VBAM 2e Review

Victory By Any Means, Second Edition, finally came out a bit over a week ago now.  It was originally scheduled for winter of 2009-2010.

There's some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that it's close enough to 1e that I had trouble finding the places where the core rules definitely differed (admittedly, it's been a while since I looked at 1e).  The things that immediately jumped out at me were:

• The way Intel Points works has changed a fair bit.
• Trade fleets now operate in a single system, less work plotting paths and less potential exploitability of convoy escorts.
• Constructing ships now takes time and there are a limited number of construction slots on shipyards.  Civilian fleets are exempt from construction time and slots (they're just contractors).
• Colony fleets don't have to pick up census in order to establish a new colony (but get a bonus if they do).
• I think the Reinforcements Pool in space combat has changed but I'm not really sure?  This is also true of the system morale changes table.
• Leftover damage changed in space combat, in a way which produces more satisfactory outcomes but also requires a little more bookkeeping.

Those are about the only things in the core rules that I could point to and go "I would bet you money that this changed."  This was not a half-decade and a new major version number's worth of update.  It's entirely possible that I'm missing plenty of small numerical changes to things like tech investment thesholds or phases being slightly reordered or something, but overall it all looks pretty much the same.

(Also, the editing isn't great - there are some sections that are organized poorly, and the phrase "imperial thrown world" drives me mad)

The good news is that you can probably still use most of the Menagerie and the Moderator's Companion material from 1e in 2e.

The actual good news is that there are some new and improved optional rules (though the WMD rules seem to have gone missing), the new unit design system looks pretty good, and there's a lot more advice for moderators on setting starting conditions and generally making the game work.  The provided scenarios have been improved; starting force values are higher (meaning you can skip or reduce the boring buildup phase of the early game) and there are more victory conditions across the board.  The changes to Barbarians at the Gates are particularly well-done.  The new starmaps are really aesthetically pleasing, too.

At the end of the day, though, VBAM2 has failed to escape 1e's "World War II in spaaaace" nature.  Its economics are solidly Industrial Era, its navies are along battleships-and-carriers lines, and the whole game structure is of War for Vast Territorial Conquest (which van Creveld has argued in both Rise and Decline of the State and The Transformation of War to be obsolete in the Age of the Nuke).  Admittedly space changes that dynamic some, but if you're willing to allow ships with stealth and FTL (as these rules do), second-strike capability with nukes or grey goo bombs or whatever is possible and a MAD situation seems likely to follow logically.  Overall it feels rather like a Pacific Theatre island-hopping game with some colonization rules and "FUTURE" stamped in front of it in big red letters.  The 2e draft materials that I recall reading back when bore some promise in this regard - more custom tech, more interesting things like planet destroyers and Homeworld-style nomad fleets, stuff like that.  But as a consequence of sticking close to 1e, 2e has failed in this regard.

It's a pity, too, because computers are generally inadequate for science fiction and fantasy grand strategy games.  Computers handle historical games well because they're tightly scoped with limited possible deviation, but in a scifi/fantasy grand strategy game, breaking the rules is sort of the point.  If I can't build ringworlds and planetary disassemblers and industrial-scale cloning vats and targeted bioweapons...  why bother?  You could write all these things into the rules, but it'd be a bloated mess.  My understanding is that this is sort of what happened to the 2e I was hoping for.  At the end of the day, you have to have plenty of human discretion in the loop to run a game like that; codifying infinite diversity is self-defeating.  But the assumptions in VBAM's core rules, things like "population is a meaningful factor in determining production", make it kinda hard to use as a basis for exploring interesting universes.

In conclusion: It is difficult to compare the work to the author's intent, because that intent clearly changed substantially over the course of development.  Speaking personally, I will probably never play this game.  It is an upgrade from 1e, but not in any of the areas that were keeping us from playing 1e.  It'd be a fine computer game, but there're still too many rules and too much paperwork for any of the potential players I know to be interested in playing it manually, and once you automate it you lose the flexibility to do interesting things (which the system already doesn't support without some elbow grease).

