  I guess my new bar for 2018 is a post a month; maintenance doses.

D&D is an artifice for character-building for the participants (traditionally, poorly-socialized young men).  Success in OSR D&D requires a number of properties which are useful in real life, which may be worth taking the time and energy to develop (and to encourage one's acquaintances to develop) in low-risk environments.

What are the lessons that various antiquated features of OSR D&D are aimed at teaching?

• Stats in order - Play the hand you're dealt.  As Hamming said, "I will do the best I can with what I got."  
• Prime reqs - In terms of class selection, you can fight your rolled "nature", but you'll get a lot further faster if you play to your high stats.  Different classes demand different virtues of their players; thieves need risk-tolerance and faith in the rest of the party to come rescue them, wizards need patience, caution, and careful spell-timing, fighters need courage, persistence, and willingness to sacrifice themselves, and clerics need humility, the ability to accept that sometimes you're not the star of the show.  Prime reqs push you towards classes that you don't usually play, and situations that test virtues you might not be so good at.
• Mixed-level parties, characters with very different stat distributions - Life isn't fair.  If you're on the weak end, resenting the strong won't get you very far; work with them for mutual gain.  If you're on the strong end, treat those weaker than you well, because you might have a reversal of fortune at any time and end up back at the bottom of the heap.
• Monoclassing, minimal build - You are not special by default; you are Joe Fighter by default.  If you want to be somebody that people will tell stories about years later, it's on you to do something notable, not just to be something notable.
• Mapping, encumbrance, rations, Vancian magic - Come prepared, plan ahead, pay attention to the details.  Neglecting them can get you killed.
• PC death - Memento mori.  Some day, you will die.  Yes you, reader.  You can run from it, or you can accept it, figure out what you want, and go get it or die trying.  It's important, I think, that unlike eg Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia, death is not short-term inevitable in OSR D&D.  You need players to get attached to their characters, and that doesn't happen when death is too frequent.
• TPK / Near-TPK situations - How panic-prone are you?  If other players are panicking, do you keep your head, or do you catch the panic?  Can you calm others?  Watching panic spread through a group of players is really remarkable.  When you get crushed, do you ragequit, or reflect calmly on your mistakes and return for vengeance?  The reason PCs don't make morale rolls is that their players are dealing with their own, very real, morale.
• Levels / fully-quantitative and exponentially-scaling advancement - If you want to get ahead, you have to be willing to take some risks.  After the first couple levels, it doesn't just happen anymore with any sort of regularity.  You need to say "I want to level", to choose it.  And then you need to put in the work, take the risks, and probably get a little lucky.  And that's true of life too.  I'm hitting this point with my career, where I've done well but the organization I'm at is just small.  I find myself with a choice between slow, pretty-safe advancement over the course of years, or choosing to prioritize advancement and doing the work to make that happen, either somewhere else or via personal projects in my free time.  Since I'm here writing blog posts, you can guess how well that's going.
• Phases of play (dungeon / wilderness / domain) - Advancement has side effects, most of which involve new challenges, more responsibility, more patience, and more paperwork.  This is what happens to conventionally-successful people.  You can't have your cake and eat it too; you can stay in the dungeon forever, but you're not going to get over 6th level if you do.
• Old-School Wish - Be careful what you wish for.  Someone was once very surprised when I mentioned that I give out wishes in my games; she said "But wishes destroy campaigns!"  And I laughed.  No, wishes are temptation.
• Rulings, not rules - Negotiate for things that you want.  Don't appeal to authority; convince me.  Whine, bullshit, do math, resort to bribery, whatever, these are valid approaches and you should learn them all.

In conclusion: I really do think OSR D&D presents its players with challenges which are well-suited to the development of mindset / personality traits which are adaptive, and rewards them for performing those virtues, not merely playing someone with those virtues.  Other games foster different virtues; 3.x rewards you for reading rulebooks, finding loopholes, and doing math, which are very useful skills.  Traveller...  rewards you for automating the trade system, which is something, I guess.

