Poem a Day, Quantity Begets Quality

I read a (pdf warning) really interesting paper recently about writing a poem a day.  It got me thinking about quantity and quality in a lot of things in life besides just writing poems (though I did have a haiku-a-day habit for a while during the pandemic; it helped me mark the passage of seasonal time while basically locked in solitary confinement in an apartment).  One interesting passage:

In the book Art & Fear, they tell a story—which may be true, maybe not—of a university pottery class broken into two halves. One half was told their grades depended on the quality of the one pot they each handed in, and other was told their grades depended on the total weight of all their semester’s pieces. That is, each person in the first group would work however they wanted, but that person’s grade was determined by the quality of a single piece; each person in the second group would work all semester, and at the end each person would put all their pieces on a gigantic scale: 50 lbs and up was an A, 40–50 lbs was a B, etc. The best pieces of course all came from the group going for weight. The reasons are probably that the second group had no reason to fear the artistic process while they were learning craft techniques, and that they were practicing and experimenting through repetition.

But I think one of the most important reasons for their having the best work was that they could select the best piece rather than shepherd it along. You see, the first group could have worked this way too, but they all decided to just focus on making one perfect pot. Which is what we do as poets often.

I suspect that some DMs are tempted to do the same, trying to make one really good dungeon instead of ten dungeons, one of which is actually good.

It's interesting that he doesn't really couch it in the language of habit, though I suspect that once it does become habit the barrier to beginning on any given day is very low.  I kind of wonder if this is how eg Dyson works.  Dyson is incredibly prolific and it has to be a habit.  It also makes me wonder how Dyson picks which maps will get published where and what fraction he considers to be experiments that turned out mediocre / not worth publishing.

To a certain extent this is also the Dungeon23 approach, of making a habit of producing a little bit of a dungeon every day.  Dungeon23, though, seems to not really want to select / discard down to just the good bits at the end, instead throwing them all into a big megadungeon.

I am also reminded of evolutionary algorithms / reproduce-and-select, fuzzing, and distillation.  These are all kinda the same processes; produce lots of stuff, most of which isn't what you want, and then pick out the good bits and work from there.  Stupid generation processes that you do a lot of will still generate good stuff from time to time and it's just a question of separating it out.  And a human producing things will tend to increase quality of the mash over time, in a way that a pot still won't.

It's probably also true of sessions.  If you want to have great games, run lots of games, don't sit there prepping for the perfect game.  If you want to run great sessions, run lots of sessions - many will be mediocre but some will be great.  These are harder because you can't really throw away the bad ones; they still get inflicted on your players.

Possibly also of games/procedures/systems too.  Maybe this is an advantage of the rules-light / itch.io approach that I hadn't considered.  When you make lots of very small games, you get to iterate quickly, highlight the stuff that you think is the best, and sort of bury the stuff that turned out mediocre.  Arguably that's kind of how I blog!  Publish first, then link people to the ones that turn out to be relevant or that keep returning to mind, and the ones that nobody cares about just sit there doing very little harm.

Randomized Starting XP

I was thinking the other day - I kind of want to start a game around the 2nd level range.  But I was having trouble settling on the precise XP number.  If you start at 2000 to get fighters to 2nd, MUs are only 1st.  If you start at 2500 to get MUs to 2nd, thieves are already 3rd.  So picking a single ideal numerical solution is hard.

It is also a little weird when all the PCs start with exactly the same amount of experience.  We already admit significant variation between PCs in terms of ability and starting gold - why not XP?  Particularly in an open-table situation, where it's expected that character level will vary within a party.

3d6 * 200 starting XP seems like a promising amount, averaging just over 2000, and never high enough for a fighter or MU to hit 3rd.  The interesting question is whether you roll it before or after committing to a class.  If you let it inform class choice, then you might get some interesting choices, where a stat line which is otherwise mediocre for a particular class gets played as that class because the XP roll is good for it (like low int, high XP to MU) or even worse otherwise (like a low XP roll where you can get 2nd with thief or cleric but nothing else).  I suspect that taking a high XP roll and using it for thief 3 instead of MU 2 or fighter 2 would probably not be a frequently-chosen option.  So this might be a great way to get a pretty consistently 2nd-level starting party, outside of very low rolls that don't even crack 1200.

On the other hand, a simulationist argument in favor of rolling XP after choosing class might be that it would be weird if nobody ever started a 1st-level MU.  Although maybe if you roll less than 1200 XP, where you're at 1st regardless, maybe MU becomes a real option again.  One sleep per day is one sleep per day...

(And then once we're rolling starting XP, clearly we need some rules for risking terrible injuries in chargen in order to potentially gain more starting XP...)

Rival Parties and Replacement Characters

Every now and then there's a discussion about bringing in replacement characters in OSR games.  There was one recently on the reddits that brought this back to mind.  The consensus is that you should find excuses to get new PCs into the game.  But the poster points out that this distorts the resource game, and then people amend their position so that obviously you should have replacement PCs come in with partly-depleted resources.

As for me...  I'm thinking this sounds like an awful lot of DM fiat.  I eagerly await the "rulings, not rules!" in the comments.  But seriously, there are a lot of things that I don't like about the...  3rd?  4th? wave OSR but one thing I do like is the focus on little rules subsystems, "procedures".  See also Arbiter of Worlds' discussion on rulings establishing precedent and evolving into rules.

Anyway.  What would a system for adjudicating the arrival of new PCs look like?

Before designing one, it's worth checking whether we already have such a system in place but have failed to recognize it.  And I think Wandering Monster tables that are heavy on demihumans and "rival" adventuring parties could easily serve this purpose.  I have never had a good explanation of the point of having 30% of B/X's dungeon level one encounter table be demihumans and humans.  But maybe these encounters are intended to be a source of replacement PCs.  Then the deeper you go, the less frequent these encounters become and the harder it becomes to replace your losses in the dungeon.  Using the first level's friendly table to gather reinforcements pairs interestingly with using it as a safe haven to rest in for expeditions down to the second level.  The sharp drop off in potentially-friendly results on the encounter table as you level is interesting - maybe by the time you're going into the third dungeon level, you're expected to have hirelings rather than "living off the land" for replacement characters.  And then again, in the wilderness you have the Men table, but usefully-leveled results vary in frequency by terrain type.