ACKS Class: Bearsarker

As I mentioned previously, it's theorized that berserkers in Norse society were holy warriors dedicated to animal cults.  Here's the first of three classes in that tradition, with a healthy dose of inspiration from Egil's Saga.  This is the least-divine and most fightery of the three.

I apologize in advance for any puns; I hope you find them bearable.

Bearsarkers
Prime Requisites: Str, Con
Requirements: None
Hit Dice: 1d6
Maximum Level: 14

Bearsarkers are the fearsome warrior-servants of the Great Bear, renowned across the land for their ferocity and stylish bear's-head hats.  They occupy a dual role in Skanadian society, viewed as both the epitome of masculine virtue and threats to the structural integrity of local drinking establishments and political order.  As a result they spend much of their time outside society; the arrival of a bearsarker in town is a noteworthy event which typically heralds violence.  Some powerful monarchs have been known to maintain a bodyguard of bearsarkers, though this is a messy and expensive proposition.

Bearsarkers are terrifying combatants, though trained in a limited range of weapons and armor.  At first level they hit AC0 on 10+ on a d20, and they advance in attack and saving throws by one point per level.  They also increase their melee damage by +1 at first level, and by an additional point at 3rd level and every three levels thereafter, and may cleave once per round per level of experience.

Bearsarkers have an intuitive grasp of hand-to-hand combat, and may use all melee weapons.  They may fight with a weapon and shield, or with a weapon in two hands.  As they are from societies where metal is precious and plate is unheard of, however, they are not trained in the use of armor heavier than chainmail.

Bearsarkers are servants of the Great Bear, and are often aided by their fellow servants.  They gain a +2 to reaction rolls with bears, soldier-bears, bearmen, owlbears, werebears, and other ursine creatures, and may converse fluently with all such creatures and hire them as henchmen.  If using Domains at War, they may serve as Creature Handler specialists, though only for bears.  If a bearsarker is reincarnated and rolls an Animal result, they may choose to return as a bear; if restored of life and limb and rolling a "body part of another creature" result, that body part is likely from a bear.  Bearsarkers take only half the usual penalty to reaction rolls for having bear arms and other bodyparts.

Bearsarkers spend much time roaming the wilds alone seeking communion with the Great Bear and guarding its shrines in uncivilized places, and so possess keen wilderness senses, granting them +1 to surprise rolls while in the wilderness.

Bearsarkers are notoriously hard to kill, and may roll twice on the mortal wounds table and choose the result.  They also reduce any required bed rest from their injuries by a number of days equal to their class level.

Bearsarker initiation rituals typically involve wrestling a bear, and almost always end with the initiate's head in the bear's mouth.  Only by the mercy of the Great Bear are the chosen spared, and the experience typically leaves them without fear of death, for they know the Bear watches over them.  Bearsarkers are immune to all fear, mundane and magical.  Bearsarker henchmen and (extremely rare) units comprised solely of bearsarkers gain +4 to morale in combat (though not to loyalty and similar rolls, as such men are headstrong and difficult to control).

At fifth level, the bearsarker masters his shape-strength.  Once per day, he may spend a round howling, beating his breast, or biting his shield in order to become enormously strong for 1 turn (10 minutes).  While in shape-strength, he attacks as an 8HD monster (3+ THAC0) or his own class and level (whichever is better) and inflicts double damage with his attacks.  He can also throw boulders, small trees, and other heavy objects at foes up to 200' away for 3d6 points of damage and gains a +16 bonus to force open doors and break objects.  Shape-strength does not stack with any other effects that alter a character's strength.  After a bout of shape-strength, the bearsarker is fatigued, taking a -1 penalty to attack and damage rolls until he has rested for 1 turn.  This stacks with fatigue from skipping rest-turns during exploration.

Also at fifth level, the bearsarker becomes a bearrifying presence on the battlefield.  Opponents who face him in melee, and units facing troops led by him in melee, take a -1 penalty to morale rolls.  This penalty does not stack if multiple bearsarkers are present.