What place does Fun have in this conception of D&D?  I agree with Tao that Fun Is Not The Point.  Fun is, however, a necessity.  If your game is not fun, your players will leave before learning the lessons the game could teach them.  So strive to make your games Fun Enough (probably Type 2 Fun); there's a balance.  Unfortunately there may be a race to the bottom with fun; games which are more-fun tend to outcompete games with are less-fun in the marketplace for players.  These games which are more-fun also tend to lack the features which promote controlled but real adversity, and consequently growth.  I do not know how to resolve this problem yet.

What place does Narrative have in this conception of D&D?  Likewise, narrative is a device.  Humans like it, and therefore you can exploit their preference for it to make your game more appealing, and consequently more effective at cultivating virtue.  I have been wrong about narrative.  There might even be some aspirational "play the sort of person you'd like to be" upside to dealing with characters and stories, but that's not something I would know anything about.  Classes are a very Jungian structure to begin with...

What place does Simulation have in this conception of D&D?  If you seek to prepare your players for Real Life, making your game reasonably realistic (at least to the level of "actions have consequences, which you can predict by analogy with real life, except when noted by the rulebook") is sensible.  Simulated details provide a hook for Attention to Detail, and can also factor into Convince Me.  I have probably over-invested in simulation in the past (but it was fun for me, so not a total waste I guess).

What place does Game have in this conception of D&D?  The game element, of luck and challenge and risk and reward, is pretty central.  But I suspect one of the lessons to be learned from OSR D&D is that yes, you can play the game well, and you can win it, but it's sort of hollow and the reward of power is tempered with paperwork, as opposed to setting out to do your own thing and winning on your own terms, like Rary.

What is the role of the DM in this conception of D&D?  Courtney hit the nail on the head with "shaman leading the group's collective vision-quest."  You are here to help them become what they could be; to point out their flaws, to put them under eustress, and to reward them when they grow.  And in this light, the ritual character of the D&D game which I found so disturbing seems perfectly natural.

I apologize, DMs, for adding "spiritual guidance" to your prep burdens (using a loose, materialist definition of "spiritual", as in "of or related to the human spirit; ie, morale, emotion, and character").  I certainly do not consider myself qualified in that department.

All this still doesn't answer the essential question of "is it worth it?"  If you're spending 12 hours a week on prep+game for four people, you're looking at effectively three hours each of time investment per week, for a very ill-defined return.  Could you do better by just...  unstructured socializing with these people for the same amount of time, and talking about their problems?  I think maybe no - the game and the ritual provide a context where failure and self-examination are tolerable, where we can get at hard truths precisely because we're all lying.

The ultimate measure of the game, from this perspective, might be "do people outgrow your games, and go on to live happy lives?"  I spoke with one of my old players recently, and he mentioned that he has come to see RPGs / storygames as a form of "group therapy."  I don't know that I'd go that far (those are very soft words), but I think it's reasonably consistent with my meaning.



Addendum:

I don't mean to say that TSR D&D was intentionally designed as a training program.  I think training is a welcome, desirable side effect which can justify the activity; for another example, consider The Morals of Chess or mahjong's correspondence with reality.  Norbert Wiener, in The Human Use of Human Beings (one of the seminal books of cybernetics), discusses the function of play, and argues that generally, play is training in vertebrate species, who come into the world with much more plasticity than eg invertebrates; you will never see an ant play.  We humans play as well, and for the same reasons: training and pack-bonding, in preparation for the difficulties of life.

Mad Ramblings - Wargames, Dreamworlds, Nihilism, Sandboxes

This is not a well-structured, carefully-pruned, cohesive post.

Sometimes I think the game I really want to be running is not D&D, a fantasy RPG with dungeoneering, but a fantasy campaign skirmish wargame.  Ditch hitpoints, switch to single-digit numbers of Warhammer-style wounds, use an armor save instead of AC, and make characters largely replaceable.  Remove character detail, improve speed-in-play, perhaps increase tactical detail (as discussed back in Starmada, there's a big difference between character-creation complexity and tactical complexity).  A lot of this would just be nice on the DM side - I don't want to think about how many HP this goblin has.  It's 1HD, it has 1 wound, done.  A shift to wargaming mentality also does some interesting things for party composition; each player builds a warband from some fixed pool of resources.  "Just one sixth-level wizard with no henchmen" and "a big pile of second-level fighters" both become valid, interoperable ways to play.