So what's the procedure here?  Roll a random encounter with demihumans or adventurers, get a reaction roll better than Hostile, and then you can smuggle your replacement PC into that game that way?  And maybe they come in with fairly complete resources, but you had to take a significant risk (an encounter roll) to get them.  And if you're a party with multiple members down, maybe you make a bunch of noise to provoke encounter rolls in the hope of friendlies rather than the conventional wisdom of quietly trying to escape.  It's a high-risk double-or-nothing play but...  having that choice, between the quiet approach and the loud approach seems like it could make for some interesting gameplay.

The wildly-diegetic angle here would be to roll NPC parties completely straight, and then if they're not hostile on the reaction roll, allow players to pick an NPC to start playing.  Might be exploitable if you go on "recruiting" expeditions in high-level areas though.

I guess I'm not convinced that some delay on the arrival of replacement PCs is an ultimate evil, particularly if you let players who are out of characters continue to contribute to the party's problem-solving discussions (voicing someone else's henchmen, perhaps).  Particularly if a caller is being used, where people aren't acting out on their own behalf.

Solving First Level - Resting in the Dungeon?

The natural product of two recent lines of thinking - figuring out how first level is "meant" to be played, and monsters that counter resting in the dungeon.

Notably, in Moldvay there really aren't any monsters on the first dungeon level's wandering monster table who hard-counter resting in a room where you've secured the door.  This means a first level party with only one sleep a day actually has a lot of leeway to recover that critical spell.  Traverse the dungeon to the stairs to the second level, hole up and recover the sleep if you had to use it to get there, go down to the second level and look for unguarded treasure, pop back up when you've spent the sleep and recover it safely near the top of the stairs...

Your ability to take out a lair is still quite limited, since your max sleeps per day is still only one, but your ability to survive wandering monsters is much improved.  And then rations and water become a limiting factor on the duration of your dungeoneering expeditions - though camping in pitch blackness in a sealed room in a haunted underworld certainly sounds...  demoralizing.  Not that torch smoke in an enclosed space sounds much better.  You start out with torches and fresh rations and then upgrade into lanterns and iron rations as you get the money for them...

There are probably amusing tradeoffs in waste management too - a 12-person party produces a fair bit of excrement per day.  If you leave it lying around it might attract vermin and molds.  If you pack it out with you then it costs encumbrance and might attract monsters with strong senses of smell.  Dare you use the dreaded dungeon bathroom, based on real FLGS bathrooms?

Surviving Fifth Level: The Heist Hypothesis

In another instance of recording bright things people have said in the ACKS discord, Arbrethil had some thoughts in response to Surviving First Level: The Heist Hypothesis and since he still hasn't started a blog (hint hint), I guess I'll record it here.

My players often break your assumptions (hiring lots of henchmen) [ed:to be fair, this is Moldvay's position and I'm just trying to solve it], but I've also definitely seen heist type play happen.  And I think when it does, it's often in the wilderness, where treasure hauls are bigger and random encounters are checked less often.  Certainly the odds of winning a wilderness fight are worse, but evasion lets you get away most of the time if it's not a fight you want.  And if you can find a good lair - stupid ogres that you can distract and bamboozle, or a lone dragon that can't both pursue pesky adventurers and guard its lair - that can be enough to level the thief on its own.  The other piece of the puzzle that stands out to me is the utility of a massed spear charge. Even if only three of your five characters can make a spear charge, if you win initiative you've got solid odds of cleaving through a dungeon-sized band of beastmen.  Once you can hire a few additional characters, a high AC PC-led dungeon phalanx trumps most any random-encounter sized band of beastmen on dungeon levels 1-2 even without magic support.
So I think your analysis of them going down to 2nd level pretty much checks out, and wilderness heists are like that but in every way moreso.

Emphasis mine.  I think the points about spear charges and high-AC phalanxes are good ones in ACKS specifically, though spear-charges can also work against the players if they encounter organized and appropriately-armed opponents.  The really interesting point (and one which cuts across both ACKS and OSE/B/X) is that that low-wilderness-level play is often very heist-like.  My Bjornaborg game was very treasure-map-centric once it got into the wilderness levels; get to the treasure, kill whatever's guarding it (if anything), and get back to town with it, avoiding encounters whenever possible.  And intuitively, it seems like there should be some parallels between low-dungeoneering-level and low-wilderness-level play, in that you don't have all the tools for either yet, under a theory of spell/class design where new abilities tend to be appropriate for the phase of the game where they become available.  To gather intel, you don't have Invisibility at 1st, and you don't have Wizard Eye at 5th.  To slow pursuit, you don't have Web at 1st, and you don't have Wall of Fire at 5th.  So it sort of makes sense that a style of play appropriate to the early-dungeon phase might re-appear in the early-wilderness phase, because you're in a similar lacking-tools situation.

This might also have something to do with my players' frustration with low-wilderness play.  I have never run 1st level before.  They've never played 1st-level OSR games before.  So we've never had to "solve" 1st level.  Hence, having to learn 1st level's lessons at 5th level instead.  But by 5th, you're more invested and the stakes are much higher; if you're learning heist play at 1st and you mess up, oh well, new characters are easy.

I wonder if this is the whole root of the problems I've been having with running wilderness game for literally a decade at this point.  It would be pretty funny if for all my theorizing about wilderness as dungeons and hiding maps and resource models and microsandboxes, the real answer was "make sure your players have had to survive 1st level."  A simple, practical, culture-of-play thing with unexpected consequences being the answer would be so perfectly on-brand for the OSR that I wouldn't even be mad.