At ninth level, the bearsarker may call upon the Great Bear to make him an unstoppable juggernaut, whom iron bites not.  Once per day, he may spend a round howling, beating his breast, or biting his shield in order to become impervious to normal weapons for 1 turn (10 minutes).  He may use this round to activate his shape-strength simultaneously if he so desires.  While so impervious, the bearsarker is immune to injury from non-magical, unsilvered weapons.  Creatures immune to nonmagical and unsilvered weapons may still injure him, as may creatures of 5 or more hit dice.  He is also not impervious to fire from siege weapons.  However, he may weather any number of hits from normal weapons wielded by weak creatures without injury.

Also at 9th level, the bearsarker may contruct a den-fortress in a remote location in the borderlands or wilderness, as an Explorer's Border Fort.  When he does so, up to 2d4+2 grizzly bears and 1d6 bearsarkers of 1st-3rd level will arrive to attend him.  Settlers also begin appearing as normal, though there might should be a population growth modifier for "abundant population of hungry bears."

Experience	Title	Level	HD	Damage Bonus
0	Cub-Initiate	1	1d6	+1
2600	Bear Wrestler	2	2d6	+1
5200	Bear Armiger	3	3d6	+2
10400	Bear Cavalier	4	4d6	+2
20800	Grizzly Veteran	5	5d6	+2
41600	Kodiak Champion	6	6d6	+3
85000	Polar Protector	7	7d6	+3
170000	He-Who-Mauls	8	8d6	+3
290000	Bearsarker	9	9d6	+4
410000	Bearsarker, 10th level	10	9d6+2	+4
530000	Bearsarker, 11th level	11	9d6+4	+4
650000	Bearsarker, 12th level	12	9d6+6	+5
770000	Bearsarker, 13th level	13	9d6+8	+5
990000	Ursine Overlord	14	9d6+10	+5

Level	Petrif & Paralysis	Poison & Death	Blast & Breath	Staves & Wands	Spells	To-Hit
1	15+	14+	16+	16+	17+	10+
2	14+	13+	15+	15+	16+	9+
3	13+	12+	14+	14+	15+	8+
4	12+	11+	13+	13+	14+	7+
5	11+	10+	12+	12+	13+	6+
6	10+	9+	11+	11+	12+	5+
7	9+	8+	10+	10+	11+	4+
8	8+	7+	9+	9+	10+	3+
9	7+	6+	8+	8+	9+	2+
10	6+	5+	7+	7+	8+	1+
11	5+	4+	6+	6+	7+	0+
12	4+	3+	5+	5+	6+	-1+
13	3+	2+	4+	4+	5+	-2+
14	2+	1+	3+	3+	4+	-3+

Bearsarker Class Proficiencies: Alertness, Ambushing, Animal Husbandry, Berserkergang, Blind Fighting, Caving, Climbing, Combat Reflexes, Combat Trickery (Wrestling), Command, Divine Blessing, Divine Health, Dungeon Bashing, Endurance, Fighting Style, Healing, Illusion Resistance, Intimidation, Laying on Hands, Naturalism, Navigation, Passing Without Trace, Prophecy, Riding, Running, Skirmishing, Survival, Trapping.

Bearsarkers gain class proficiencies at 1st, 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th, 12th, and 14th level, due to their Fighting 3 / Monster save progression.

Mead-Drinker Template: This pre-generated template represents a drunkard bear cultist living on the outskirts of civilized society with his trusty polearm.  The template is ready for adventure.  In the unlikely event that your bearsarker's intelligence is 13 or higher despite all the alcohol and head trauma, you may pick one or more general proficiencies before play (Endurance and Gambling are also recommended)
Proficiencies: Fighting Style (Polearm), Intimidation
Equipment: Sparth-axe (polearm), sax (short sword), boot knife, rusty chain mail shirt, spangenhelm, battered wooden shield, wool tunic, leather belt, bearskin cloak, iron brooch, a dead man's boots, muddy backpack, bedroll, tent, tinder box, six torches, 50' of rope, a week's worth of smoked fish (iron rations), half a wineskin of mead, slight hangover, no coinage.

Design notes:
Fighting 3 / HD 1
Four tradeoffs: reduced weapon selection, reduced armor selection, dropped two-weapon fighting style, dropped ranged damage bonus.