The primeval purpose of play, as seen in young animals, is training, for food acquisition, mating-fights, or flight.  What are we training for?  With a wargame it's pretty clear.  With D&D it's much less so.  Maybe we're training for everything, but when you defend everything, you defend nothing.

On the other hand, rather than "I want to run D&D as a wargame", it may be more true that I seem to always end up running D&D as a wargame, and making systemic changes would make my life easier, but not more satisfying.  I'm not really sure why my games seem to keep ending up as wargames.  I think I enjoy the tactical challenge of actually giving players a good fight (and a good fright).  I also feel that I have lost confidence in the quality of my creative output, leaving tactics as the only place I'm willing to go nuts.  The well feels dry more than it used to.  Part of this, I suspect, is that I've basically stopped consuming fantasy media.  The last fantasy book I read was Wizard of Earthsea about a year ago (I did read Beowulf and finally finished the Saga of Burnt Njal this winter, but those doesn't quite count).  In terms of videogames, I think the only fantasy stuff I've played in the last year was Skyrim (lousy) and Hammerwatch (arcade, empty).  Skyrim was a strong contributing factor to launching the last campaign, actually - "If as many people loved Skyrim as seemed to, the bar must be lower than I thought; maybe I should give it another shot."  In any case, not much fantasy input, not much to remix and quietly steal.  I tried tapping dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations - that's how we ended up with a mad city-dungeon open to the endless void of space, showered by metal shavings from the decrepit cosmic engine that burns the souls of the damned to spin the earth.  No seriously, that's where the copper pieces came from - they fell out of the sky and into the dungeon as the engine ground itself towards inevitable failure and the End of Days.  Really the embarrassing part is that I put something as mundane as ratmen in such a place.

Reflecting on that, I was remiss to omit that I began reading Kill Six Billion Demons some time last summer, and I greatly enjoyed its Planescape-ness, its strangeness.  Still do.  So I suppose perhaps that influenced me more than I thought, but I put my own spin (ie, Warhammer-esque) on it, and thereby took most of the strangeness right out of it.

What I have been reading has been mostly history and sociology, which are relevant to D&D but not in useful ways.  D&D (and RPGs generally) are fundamentally based around emulating stories; myth, legend, books, movies.  I have gotten very skeptical, suspicious, of stories.  Stories simplify the very complex into nice simple causal chains.  A good story is always simpler than the reality of the situation; it's an authorial duty to cut out parts, to simplify for human consumption (Venkatesh Rao argues in a very roundabout way that all human organizations are based on such simplifications, claiming that leaders create simplifying myths for their underlings to live within).  Making wilderness illegible, or making running a domain hard because of historically-reasonable administrative information shortages, is not conducive to producing any sort of resonant narrative.  They're interesting thought experiments, but probably terrible in practice.  Which is a better story, the one that people all know, that riffs off of will resonate with them: Arthur and the Sword in the Stone, or King William and the Census?

At any rate, I suspect my nonfiction reading has made me a worse ACKS DM.  Played in a more typical D&D fashion ("band of roving murderers saves kingdom"), things like administrative information shortages could be turned into reasonable narratives, but when it comes to players looking at rulership, it gets mighty tedious to have to maintain both a true set of information for my own use, and a plausible false set of information to feed players.  In the case of an NPC governor deceiving an NPC king, I don't have to do the latter.  Frankly I have little desire to do the former anymore either.  I need all of my paperwork tolerance for taxes this season.