But since, we're here and theorizing - there are some important differences in the resource model between 1st in the dungeon and 5th in the wilderness.  Fireball is pretty analogous to sleep - except that often in the wilderness you can regain fireball most days.  So that's a tremendous difference in your ability to deal with repeated encounters in a single expedition.  On the other hand, there's still some similarity in tackling lairs; one fireball isn't going to win a wilderness humanoid lair fight any more than a single sleep is going to win a dungeon lair fight.  And this is what drives the back to the heist dynamic - it's really about inability to take lairs head-on, since that's where the treasure (hence XP) is.  On the other hand, the ability to replenish fireballs daily opens up Fabian options for gradual lair reduction during a single expedition not available in the dungeon at 1st level.

The mercenaries-and-hirelings situation also bears examination through this lens.  Mercenary troops in the low wilderness levels probably serve about the same function are hirelings at 1st level; you're not going to be able to acquire and finance enough of them of high quality to rely on them alone to take out humanoid lairs, but they can even your odds against humanoid encounters, and at least help hold the line, pin the humanoids, and help prevent you from being overrun.  I'm really curious whether Moldvay would push against the use of mercenaries in the low wilderness levels in the same way he pushes against hirelings right out of the gate, so that players learn to do without them rather than using them as a crutch.  It seems worth considering to me; we certainly had fights in low-wilderness that my players "cheesed" with massed troops and then I got butthurt and wrote a long post about it.  I guess maybe I should go read Expert and see if Moldvay expresses an opinion on this.

In any case - thanks again Arb for pointing this parallel out!

Surviving First Level: The Heist Hypothesis

I'm still trying to figure out what a reliable or intended strategy for surviving 1st level is supposed to look like.  In part so that I can design a dungeon that supports it, or at worst not design a dungeon that accidentally hard-counters it.

Assume for the sake of argument a Big Four party of fighter, MU, cleric, thief.  Total XP required to get them all to 2nd is 7200.  Assuming stats roughly typical for 3d6, with +5% prime reqs all around and not much else, bringing us down to about 6850 XP.  Assume also that we're following Moldvay's advice to not let new players lean on hirelings as they learn the game.

A single dungeon encounter of 2d4 (average 5) goblins is a pretty fair match outside of the party's one sleep per day.  3d4 (average 7.5) skeletons are liable to get messy if the cleric fails the turning roll.  And those are both bite-sized random encounters with pocket change at best for treasure.  Lairs are much bigger, and dividing and conquering them requires shared languages, decent luck with reaction rolls, and ideally multiple humanoid lairs to pit against each other - but we can't count on getting that from the stocking tables.

Fighting monsters for their treasure seems like a pretty bad idea at 1st level.  You don't have any healing resources and your one sleep might be best used to survive a fight that you didn't want to be in, rather than offensively to win a fight that probably won't have treasure.  Oil and war-dogs are great and all, but...  is that really the intended solution?

Is it possible that you're meant to spend first level skulking about, looking for trapped or unguarded treasure and avoiding almost all encounters?

Well...  I'm not sure the math works out.  In ACKS, the expected value of an unguarded treasure on the first level of a dungeon is 870 GP, so you'd need about 8 unguarded treasures to get everyone to 2nd, for that cure light and extra sleep per day (the thief, incidentally, will level after only about four such treasures).  Buuut between trap rooms and empty rooms, about 9% of rooms (1 in 11) have treasure but no monsters.  So on average you'd need to explore 88 rooms on the first level of the dungeon to level by unguarded+trapped treasure, and that's assuming no casualties to traps, random encounters, stumbling into lairs, etc (granted, also assuming no monster XP - but if you're avoiding lairs and start heading for the exit when you've burnt your one sleep on a random encounter, you're talking maybe 25-50 monster XP per expedition). 88 rooms is huge for the first level of a dungeon - when I'm building standalone non-mega dungeons, I often have about that many rooms across three levels.  But it's sort of plausible that one could build a ruin that large, all of dungeon level 1.  88 rooms is also going to take quite a lot of play time to get through - my players in Rat-hell were exploring maybe 10 rooms per session, so we're looking at 9 sessions without any resets from casualties.  That seems like a long time to spend at 1st level.

The situation is much worse in OSE.  It's still 9% of rooms with treasure but no monsters, but the expected value of that treasure on the first level of the dungeon is a paltry 160gp - about a fifth of what it is in ACKS.  So you'd need to explore over 400 first-level dungeon rooms to level everyone off of unguarded treasure in OSE.

Is the answer to go deeper?  If you're already adopting a Robinsonian posture towards monsters, and the unguarded loot is better at lower levels, maybe this isn't crazy.  And traps don't necessarily scale up when you go down; ACKS' list of traps is the same for 1st-3rd dungeon levels, and OSE doesn't specify.  2nd level unguarded treasure in OSE has an expected value of 492 gp (about triple), while in ACKS it's 1491 gp (almost double).  And many of the random encounters on the 2nd level dungeon table are still susceptible to sleep - 5 2HD lizardmen vs 9 HD affected on average by sleep, for example.  So a 2nd level random encounter isn't necessarily any more of a game-ender than a 1st-level one is...

With ACKS' treasure numbers, I could see a dungeon with 30 rooms in the first level and 30 rooms in the second level yielding enough unguarded/trapped treasure to get a party to 2nd.  'course, in those 60 rooms you've got about 20 monster rooms, of which probably 2 are lairs...

There is also the question of surviving the traps.  In 60 rooms, we're talking about 20 traps (of which 6-7 have treasure).  Most of the "treasure traps" are threats only to whoever interacts with the treasure, but some of the "room traps" are threats to the whole party at once.  In 20 trapped rooms, we'll probably pull the "room fills with poison gas" one at least once, and it could easily happen twice.  Saves at 1st are pretty bad (we should expect ~1.5 survivors based on saves).  Finding and Removing Traps at 1st is also pretty terrible.  The Trapfinding proficiency in ACKS is actually a huge boost at this point in the game, almost doubling the thief's chances of successfully finding or removing a trap (granted, it's 15% chance of success to 25%, which is still not great).  ACKS also removes the poison gas room trap, though the falling bricks from the ceiling for 2d6 is arguably worse at this point since Petrification and Paralysis saves are slightly worse than Poison and Death, and its average damage is still going to be enough for the vast majority of 1st-level characters.