Servant of the Bear God is about half a power; much less useful than Beast Friendship in preventing wilderness encounters unless bears are incredibly common in your game.  Likewise, sort of limited-use for acquiring henchmen.  At the end of the day the level range where bears are available and effective combatants is narrow; they make lousy mounts and warbeasts, and leveling up monstrous henchmen is a black hole that you can throw almost any amount of XP into for little gain.  This a thematic and fun ability, but probably doesn't bring much utility.
Keen Wilderness Senses is half a power, by the book.
Hard to Kill is just Savage Resilience by another name, one power.
Without Fear of Death is a power by the book.

One remaining power from tradeoffs is turned into a power at 5th and a power at 9th.

Shape-Strength is a modified Giant Strength as a spell-like ability.  Duration reduced to 1 turn, target self-only should bring the level down to about 3rd, for the one-use per day with 1-round casting time.  Shape-Strength is perhaps a bit over the top, but it provides a good "dragon-fight" source of damage.  It also addresses the issue with Berserkergang and Fighting Fury, which is that they're like ok mechanically but unimpressive and not really Norse Saga-grade berserkering.

Kveldulf had in his hand a battle-axe; but when he got on board, he bade his men go along the outer way by the gunwale and cut the tent from its forks, while he himself rushed aft to the stern-castle. And it is said that he then had a fit of shape-strength, as had also several of his comrades. They slew all that came in their way, the same did Skallagrim where he boarded the ship; nor did father and son stay hands till the ship was cleared. When Kveldulf came aft to the stern-castle, he brandished high his battle-axe, and smote Hallvard right through helm and head, so that the axe sank in even to the shaft; then he snatched it back towards him so forcibly that he whirled Hallvard aloft, and slung him overboard...  It is said of shape-strong men, or men with a fit of Berserk fury on them, that while the fit lasted they were so strong that nought could withstand them; but when it passed off, then they were weaker than their wont. Even so it was with Kveldulf. When the shape-strong fit went from him, then he felt exhaustion from the onset he had made, and became so utterly weak that he lay in bed.

And hey, a source for the rock-throwing!

Skallagrim then became so strong and he caught up Thord and dashed him down so violently that he was all bruised and at once got his bane. Then he seized Egil. Now there was a handmaid of Skallagrim's named Thorgerdr Brak, who had nursed Egil when a child; she was a big woman, strong as a man, and of magic cunning. Said Brak:
'Dost thou turn they shape-strength, Skallagrim, against thy son?'
Whereat Skallagrim let Egil loose, but clutched at her. She broke away and took to her heels with Skallagrim after her. So went they to the utmost point of Digra-ness. Then she leapt out from the rock into the water. Skallagrim hurled after her a great stone, which struck her between the shoulders, and neither ever came up again. The water there is now called Brakar-sound.

Bearrifying Presence is a replacement for the "+1 follower morale" that fighting classes usually get at 5th.  Bearsarkers aren't great leaders, but they're scary.  Arguably -1 enemy morale is applicable in more combats than +1 follower morale, since there are plenty of fights that don't involve followers, hence the "engaged in melee" caveat.

Whom Iron Bites Not is a modified Immunity to Normal Weapons effect as a spell-like ability.  Again, self-only and 1-turn duration bring the effect to about 3rd level, for one use per day with a 1-round casting time.  This is somewhat weaker than King Harald's Berserks in Egil's Saga, but close enough.  

King Harold proclaimed a general levy, and gathered a fleet, summoning his forces far and wide through the land. He went out from Throndheim, and bent his course southwards, for he had heard that a large host was gathered throughout Agdir, Rogaland, and Hordaland, assembled from far, both from the inland parts above, and from the east out of Vik, and many great men were there met who purposed to defend their land from the king. Harold held on his way from the north, with a large force, having his guards on board. In the forecastle of the king's ship were Thorolf Kveldulfsson, Bard the White, Kari of Berdla's sons, Aulvir Hnuf and Eyvind Lambi, and in the prow were twelve Berserks of the king.