You know what else I'm starting to hate?  Character levels.  Having mechanical advancement be a thing that the system does means that players (well OK, people like me and my players) will aggressively optimize for it.  ACKS has this problem where the level of risk you have to take in order to make enough money to level at any sort of reasonable* pace results in levels being attritted away by casualties faster than they are earned.  I like the exponential XP curve; I really do.  It means that you can bring in 1st-level guys and they catch up, provided that any XP at all is being earned.  Domain XP breaks this, by providing XP only to the high-level characters in the party, and leads to the gap opening rather than closing.  The real problem with the OSR's XP curves (for us) is that they're build to support loooong-haul campaigns that run for multiple years of real-time.  That's something that we never do; in the six month duration of my typical ACKS campaign, players tend to get from 3rd or 4th level to 7th or 8th level.  Calibrated on 3.x, my players are frustrated by this slow progression and unwilling to take the sort of risks required to accelerate it.  ACKS dangles the domain carrot, of safe monthly gold and XP, and they really want to skip getting beaten with the wilderness stick (having labeled it as a poor risk-reward balance previously).  This is frustrating for me, because I feel that we haven't even scratched the surface of wilderness play (for example, tactics in the wilderness), while I find domain play tedious / boring so far.  It's kind of funny if you interpret it in a certain light: as adolescents the fantasy was to kill the dragon and win the princess, but as adults the fantasy is to be the guy at the top of the hierarchy who collects taxes from the safety of his castle while other people do the dying and the dirty work.  I miss Tim's meandering / anti-domain style of play.  Probably I should switch to some other retroclone, but I suspect my current playerbase (such as it is) has been accumulated in part by the allure of domains.

It would be an interesting experiment to bring a bunch of PCs in at low domain level (8th or 9th or so) and say "OK that's it, no leveling, all advancement will be Traveller-style through gear and hirelings and domains and achieving ends-in-the-world" (or just lower the level cap to 9th across the board...).  I've also been thinking about how poorly the leveling system as it currently exists does at supporting common narrative tropes.  The characters who start the weakest, the farmboy and the squire, have the greatest potential, while the characters to start strong, the knight and the wizard, rarely gain.  Lancelot and Merlin and Han Solo never get any stronger; Arthur and Luke do (though I guess this could also be interpreted as a game with a lower level cap).  What if you had the option to start at a higher level, but your maximum level was lowered accordingly?  This is a much more interesting use of level limits than demihumans; make it correlate with age at the beginning of the campaign.  Starting older gives you XP, but limits the new tricks your old dog can learn.  What if henchmen simply couldn't outlevel their masters - they could continue accumulating XP, but without adequate mentorship, they can never reach their full potential.  There are lots of interesting things to try in this space.

In any case, stopping or capping leveling suddenly introduces a gaping existential hole - why play?  I had hoped that ACKS, by making the domain game mechanical and providing XP for interacting with it, would encourage players to interact with the world on non-mechanical terms.  This was foolish; if you have mechanics for interacting with something, it will be interacted with mechanically at the exclusion of non-mechanical interactions (for another example, see 3.x Diplomacy hacks).  This is the underlying logical crux of the OSR's "rulings, not rules" stance, and its opposition to skill systems.  It also relates back to old thoughts on reliability and aim-of-playing, which loops back to "why play?".  Last spring, when I quit, I had been reading Interaction Ritual Chains, which discusses the process by which sacredness is manufactured through ritual (by which is meant routine, roughly-weekly interactions where a set of participants gather, isolated from the rest of the world, and waste resources).  I observed that this description fit the weekly D&D game perfectly, and was left very conflicted and disturbed about it all.  It left me asking "why do we really play?  Sure we have our surface reasons, that we like to kill monsters and gain levels, but is there another level of motivations underneath it where we value the game in itself?"  I observed that this potential treatment of the game as lightly-sacred was consistent with my behavior on one occasion, where I wrecked my bike on the way home from work and wasn't sure whether I'd sprained or broken my wrist, but went to run the weekly ACKS instead of to the hospital (I ended up there the next morning when the pain woke me up at 0430).  That is not the sort of thing that rational self-interested actors do.  Past-me is an idiot and the ACKS ritual made me so.  There is something weird going on here.  There is also a conflict between Interaction Ritual Chains and Rao's schema here, in that Rao doesn't believe that the organizing myth-makers get caught up in their own myths.  When I was reading Interaction Ritual Chains, I was elated, that now I understood how to create values, and the keys to power, to binding man, were in my grasp.  It was not until later that I realized that I could not help but become caught in those values myself, at which point I destroyed all of my social rituals (except the inescapable lunchtime at the office) and strove for hermit-hood, moral freedom, and the rejection of fantasy.  Success has been mixed; habits, personal rituals, are hard to break, and it is draining work.