On the other hand, when you frame Finding Traps as "15% chance to detect non-monster TPKs before they fire", thieves start to sound pretty good.  It's not a high chance, but it's better than nothing.

The Caller and the Vietnam Hypothesis

In order to command well, we should know how to submit. He who submits with good grace will eventually become worthy of command.

- Cicero, On the Laws.

There was a post on the osr subreddit the other day asking about the caller.  This post is an elaboration of my comments on that post.

In what seems to be my idiom lately, I decided to go have a look at what OD&D and 1e said about the caller, and was a bit surprised at what I found.

OD&D makes only a brief mention of the caller on page 12-13 of Book 3, where there is a dialogue between the DM and the caller, in which the caller describes a series of actions the party takes during exploration.Curiously, none of the other players say anything.

AD&D 1e largely replaces the term "caller" with "leader". A dialogue demonstrating exploration on pages 97-100 of the 1e DMG does include separate voices for Leader Character (LC) and Other Characters (OC). The OC voice seems to do a fair bit of asking questions of the DM, undertaking combat actions, and in a few cases undertaking independent actions when separated from the party. There is also a note after one of the LC's proposals ("The other players concur") which indicates that this dialogue is perhaps not intended to capture the full discussion at the table, just what passes between the DM and players (but on the other hand, there are also lines that are more or less just other characters agreeing to a plan proposed by the leader, so the text is somewhat inconsistent). The LC does seem to have a very active role in proposing courses of action.

The 1e PHB also makes a few mention of party leaders. The heading "Obedience" on page 106 notes,

The leader and caller of a party might order one course of action while various players state that their characters do otherwise. Your DM will treat such situations as confused and muddled, being certain to penalize the group accordingly.

(emphasis mine).  It is foreign indeed to modern gaming sensibilities for any player to give orders to the party as a whole. I have often thought of callers as sort of like the chairman of a committee, responsible for keeping the party moving coherently, but perhaps "elected expedition captain" is closer to the original role.  Maybe "caller" is meant as in "shot-caller".

This doesn't seem like something that would work well with the sort of people I have historically gamed with - contrarian engineers suspicious of all authority, who can't take orders even from the people paying them without arguing (to be fair, a big part of the job is figuring out which orders are impossible and pushing back on them).  But it probably worked for some sort of player, once - but what sort?  And then I remembered that I had read of a game at West Point that used a caller in very much this commanding style (with a second-in-command even, I believe).

Maybe, like careful dungeoncrawling and Tucker's Kobolds, this commanding way of playing the caller comes out of the American experience in Vietnam, where a broad cross-section of men were exposed to giving and receiving orders as a consequence of the draft.  And like careful dungeoncrawling and Tucker's Kobolds, maybe its decline in the '80s reflects the spread of the game beyond its original audience of historical wargamers and veterans.

Playing with AD&D's Weapon-vs-Armor Table

Delta had a good post the other day about what he believes to be a big error in the weapon-vs-armor table present in the 1e DMG (and as far as I can tell, identical to the one in Supplement 1, Greyhawk, which I noted in passing).

I think Delta is correct, that the modifiers were just taken by looking at the difference between 8+ and the target number for each entry, which means that (for example) maces aren't particularly good against heavy armor, and that in general you get very un-Chainmail-like outcomes for a table nominally derived from Chainmail.

But Delta doesn't quite follow through to publishing a revised table.  He asks at the end if that's something that people would like to see.  And I was curious so I decided to have a stab at it myself.

First I converted each of the target numbers on 2d6 into a probability and then into a target number on d20.

 

TN 2d6	% hit	% miss	TN d20
5	83.33	16.67	4
6	72.22	27.78	6
7	58.33	41.67	9
8	41.67	58.33	12
9	27.78	72.22	15
10	16.67	83.33	17
11	8.33	91.67	19
12	2.78	97.22	20

 

Then I filled those d20 target numbers in for each weapon:

d20 target numbers	No armor	Leather	Shield only	Leather +shield	Chain	Chain +shield	Plate	Plate +shield
Dagger	6	9	12	12	15	17	20	20
Hand Axe	9	9	12	15	17	17	19	20
Mace	12	12	12	15	12	12	9	12
Sword	9	12	12	15	12	15	17	19
Battle Axe	12	12	12	12	9	9	15	17
Morningstar	6	6	9	9	6	9	12	12
Flail	9	9	9	9	6	9	6	9
Spear	12	12	15	15	17	17	19	20
Pole arm	6	6	6	9	9	12	15	17
Halberd	12	12	12	9	6	6	9	12
2H Sword	6	6	6	6	4	4	6	9
Mounted Lance	4	4	4	4	6	9	12	15
Pike	12	12	12	12	12	12	15	17

Finally, I converted those target numbers into modifiers relative to the baseline target number to hit that type of armor in Supplement 1 (10+ for No Armor, 12+ for Shield Only, 17+ for Plate+shield, etc)

	No armor	Leather	Shield only	Leather +shield	Chain	Chain +shield	Plate	Plate +shield
Base to-hit:	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
Dagger	+4	+2		+1	-1	-2	-4	-3
Hand Axe	+1	+2		-2	-3	-2	-3	-3
Mace	-2	-1		-2	+2	+3	+7	+5
Sword	+1	-1		-2	+2		-1	-2
Battle Axe	-2	-1		+1	+5	+6	+1
Morningstar	+4	+5	+3	+4	+8	+6	+4	+5
Flail	+1	+2	+3	+4	+8	+6	+10	+8
Spear	-2	-1	-3	-2	-3	-2	-3	-3
Pole arm	+4	+5	+6	+4	+5	+3	+1
Halberd	-2	-1		+4	+8	+9	+7	+5
2H Sword	+4	+5	+6	+7	+10	+11	+10	+8
Mounted Lance	+6	+7	+8	+9	+8	+6	+4	+2
Pike	-2	-1		+1	+2	+3	+1

This seems somewhat unnecessarily complicated, though, since you have to check both a modifier for the armor and then a modifier for the weapon.  I rather like the big table of d20 target numbers - sum your adjustment from Str, magic weapons, and level, subtract for defender's magic armor and rings of protection, roll your d20, add your bonus, and look up in the table what you need to hit.