The fleets met south in Rogaland in Hafr's Firth. There was fought the greatest battle that king Harold had had, with much slaughter in either host. The king set his own ship in the van, and there the battle was most stubborn, but the end was that king Harold won the victory. Thorir Longchin, king of Agdir, fell there, but Kjotvi the wealthy fled with all his men that could stand, save some that surrendered after the battle. When the roll of Harold's army was called, many were they that had fallen, and many were sore wounded. Thorolf was badly wounded, Bard even worse; nor was there a man unwounded in the king's ship before the mast, except those whom iron bit not, to wit the Berserks.

I see this being useful primarily in mass combat, where I expect it should let a bearsarker wade through massed troops while laughing maniacally, especially when combined with a d10 weapon, shape-strength, and the penalty to enemy morale.  Being a bona fide badass, even for only 10 minutes of game-time, is occasionally fun for PCs.  This is also a fun ability for NPCs to deploy, because the bearsarker lord who is personally collapsing the left flank is something the PCs are going to have to deal with themselves (while balancing that threat against the necessities of leading their troops effectively).

Is this class even sort of balanced?  ehhhh.  The crazy abilities are within reach of a fighter with a wizard henchman, and fewer times per day than that combo.  Does it look fun to play?  Probably.

Notes from the Salt Marsh

I spent a fair bit of time out in the swamp over this holiday weekend, and brought back a couple of thoughts.

• A fun model for a "the dungeon closes at sundown" would be a megadungeon in a tidal zone that floods every 12 hours or so, with changing water levels and levers and pumps and things to open and close areas...  Sorely tempted to build one of these.
• Six mile hexes are still big.  In a mile of trail, saw several differnet biomes, including stands of dead trees, fields of cord grass, tidal mud flats, pond full of red tannin water, thickets, beach, bay, numerous islands...
• Small islands make good isolated microbiomes for something like Western Marches (Western Marshes?)
• Saw a worm that looked like a twig.  Scaling up to a giant worm that looks like a dead tree and eats human-sized critters would be entertaining.
• Heat, humidity, biting insects, jellyfish, sunburn, the smell of the pluff mud (actually I don't mind that one much), blaugh.  Minor environmental inconveniences often get ignored, even as flavor text.  Bring extra water rations and a hat next time.

Old-School DMing Blogiography 2: Of Dungeons

Continued from Part 1

Old-school dungeoncrawls are conventionally resource-constrained.  Hit points and spells are limited, and the more time you spend in the dungeon, the more treasureless random encounters you'll have, which are a poor use of your resources.  The party is not in the dungeon to kill everything that moves.  Old-school dungeoneering has as much in common with the heist genre as the action genre.  Get in, get the goods, get out alive.  Players should reach consensus about the expedition (not adventure)'s objective before reaching the dungeon, and know when to call it quits and head back to town.  Retreat is an option; encourage players to exercise it regularly.  Does winning this fight advance the aims of the expedition?  How much (spells, HP, time, ammunition) will it cost you to win?  Any individual fight might be winnable, but they add up, and there's always the chance that there'll be one more random encounter than you expected on your way out of the dungeon.  Let them know these facts.

It is possible to build dungeons sufficiently small as to be clearable in a single expedition.  This is inadvisable.  Dungeon reuse is good, because it contributes to the emergent worldbuilding mentioned in the Dungeon of Signs link in part 1.  Players can experience the effects of their actions on the environment - if you kill all of the giant spiders, the bat and rat populations are going to grow out of control.  If you unseal the crypts, undead might start appearing as wandering monsters throughout the dungeon.  Stories and lore grow up around reused dungeons; the iron spikes, chalk marks, soot, blood, and corpses your players leave around provide emergent detail, and the dungeon takes on a character of its own.  Reusing a dungeon is also very prep-time efficient; once you've done the initial work of mapping and stocking, having some new monsters move in to replace the ones killed last session is very quick.