I did not viscerally understand nihilism / moral relativism until Interaction Ritual Chains showed me how the sacred sausage is made.  It is one thing to be told "all morality is constructed", and another to be told exactly how it is constructed and at what cost.  I'm still not sure what to do with that information.  I suppose I can link this back to the bit above about leveling by noting that removing explicit / absolute mechanical objectives (like XP / leveling) is killing god (to borrow Nietzsche's phrase and meaning) and exposing the players to that same paralyzing freedom, of "all is permitted but nothing matters; freedom, and futility, are the only absolutes."  This ties back to the article by Rao, where political leadership requires simplifying political realities for human consumption.  It is also true that moral leadership generally requires simplifying moral realities for human consumption.  XP and reward system is essentially a moral choice (albeit a laughably small one), and delegating that choice down onto players is probably not what they're looking for.  They are here to play a game, to escape the spirit of gravity and the burdens of life, maybe for some occasional catharsis, but not to stare into the abyss.  Sandboxing in general has this problem.

One reasonable response, though, is that while the sacredness of moral norms may be an emergent property of social organizations rather than a reflection of any cosmic significance, that doesn't invalidate their usefulness.  Sacredness and morality formation are a mechanism for something (probably social cohesion and ingroup predictability) - if they weren't worth their cost in "wasted" resources, they wouldn't have emerged over and over again, in every society across human history.  Now granted, they may provide a fitness advantage to societies in competition with each other rather than to the individuals within those societies, who are materially poorer as a result of ritual expenditures (but the success of those individuals' genes and memes over the long term is tied to that of the society in which they live).  In any case, my response, cutting out all sacredness without really reflecting on its function, was like that of the D&D3.0 group that removes attacks of opportunity or the XP cost from creating magic items, or bans grappling because it's complicated, without understanding the effects that these will have on the system (spellcasters even more overpowered than normal).  Chesterton's Fence applies here:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

But enough of that.

I also miss the competitive-cooperative nature of the first ACKS campaign.  I've been reading some game theory stuff lately and there is a category of "non-fixed sum" games that describes observed player behavior during that campaign well.  It also helped that there were a variety of vigorously-argued value-systems / player utility functions present in that campaign, rather than a tacit convergence on the "whatever maximizes GP/XP" utility function that I see more now.  There's no playfulness anymore, and this is probably my fault for setting lethality high and leveling so slow.  I keep hoping that we'll hit the point of fatalist playfulness - "we're all going to die, so better to die for something, heroically or entertainingly, rather than waiting for the eventually-inevitable lame, random, or cowardly death" - but I think character advancement, and specifically the risk of falling behind the rest of the party, discourages this.  So I suppose there is still some competition, but it's boring, tacit competition that drives inaction, rather than entertaining competition that drives action.

I've come to the conclusion that the Death and Dismemberment table just isn't worth it.  It's funny about 10% of the time.  The other 90% of the time it just sucks - either you get an injury that doesn't matter for your class, or you get one that does and then you repeat the same "hope for effects that don't matter" procedure on the RL&L table.  If I were to build a new one, I'd probably just make it a roll between "mission killed" (out of action for the rest of this adventure), "multi-mission killed" (out of action for a couple adventures), and "campaign killed" (maybe there's enough left of you to retire, but your adventuring days are done), and leave details up to players.  I really want to make the bedrest mechanic work.  It seems like a good way to encourage players to maintain stables of characters and to swap out for mission requirements.  It sort of works for henchmen, but if a PC is out for bedrest, adventuring is often delayed, because playing a henchman risks being outleveled and because PCs are the highest level (hence most useful) and missing out on XP for a PC means falling behind on already-glacial leveling.

In conclusion: great dissatisfaction!