I don't know that these direct conversions by probability are actually reasonable within the context of balancing weapon choices for AD&D.  The heavy weapons get some really big bonuses to hit, and they don't have the counterbalancing factors that they did in Chainmail's man-to-man combat system, where opponents using lighter weapons could parry or attack multiple times in a round against opponents using heavier weapons.

Mahjong a la Hamming

This post is absolutely unrelated to D&D.  It is also not a particularly sober post.

 

I was introduced to mahjong last week (first the Old Hong Kong rules, then Japanese riichi mahjong) and it is surprisingly interesting.

 

I've never gotten into a traditional (pre-20th-century) game before.  I learned a little about the theory of chess while writing a chessbot in school, but I don't really enjoy trying to play deterministic, perfect-information games many moves deep; it has always felt sort of like fencing, in trying to make the second-to-last mistake (and then your opponent makes the last mistake).  I tried to wrap my head around go briefly but that was as deterministic and perfect information as chess, with even more spooky action at a distance (pieces influencing actions across the board via laddering potential, for example).  Poker was a little more to my tastes, because it is probabilistic with hidden information, so the best you can do is math rather than tree-search to infinite depths, but the betting strategy and deception are too central for me.  How can I deceive when others expect me to deceive?  I was into blackjack as a kid, which was nice because it was partial information and random but not entirely adversarial, but not really that interesting because relatively soluble and simple.

Mahjong, though.  Like poker, it is probabilistic and partial-information.  Unlike poker, betting strategy and deceiving your opponents are not so central; reading your opponents is useful (particularly for not losing by feeding them tiles that they need), but in order to win you pretty much have to be able to "play your own game" of building up a good hand from the drip of random tiles given to you, balancing the speed with which you can get a hand to a "victory if I draw the right tile" state against the probability that that draw will happen against the value of the hand if it is drawn.  So it's a game about a partially-controlled traversal of the lattice of hands; you don't control your draws, but you do control your discards.  As with forking in chess, there's a fair bit of trying to build win-win structures into your hand; if you have a 2-2-3 of the same suit, you can turn it into 1-2-3 if you draw a 1 and discard a 2, 2-3-4 if you draw a 4 and discard a 2, and 2-2-2 if you draw a third 2 and discard the 3.  So you try to build these structures that maximize your options for capitalizing on randomness.

It reminds me of Hamming's lecture, You and Your Research (Hamming, for those unfamiliar, did computing at Los Alamos and then Bell Labs, invented the error-correcting codes whose descendants are used to detect cosmic-ray-induced bit flips in your RAM, and has a lot of stuff named after him in computing).  Hamming remarks that a lot of people think success/fame is all luck, but that "luck favors a prepared mind...  you prepare yourself by the way you lead your life from day to day, and then luck hits you...  It is luck, but it isn't luck."  The mahjong player might say that luck favors a prepared hand, and you prepare your hand by the way you discard from turn to turn.

There are a number of other odd parallels between mahjong and Hamming's talk.  Hamming discusses the Matthew Effect - those who have had success have an easier time having more success, while those who fall behind tend to fall further behind over time.  Many mahjong variants have a rule where if the dealer wins a hand, he gets more score than he would if he weren't the dealer, and he remains the dealer for the next hand.  So one success at the right time can enable a string of high-value successes.  So the Matthew Effect is built in, beyond the usual level of "oh I'm up, I can afford to absorb some losses".

Another remark Hamming makes is that it isn't enough to do good/novel work quickly, to be prepared for the lightning - you have to do the work in a way which makes it valuable.  The story he tells is about an engineering problem that he was solving, which had wider implications for the debate over the primacy of analog vs digital machines for solving certain kinds of problems.  He could have just solved the problem for his use case, but he realized he was on to something more general and more important, and put the extra work in to elaborate on that, and consequently his work was of greater value.  The parallel in mahjong is that creating a hand which satisfies the constraints for winning a round is not that hard, but a hand which only satisfies the winning constraints is of low value; it scores you few points.  Recognizing the potential for high point-value structures within the hand and bringing those to fruition yields exponentially more points.  The exponential scoring system is terrifying and wondrous; it means that you can afford to make exceedingly low-probability plays and have the expected value still work out, because the payoff can be exceedingly huge.  But I think Hamming would absolutely agree that the impact of science and engineering work is scored exponentially; he talks about how Poincaré had relativity figured out before Einstein, but his formulation wasn't as clear, while Einstein's formulation was in a relatively accessible style and that made all the difference.

The correspondences continue.  Hamming's remark that you can't be working on important problems all the time, you have to pick small, insignificant problems that will grow into important problems, parallels the strategy of growing a lone middle tile into a group.  His remarks on having a direction that you're going in and not vacillating are absolutely a problem that I have in developing hands, where I try to pursue too many directions for development at once.  His discussion of courage vs stubbornness and Shannon's willingness to hold out for good randomness in his technical work correspond to the potential big payoffs of the scoring system for holding out rather than abandoning a potentially big hand.

 

Hamming tells a story about how Bell Labs wouldn't let him have enough programmers.  Eventually this led him to ask the question if he could get the machine to do the programming, which "put me immediately at the forefront of computing.  What had seemed to be an obstacle turned out to be an asset.  Admiral Hopper has said similar."

And then in mahjong, what seem to be obstacles can often turn into assets in scoring, like pinfu (a hand with no tiles that are worth points on their own, which instead earns bonus points as a whole) or a hand with too many winds and dragons (which has the potential to become a very high-scoring "13 Orphans" hand).

"Is what you're working on important, or likely to become important?  If no, why are you working on it?"  "Is the hand structure that you're building one that lets you either win quick or win big?  If no, why are you pursuing it?"

It's just bizarre to find a game where a philosophy that I recognize as legitimate is so...  embodied.  If Hamming's views on the world are accurate, and mahjong is applied hammingism in the small, then...