If your system of choice permits resources to be restored within the dungeon (ye olde Short Rest), this makes it somewhat more difficult to make a dungeon highly reusable, because the PCs will tend to rest in the dungeon instead of leaving and re-traversing territory.  This can be partially alleviated with "the park closes at sundown"-type rules for a supernatural underworld (pdf warning, see page 22)-style dungeon, especially if you keep careful track of time until 'doomsday'.  If taking a short rest trades limited time for spells and HP, parties will have to make careful resource-management decisions, which are one of the pillars of old-school play.

A half-sheet of graph paper of dungeon, stocked and ready to play today, is infinitely better than a ten-page megadungeon that you never finish building.  I've gotten about ten sessions out of a sheet-and-a-half-of-uncramped-graph-paper dungeon.  If you intend for your party to keep their own maps, you should take ease-of-duplication into account when designing your dungeons - rectangles are easy to describe precisely in words, curves and 37-degree angles are less so.  If you want to build reusable dungeons, you should Jayquay them - lots of entrances, exits, paths between levels, loops, and other topologically-interesting paths.  Re-traversing a linear dungeon many times is boring, and a linear dungeon also provides no paths around obstacles like particularly-deadly monster lairs.

Other considerations for building reusable, old-school dungeons: competing NPC/monster factions in the dungeon can add a lot of potential for divide-and-conquer, tenuous alliances, mutual betrayal, and other satisfying emergent narratives.  Empty rooms are great - they build tension and provide buffer zones between lairs of different types of monsters, good places to restock replacement monsters into, and areas for players to retreat through.  Building proper megadungeons on a hobbyist time-budget is really hard unless you take shortcuts like node-based design or filling in the blank spaces on the map during play.  Avoid Bad Trap Syndrome - Hack & Slash has many quality traps, which I heartily recommend.  Just as Hack & Slash emphasizes providing hints, clues, and actionable information about traps to PCs so that they can make informed decisions, you can (and should!) do the same for monsters within a dungeon and in the wilderness.

Most OSR rulebooks have plenty to say about filling dungeons with monsters and treasure.  I have little to add, save that building a custom random encounter / dungeon stocking table per level is great for differentiating / theming your dungeons, and that I find it works better to figure out how many monsters you need, then roll and place them sensibly, than to roll for each room and end up with nonsensical arrangements.  Pretty straightforward.

When in doubt, err on the side of too much treasure.  It's good for player morale and keeps the pace of levelling up, especially as PC deaths pull XP out of the party.  XP-for-treasure is a great rule, because it incentivizes interactions with the game-world other than violence.  There's no such thing as level-appropriate treasure - sometimes you roll a +3 suit of full plate in a first-level dungeon, and it's awesome, but ultimately it just means the party can play a little more aggressively, taking on stronger foes and greater risks.  Since monsters aren't tightly level-appropriate either, this isn't really a problem.  Magic items that would be wildly level-inappropriate in a new-school game become storied and important to the party as a whole.  I've seen players mount rescue missions for characters separated from the party because that character had an awesome magic item that the party was unwilling to lose.

Characterize your monsters.  Old-school statblocks don't differ all that much, but a few behavioral changes can make interactions with two monsters with similar statblocks very different.  This is hard to do on the fly, so it's wise to consider during prep.  Traveller's critter reaction mechanics and old D&D's morale and number encountered statblock entries are part of this, but a little extra effort in characteristic monster behavior can go a long way.

Next up - actually running an old-school dungeoncrawl.

Of Classic Traveller

First - the Classic Traveller Bundle of Holding is back, this time with supplements instead of adventures.  CT had some pretty interesting features; if you already have Mongoose, it might be worth checking out for historical perspective and potential houserules.  I may have to dig through the supplements on the upgraded tier.

Second, I stumbled across this very, very interesting article from an old scifi webzine discussing the inspiring works for Traveller.  The author concludes that Traveller has always been hard science fiction noir, with a focus on the criminal and the political dissident, and that its two primary literary inspirations were the Dumarest Saga (which I'd never heard of before, but is evidently the source of low berth and the whole non-ship part of the game) and H. Beam Piper's Space Viking, which I've heard of but not read.  I think the article makes a pretty convincing case, and also explains where a lot of the odd Travellerisms like mesh, blade, and feudal technocracy come from.  Definitely worth a read, and not just because it supports my conclusions that Traveller is intended to be about cash-strapped antiheroes doing jobs of dubious morality to make the next payment.  I suspect a clear understanding of where it comes from and why it made the design decisions that it did might be important for successfully upgrading Traveller.