Reflections on a Session: 6 November 2016

• Time spent: ~4 hours
• Prepping NPC stats: 0.5 hours
• Presession henchmen and markets and whatnot: ~0.5 hours
• Running game: ~3 hours
• No new areas mapped
• No rooms restocked
• Dungeon areas explored in 3 hours of play:
• 1 lair (giant rats), cleared
• 2 monsters (cultists and manspiders)
• 2 empty
• Game-time elapsed in dungeon: 5 hours
• Random encounters: 2
• Expected random encounters: ~2.5 (not including checks from loud actions like Magical Music)
• Party composition:
• Clarence of the Stone, Craftpriest 2
• Wilgeva, L0 woman
• The Wardog With No Name
• Mule with repeating light ballista
• Scarth, MU 3
• Slagathor, Chaotic Cleric 2
• Thancharat, Elven Enchanter 1
• Rheingold, Cleric 1
• Chathis the Lizardman, Thrassian Gladiator 2
• Ascila the Assonant, Bard 1
• Dogeater, Ratman 1
•  Mortal wounds taken: 1
• Chathis took an injury to his hips and spine while cleaving through a block of cultists with polearms who used the preemptive-hit ability to attack him even though he'd won initiative.  His charge did prevent them from charging the party, though.  Chathis can no longer forced-march, but hasn't gotten the injury fixed yet because that's more of a wilderness-level concern.
• Loot recovered:
• 733 gp in silver, trinkets, and small gems from the giant rats' nest
• Three cultists captured and sold into slavery to the manspiders in exchange for a promise of silk next expedition
• Traded twenty ballista bolts this session, and a promise of ten more next session, to Scabies' ratmen for information about a trap
•  Traps triggered: 2?
• Bear-traps at the foot of a bridge were triggered and then relocated to cover a fork that the party didn't want to explore yet, where they caught a skeleton random encounter.  Considering adding bear-traps to my equipment tables.
• XP from monsters: 416
• Frankly this was somewhat generous
• Well under the 4:1 ratio, but maybe the silks next time will help balance that out.
• Exploration session avoiding humanoid lairs -> low yield

Other notes:

I forgot my map today, which delayed our start by ~20 minutes.  Derp.

The party's three clerics were very excited to see 10 skeletons come around the corner as they were trying to rest.  Maybe I should use undead more often.

Party definitely felt time pressure today exploring a moderately-distant area.  Proposed solutions included bribing the guards to keep the portal open longer, setting up a secure base-camp, and working out lodgings in Scabies' camp.

I didn't really expect them to go for the "sell your enemies to us as slaves and we'll supply you with silk" deal.  That was silly of me.  Chathis' player seems open to alliance with manspiders after discovering that they're also not from this sewer-realm, but come from Spiderworld via a dungeon portal.  Chathis got slandered again while trying to recruit henchmen, so he can no longer recruit humans and must rely purely to beasthenchmen.  Rest of party somewhat less sure about dealing with manspiders.

Plan for next session: receive silks, capture more cultists.  Plans after that include securing a staging area and going after the section of their map that the ratmen told them is inhabited by "fire demons".  Party is optimistic about their prospects there because they have an ice sword and a ring of fire resistance.  Plans to go after Bone-gnawer seem to be on hold, as Scabies' tribe are holding their ground against the ratmen to the north.

I definitely need to prep for next session.  They were right up against the stocked-unstocked boundary today.

Reflections on a Session: 29 October

• Time spent: ~6 hours
• Presession+pizza: ~1.5 hours
• Incl 15-30 minutes of restocking rooms and generating NPC stats
• DMing: 4.5 hours
• No new rooms mapped
• 2 rooms restocked, one stocked room updated
• Dungeon area explored in 4.5 hours of play:
• Five new rooms:
• 2 hidden treasure, 1 trapped
• 2 monster (both negotiated with)
• 1 trap
•  Game-time elapsed: 4 hours, 40 minutes of 5 hours the dungeon-portal was open
• Random encounters checked: unsure
• Random encounter rolls forgotten: unsure
• Random encounters rolled: 5
• NPC party, fought
• skipped while waiting for dwarfgeld under ratman fire cover
• Sewer Things, evaded
• Giant rats, subdued with Magical Music
• Masked men with polearms, evaded 
• They were pretty noisy today, and I was rolling high for encounters (if not anything else...)
• Party composition:
• Brynja, Bladedancer 3
• Crapahildis, ??? 1
• Spike, War dog
• Chathis, Thrassian Gladiator 2
• Dogeater, Ratman 1
• Wardok, War dog (lost an eye)
• Ascila, Bard 1
• Scarth, MU 3
• Rheingold, Cleric 1
• Thancharat, Elven Enchanter 1
• Mortal wounds taken: 1
• Wardok was stabbed in the head with a spear by one of the Seven Dwarves' henchmen, and lost an eye.  He was successfully evacuated while the party was waiting for Mordin the Craftpriest to return with the ransom for his captured compatriots
• Loot recovered:
• 1000 gp in ransom for captured dwarves
• Battleaxe +1, shield +1, and an unidentified dwarven divine scroll
   captured from the Seven Dwarves
• ~4500 gp in gems captured from the Janitorial Supply Closet
• Another stash of ~500gp and a magic dagger was located, but not recovered because it was guarded by assassins
• Traps triggered: 2
• XP from monsters: ~158
• Way over the 4:1 ratio, but they're about out of easy treasure that doesn't require tangling with lairs to extract