There is a moment in Iain Banks' The Player of Games where the protagonist observes that the society with which he is interacting treats its central game as descriptive of life, and thinks of life in terms of the game.  I am, obviously, the rankest of novices, which makes this obvious cringe, but: I don't think I've ever met a game with the same potential to correspond to reality as mahjong seems to have.  An abstract tradgame has never hit me in the gut like this before.

Maybe part of the staying power of traditional abstract games is that like the abstractions of mathematics, you can understand more situations through their lenses / metaphors than through the lenses of more concrete games; the mahjong lens is more general than the D&D lens or the Stargrunt lens, because there are parts of the D&D lens or wargaming lens that obviously do not apply to most situations.

Perhaps when I say that perfect-information deterministic games are "not to my taste", what I really mean is that I believe that they're sort of irrelevant because life is subject to a great deal of chance and uncertainty about the world beyond just what is in the head of my opponents.  Perhaps when I say that poker is not to my taste it is because I believe that generally there are things that you can do to strengthen your own position besides communicating, that randomness isn't so strong in reality as it is in poker, so poker is likewise not a very good model of reality.

But if a traditional game does seem to correspond to reality, then one of the things which was an obstacle to me in chess, learning the opening books and studying the accumulated understanding of the game, seems much less burdensome.

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.

Dwarf Fortress a la ACKS

"Study your successes, not your failures.  If you study your successes, you learn how to succeed.  If your study your failures, you learn how to fail." - Richard Hamming, You and Your Research.

I'm not actually proposing to run another ACKS campaign.  This is more like a thought-experiment derived from the previous (relative) success of the Bjornaborg campaign, after which my players remarked positively on their relative ownership of the world and their dwarven engineers.

Part of the issue with ACKS is that I never want to map a dungeon ever again so long as I live.  So the question - can I get players to do it for me?  The answer, I suspect, is yes.  Previously I've had several players take great pleasure in designing and mapping their castles in ACKS.  "Reverse dungeon" is already a thing, with the players running defense.  This would look a lot like that, but with some base-building aspects on top of it.  Coming at it from the ACKS side, it's extremely granular but benefits from single-domain-for-entire-party, which should be good for cohesion (if you can get buy-in on the idea at all).  This is like, domains for third-level characters.

You get a population of dwarves.  Cut it up into pools of anonymous Laborers, Craftsdwarves, and Soldiery, with a small number of named NPCs (eg, veterans / heroes, master craftsdwarves, sages).  Each laborer can produce 10gp/mo of food (provided space to grow it), construction, or mining.  Craftsdwarves can supervise construction as engineers, produce goods for export or use, or build traps and siege weapons at about 20gp/mo.  Soldiers, of course, train, patrol, and fight (or labor).

Let's do some math.  We're going to assume Absolutist Survivalist Autarchy Juche Dworth Korea economics with no useless children as our baseline, from each according to their ability, to each according to the whims of the player characters.  I'm also going to take a few gross liberties with ACKS' math.

Farming - one laborer produces 10gp/mo (9 really, per the Labor proficiency, but 10 for ease of use).  Per Campaigns, supply costs for infantry are 0.5gp/wk/individual, so one farmer supports himself plus four others.  Great.  The really interesting question is "how much land do you need to do that?"  This is something that Dwarf Fortress is really bad about; farmland is rarely a problem except in the early game in certain embarks (glacier, salt water, &c), because productivity per unit of farmland is very high.  I'm sure ACKS has the answer to this question, and that answer is almost certainly "even with mushroom crops, there's no way in hell you're going to manually dig a farm large enough to support anybody".  So you're probably left with surface farming or cavern farming, and those are both areas you're going to need to secure by force and fortification.  Looking at the Axioms Peasant Economics issue (goddamnit) they have 30 acres of land producing ~160gp/year of food (but with more labor), so ~5gp/acre/year, so if you're producing 10gp/mo you're looking at like 22 acres.  An acre is ~44000 square feet, or a 210' x 210' area.  So...  yeah, if you want to farm underground, you're going to need to do a lot of digging.  You could probably get into some decent surface-world Civ-type gaming if you had the right hexmap scale; a half-mile hex contains 24 farms, a quarter-mile hex contains 6, so somewhere in that range is probably about right.  A nice feature of operating at this scale is that rapid response is possible; if goblins are burning the outlying farms a mile from the fortress, it takes news 10 minutes to arrive at a run, a few minutes to reach the PCs in the fortress, and then 10 minutes at a run to get to the action...  which means some peasants might still be alive.  That is, if you have roads and bridges, of course.  Maybe faster if you have lookout towers and soldiers on duty; because hey, you can see smoke from a long way away!  So the PC choice structure / play loop here looks like "choose which hexes to farm, where to build logistics and fortifications so we can defend them, defending them when they get attacked, tracking the attackers back to their lair, and clearing it."  Depending on how complicated you want to get, you could also get into like, building huts for your peasants and clearing woods for raw materials.  Might also make sense to have no surface farm production during winter, so you want to shift mining labor to farming in the summer / fall, stock up food, and then shift farming labor to mining in the winter.

Right, the other option is farming caverns.  I'm going to assume comparable land productivity between surface and caverns for ease of us (actually a terrible assumption, because power per square foot on the surface is way higher due to sunlight, which is why there isn't a whole lot of biomass density in caverns IRL).  Unlike the surface, caverns are mostly closed, so instead of a hex map it might make sense to just use a graph of connected nodes, each of which has some size in arable land, and each edge of which has some distance for travel purposes.  In the spirit of jayquaying, throw in a smattering of surface-cavern links; very reasonable places to build fortifications.  Could also very easily do multiple layers / depths of caverns, underground rivers, &c.  PCs explore caverns, locate monster lairs and desirable special features, choose which caverns to clear and secure via fortifications, and play reactive defense.