An Old-School DMing Blogiography I: Unpacking Assumptions

LQuinze on the Autarch fora asked recently about running old-school games, noting that one does not usually see hex-crawling-style adventures in movies and literature and that a lot of OSR material has many implicit, poorly-documented assumptions.  I was going to reply there, but it turned out that there were more links than I felt would be polite in a forum post, so this was going to be a blog post instead.  But it got too long for that, too, so now it's going to be a series of posts...  I'm going to bold links that I believe are critical to the topic area.

Unpacking Some Important Assumptions:

The Alexandrian has done some great work documenting some of the assumptions of old-school play.  His posts Subtle Shifts in Play, Prime Requisites, and the Death of the Wandering Monster are must-reads, and his other Reactions to OD&D and OD&D in the Caverns of Thracia posts are also worthwhile.  Subtle Shifts are particularly relevant to ACKS, which wholeheartedly embraces the phase-changes Alexander talks about.

As the Prime Requisites post's section on Darwinian Attrition points out (and as the OD&D in Thracia posts suggest), death is a common part of the old-school experience and helps balance out the very random stat distribution.  There was an excellent post at Dungeon of Signs which argues that  PC death is useful for worldbuilding and that in OSR games, the party as a whole is the main character.  Also, death can be fun and shared danger helps unify the party.  Losing a PC is not the end of the game for a player; try to avoid putting PCs in positions of such cosmic significance (The Prophecied One!) that the death of a PC means the end of the game-world, because sometimes these things happen.  Do not point the dice at anything you are not willing to destroy - therefore if you are going to point the dice at PCs, you (and your campaign world) must be willing to tolerate the consequences of occasionally destroying those PCs.

If you are going to be harsh, you ought also to be fair, where by fair I mean consistent.  Autarch and the Judges' Guild prefer the term Judge to DM or GM, and I think this gives the right mindset.  I have in the past put substantial stock in Beyond the Black Gate's take on referee impartiality and the Western Marches approach, but am slowly swaying back the other way a little.  Still, make as many rolls as you reasonably can in the open, especially if a PC's life is at stake.  If you're going to kill a PC, it's best to do it By The Book, and to make sure your players agree that it was legitimately done - either through unambiguous application of the rules, or as an forseeable risk of interacting with something known to be dangerous and outside the rules (artifacts, deities, &c).  Avoid succumbing to DM bloodthirst; monsters should do their best to kill (or drive off, capture for ransom, implant with their eggs, or whatever their objective is) the PCs, but you as the DM don't need to make much of an effort.  Deaths will happen on their own, and typically PCs bring it on themselves by being too aggressive.

Next up: Dungeon Design

Trapfinding Surprise

It occurs to me that trapfinding mechanics are a bit unnecessary.  We already have a perfectly good system for resolving who is surprised during an ambush or chance encounter: it is called surprise.  Alert characters already get bonuses to it.  Why not reuse this mechanic for trapfinding?

There are basically four possible outcomes to an encounter with a trap:

• It goes off without being detected first
• It is detected and disarmed or circumvented
• It is detected, but someone cocks up and accidentally sets it off anyway
• It is undetected, but does not trigger.

Four outcomes map nicely to two independent d6 rolls with mods, don't they?

If the trap surprised the party, it was undetected.  If the party surprised the trap, they avoided triggering it.  Most traps will have modifiers to the party's surprise roll for their construction; thieves receive a bonus to their surprise rolls against traps.  In the event that the trap is triggered, only characters in front of the first character to detect it may be threatened (ie, if you have a character with a +2 surprise modifier in the middle of the party and you stumble over a trap that he detects, the front half of the party is in jeopardy if the party fails its surprise roll to avoid triggering the trap).  Resolve who gets got in a manner consistent with the nature of the trap and trigger.