Other notes:

I considered running a Halloween Horror special, but ultimately decided that low-level ACKS in a hellscape megadungeon was adequate.

Rather underprepped.  Need to finish up stats for the Five-Finger Discount this week; the party cut the Seven Dwarves down to four, and they're going to be out of commission for a bit, so somebody's going to have to fill the NPC Party slot on the random encounter table.  I also need to reload the stocking for the cultist zone into cache; it seems like they might head that way soon.

Brynja's player seemed somewhat underinvolved, but not unhappy.

I'm not totally happy with the way we handled cleaving during the Seven Dwarves fight - the thrassian punched all the way through into the dwarves' back-row without taking any free attacks for disengaging (though he did take some for engaging spear-wielders with lower initiative).  Also man, initiative really is a decisive advantage.

Scarth's player: "Well if I were designing a dungeon to live in, I certainly wouldn't put a pit trap in the only entrance to this room.  So there must be a secret door."
Chathis' player: "That would be sound reasoning if this dungeon weren't designing by a vengeful chaos god who revels in our suffering."
Me, returning from kitchen with pizza: "Hello!  You called?"

The party was actually reasonably diplomatic today, though in both cases (the sewer-things guarding the Supply Closet and the assassins) they weren't sure if they would win a fight if one started.  In retrospect I'm a little surprised they struck first against the Seven Dwarves instead of trying to talk, but they were cornered with an insecure rear area and they knew it.  I think that was a big part of the reason they chose to make a decisive engagement there.  The party also wanted to talk to the Masked Polearm Men, but they didn't respond to hails (instead following the party at the edge of their torchlight).

An awful lot of treasure today...  but they're about out of lightly-guarded loot.  I don't think anyone leveled, but Brynja should be over halfway to 4th if I'm recalling correctly.

Referring back to my estimates on 10 September, I think my estimates were reasonable.  I projected that I had about five sessions of prepped material at their exploration rate from 10 Sept.  Five sessions later, they've cleared out and made friendly about a quarter of the area I've prepped, and explored another quarter.  If I were in charge of their mission-planning, I could probably get another 3? sessions out of areas currently prepped, but they've gotten close enough to the edges of the stocked area that they could wander out if they were uncharacteristically motivated to strike deep, or if they made an area friendly diplomatically.  There's definitely been some slowdown in new-area exploration compared to their first-session rate, though; I expected this, but did not work it into my estimates because I wasn't sure how.

It was interesting that this session they made a point of going back and filling in a hole in their map otherwise surrounded by areas they'd explored (part of this was due to currect suspicion of a secret room).  So far the sort of general progression for dungeoneering in Pox's Quadrant that we've seen was:

• Blind exploration until centers of opposition are located
• Elimination of aggressive / proactive lairs
• Exploitation: easy treasure extraction
• Consolidation: establishing relatively safe zones, filling in holes in the map and making sure there aren't hidden threats or secret routes unknown in the area
• Use as a springboard into new areas

Scarth's player commented positively on the time pressure from the dungeon portal window (the portal to the dungeon is in the duke's castle's basement, and the guards only open it for 4-6 hours at a time 1-2 days a week, which means that multiple adventuring parties are often in at a time, and if you stay too long they'll close it and you'll be stuck for a couple of days).  There may come a time when they want to go so deep that six hours will be tight, and at that point they'll either need a safe place in the dungeon to hole up for a couple of days or some very solid mission planning (possibly including reduction of gear for increased speed, and preliminary missions laying groundwork by clearing along the shortest path to their objective).