Mining - Mostly we're interested in mining for space, although mining for raw resources is also worth thinking about.  ACKS has somewhat conflicting numbers for mining for space; in Core, a 10x10x10 section of dungeon hallway costs 500gp, which is 50 dwarf-months of labor.  Ouch.  In DaW: Campaigns, though, the cost of siege-mining is 1gp per 20 cubic feet, or 50gp for the same volume, a mere 5 dwarf-months.  I guess the important difference here is the flagstone floor you get in the dungeon hallway.  Let's go with the 50gp/cube estimate.  So if you have, say, 25 laborers, you can allocate 5 to farming a quarter-mile hex (producing 50gp/mo of food, which supports 25 dwarves) and the other 20 to mining, and dig four 10x10x10 cubes in your fortress per month.  If you happen to have an ore vein, this can also produce raw materials of value (would probably steal a note from How to Host a Dungeon here, and figure out ore vein locations by dropping dice on graph paper).  Given that it takes about 5 dwarves to dig a cube, and about 5 dwarves to farm a quarter-mile hex, five dwarves producing 50gp/mo might just be the right size to track labor in.

Labor is probably going to be a limiting factor of construction, generally.  Given the presence of surface-cavern links, it might make sense to secure that initial cavern and fortify all the links out, even if those fortifications are just wooden palisades, because then you don't need to dig out living space (huts-in-a-cavern are cheaper, but less defensible, than excavation).

Craftsdwarves - assuming a mix of apprentices and journeymen, I'm willing to call it 20gp/mo of production per craftsdwarf for ease of use.  That production can be finished goods for export (cut gems, enameled beer steins, whatever), weapons and armor, siege weapons and ammunition, traps (per Player's Companion...  though traps are crazy-expensive), or "Specialist" support for military, which is a cost of about 1gp/soldier/month.  Craftsdwarves are scarcer than laborers and more productive, so you probably want to house them in or near the fortress.  They may or may not need workshops and tools, depending on the detail you want.  Again, very nice to manage in groups of 5, for 100gp/mo production.

TODO seasonal or annual check to see if a craftsdwarf turns into a named master craftsdwarf.  Might involve Fell Mood, PC quest for unusual materials.  Not that it would be worth the hassle, because master craftsdwarves don't improve production that much...  unless you make them grandmasters from the Heroic book and let them start making masterwork / semi-magic items.  That it might be worth worrying about.

Soldiers - this is kinda the easy one, since there's so much material already in Domains at War about them.  Comes in two flavors, heavy infantry and crossbow (and maybe furies).  Need both food / supply from labor and specialist upkeep from craftsdwarves.  Station them in fortifications or watchtowers, send them on a regular patrol route through certain hexes, keep them close at hand so they can support PC actions, whatever.  Probably can't have more than a third of the militia or so on watch / available at the drop of a hat, but should be able to bring the whole force to bear with a day's notice.  Nice to group into 6-dwarf squads (for fighting in 10x10 squares) or 30-dwarf platoons.  Combat against beastmen (goblins and orcs) is probably going to be on warband / platoon or even squad scale.

TODO occasional check to see if a soldier turns into a named / classed hero, subsequently available for henching; might only happen through combat.  Heroes can train laborers to be soldiers, per Campaigns (and then you use craftsdwarf labor to equip them).

TODO priests?  Sacrificing food and goods for blessings.  Prevent disease and undead?  Praise be unto Armok!

TODO morale, consuming excess production for a morale bonus.  In the case of excess food, this is a festival; in case of excess crafts, it's gift-giving and private property.

Caravans - every season except winter, a caravan arrives and you can trade them stuff; useless tchotchkes, excess food, goblin prisoners, smoked chimera meat, whatever, and purchase weapons or food, or hire labor from them, in return.  Since we don't pay anyone wages, arguably the "fair" / ACKSonomically sound thing to do would be to convert excess production into migrants at slave-labor rates, of 33 times their monthly wage.  Since we have to produce the goods we're using to pay that price, we can take three months of production and use that to pay for a migrant, so for every 11 dwarves allocated just to exports for an entire season we could get a new dwarf.  That's kinda harsh; I expect casualties would outpace population growth.  Another option is that you export some goods and then the amount you export earns you a certain number of rolls on the Migrant Table...  as well as on the Monsters Table, with results including goblins and dragons, of course.  Fame for production is a double-edged sword.

So that's all pretty straightforward.  The real remaining trouble is PCs.  What do they do?  How do they earn XP?  Why do they care about this hole in the ground full of dwarves?  We've broken the core adventuring heist "get the money and get out" gameplay loop of ACKS by making the game largely defensive.  Could award XP for fortress / domain production, consumption, or exportation, plus cash earned from fighting and killing monsters I guess.  In terms of class mix, Vaultguard, Fury, Craftpriest, and Delver are all very reasonable classes.  A dwarf surface-explorer counterpart to the Delver's underground exploration might be reasonable.  A dwarf ceremonialist from the Heroic book might be reasonable too, to get some effects that you can't with divine magic.  Human bards, mercenaries, scholars, and monster hunters are not unusual long-term guests, and there's even precedent for elves leading dwarf fortresses.  So maybe party composition is not that big a deal.

In terms of adventuring activities, there's actually a mix of reactive and proactive possibilities.  Reactive adventures include stopping monsters from killing all your peasants and seeking out rare materials for fell moods.  Proactive adventures include cavern exploration, treasure maps?, and clearing out monster lairs that have raided you previously.  Probably a reasonable place for clocks - if you defeat a raid, it's only a matter of time until there's a stronger follow-up.  Likewise, over time Monster Table results build up, and those lairs may merge.  So a proactive policy of taking care of threats before they get worse is probably wise...

Oh yeah, and the endgame - fortress falls to darkness, and a new party gets to explore / loot it.

Player-Controlled XP Allocation

A friend of mine asked me to give a talk on DMing, so I've been writing and rewriting endless cycles of notes on that.  One theme that I know I want to hit is putting players mostly-in-control of the difficulty of the combat that they face, by giving them free rein to scout the dungeon and avoid dangerous monsters.  Another theme is that really strong play often requires submission of the individual party member to the interests of the party - the wizard has to hold on to his one spell carefully rather than using it early for personal satisfaction, the thief has to expose himself to substantial personal risk in order to find traps so that they don't kill anyone (or everyone) else, and fighters are sometimes called upon to die for the party so that everyone else can live.  Clerics, of course, are clerics, and have always operated been expected to operate "in service" to the party as a whole.

But when you take these two ideas, players collectively in control of their destiny and subordination of the individual to the party, and combine them with XP for treasure, a funny possibility arises.

Under a certain reading of the rules, you earn 1 XP per GP that you receive from the adventure.  If the party as a whole determines (by vote, say) that some player failed to contribute and to pull their weight, by (say) fleeing from combat, the party as a whole need not allocate any GP from the treasure to that player, and hence he will earn little XP - just the monster XP portion, which is around 20% of XP on most adventures.  A persistent problem player who regularly earns 20% XP will eventually end up about 2 levels behind the rest of the party.  A player allocated only half a share of gold will tend to end up one level behind.  This is, obviously, not a form of censure that should be used lightly, but it is one that should be considered.  I suspect that, as with PC death, this is not something that needs to happen often for it to modify player behavior substantially.  The knowledge that it is a possibility encourages cooperation.

The reverse also applies - if you have a new player join a group and he's playing a class that you really need, the party can allocate greater than a share to him.  If someone's fighter died in a heroic rearguard action to cover the party's retreat and now they're playing a henchman and a level behind, you can allocate them greater than a share until they come up to level parity.  The trivial, common case is that a PC is 10 XP from leveling with standard shares, and a tiny reallocation might push them across a threshold.

Unfortunately, henchmen complicate this XP allocation scheme, for one because they receive an odd share size, and for two because traditionally they receive their shares straight from the party pool, but if a player receives an odd-sized share, do his henchmen too?  In the case of a problem player, it seems reasonable to dock his henchmen as well; in the case of a hero player, it seems reasonable to award his henchmen extra as well.  But this all complicates the accounting, or raises again the specter of "the pay for your henchmen should come out of your share of the treasure", which I suspect most sensible parties will reject on the grounds that a player with many henchmen is of great value to the party as a whole.

At the end of the day, one of the interesting facets of this game not present in more modern editions is that it is in many ways an experiment in small-scale self-governance, civics, and organizational behavior.  And yes, the gaming community seems to have settled on very regular norms regarding the allocation of treasure and XP, but one of the joys of transgressive/retrogressive gaming, allowing things like PvP and uneven allocation of treasure, is an opportunity to reinvent those norms (with good stories and object lessons about why we have those norms), or to arrive at new and strange norms.  And isn't that what the OSR is all about?  Rolling back the clock and seeing the other possibilities that could have been, not merely in the rules of the game, but in the rules of the group?

D&D, Vietnam, and the Dungeon

Seeing Like a State's mention of compulsory village formation / sedentarization in precolonial Thailand reminded me of a similar phenomenon during the Vietnam War: the relocation of peasants into "Strategic Hamlets", where they could be monitored, in order to keep them from providing assistance to Viet Cong guerillas, which I had read about in War of the Flea I think.  This, combined with the savage beating my players took last session, brought to mind a blog post I once read by an old D&D player who played with his father, who was a Vietnam veteran and relentlessly paranoid in the dungeon.  Despite my best efforts at googling, I have failed to find that post (edit: thanks DHBoggs for finding the post I was talking about!).  Instead, I found this, which was pretty interesting, but left me with some unvoiced questions.

Whither dungeons?  Moria's all well and good, but as movie adaptations have shown, it's easily distilled down to a Five Room Dungeon.  I suppose there was some dungeoneering in the old Conan stories, though I've not read them.  But the campaign-tentpole megadungeon full of traps, and the style of exploration and dirty fighting that surrounded it, is not a thing I recall seeing much in fantasy (even post-D&D fantasy).

And then today, I stumbled on this excellent thread on that finest of subreddits, /r/AskHistorians, and via it the Cu Chi Tunnel Complex.  It's 75 miles long - the original megadungeon, the real deal.  Way too big to clear, and full of traps.

My contention, in extension of MacDougall's idea that D&D came out of the culture war in the Vietnam era, is that old-school megadungeoncrawling came specifically out of the American experience in tunnel-fighting in Vietnam.  Why else the great concern with light and darkness and air currents?  Why else the absurdly slow exploration movement speed, the concern with getting lost, the trap paranoia?  Somebody had been there, or read the reports.

It nicely explains the division between henchmen and mercenaries - henchmen and PCs are tunnel rats, crazy enough to go into an infinite hole full of traps.

Tucker's Kobolds are a profoundly guerilla war experience, a gamerculture memory of the Viet Cong.  The article is also interesting historically.  We observe that by 1987 (when Dragon #127 was published), 16 years after the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, this style of playing the opposition was atypical (the publication of OD&D in 1974 was just after the withdrawal of troops).  We also observe that the author was at the time in the Army.  Makes you wonder if the emergence of the New School was correlated with the dilution of the 'Nam vets in the gamer community.

The ecology of the Cu Chi Original Megadungeon, meanwhile, was supported by a combination of imports from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and rice grown on the surface by cooperative peasants.  This works somewhat less well in a fantasy setting where you can ethically exterminate the beastman villages responsible for growing food on the surface (although at low levels when dungeoneering is usually happening, PCs may not be powerful enough to attack surface villages).  But putting some fraction of beastman wilderness lairs underground (instead of aboveground villages) does solve some of my wilderness-level problems (including "let's throw mercenaries at this problem" and "let's just light it on fire from the air", which are perfectly valid strategies but sort of repetitive after a while).  It all goes very nicely with the notion of nonstate spaces, too.  The domain game is fundamentally about creating bubbles of order and safety, "pacified regions", and maps nicely to the poor counter-insurgency war conducted in Vietnam.

I wonder to what degree the "PCs are always foreigners" trope (as in Tekumel, among other places) was a product of necessity (in terms of DM bandwidth and player attention limits) and laziness, and how much it was a product of, again, the American military experience in Vietnam...  We also see Occupied Territory scenarios not that infrequently, including in Morrowind and Skyrim on the videogame side, and inverted in Midnight (with the PCs as rebels rather than occupiers).  Come to think of it, I don't recall the last time I saw a scenario that cast the PCs in with the occupiers; culture shift I guess (not that it stopped us from doing it again 30 years later...).