D&D B/X: Sample Dungeon Expedition (2/2)

(I do not own any of the quoted content below.  If the content owner(s) wish me to take it down or modify its presentation, just let me know.)

Our story continues.... 

Morgan: "OK, what does the room look like? We are checking the floor and ceiling, too."DM: "The room is six-sided, 30' on a side and 20' high. The door you came in is the only one you see. There is nothing unusual about the floor or ceiling. Besides the bodies of the goblins, there is a wooden box along the northeast wall and a pile of old rags in the north corner."Morgan: "Silverleaf is checking for secret doors, Fred is looking for traps, Black Dougal is examining the box, and Sister Rebecca is guarding the door. I'm prodding the rags with my sword--any movement?"

(No matter how much I try, the above format is the only thing Blogger can come up with.  Does it just suck?)

More of the caller running the show.  Note the assumption that everything should be examined.  Totally expected and common these days, but apparently "back in the day" it needed to be shown. 

DM (after rolling for the appropriate chances): "Silverleaf notices that one of the tone blocks in the southwest wall is slightly discolored.  Fred does not see any traps.  The box is the size of a small trunk; it is latched, but not locked.  Morgan: nothing moves in the pile of rags."
Fredrik: "I want to have a look at that block, Silverleaf."
Morgan: "Fred examines the block."
Fredrik: "For traps."
Morgan: "Sorry, Fred; for traps."

Fred can't even speak to the DM?  (Remember, tales are told of Gygax DMing from behind file cabinets so the players only heard his voice.  So serious.)

Dougal: "I'm looking for traps on the box, too."

Maybe I'm daft, but I'm pretty sure this is the chest the hobgoblins were describing when talking about the poison needle....  Even for "back then" this seems a little odd, to the point of possibly just being an oversight. 

DM (rolling for Fred, even though the block is not trapped; the DM also rolls for Dougal's "find traps" ability.  The roll indicates that Dougal has failed to find the poisoned needle in the latch.):  "Neither of you finds a trap."
Fredrik: "I'm pushing, pulling, and trying to twist the block."
DM: "When you push it, a secret door opens in the west section of the southwest wall.  You see a 5' wide corridor that goes south for 30' and ends at a door."

If I can have two words to describe what dungeon crawling is about, they're "secret door".  Nothing says hack-and-slash, smell-of-burning-pitch-in-musty-caves, explore-the-underground-with-graph-paper like "secret door".

Morgan: "Fred and Silverleaf will guard the secret door, and Black Dougal will open the box.  I'll search through the rags.  Anything that looks like a cloak or boots?"
DM: "Black Dougal, you find out that you missed a tiny discolored needle in the latch.  Roll a saving throw vs. poison, please!"
Dougal (rolling): "Missed it!"

Want to know a big part of what "Old School" is about? 

DM: "Black Dougal gasps 'Poison!' and falls to the floor.  He looks dead."

That's it.  No heals, no resurrections, no recoveries, no bennies, no fate points (although to be fair WFRP 1e included these a couple years later).  Dougal's dead.  Thanks for coming, dude.

Fredrik: "I'm grabbing his pack to carry treasure in."

LOL.  What would people around a table say in 2015 if someone did that after a death that abrupt? 

Rebecca: "I'm giving Black Dougal the last rites of my church."

Cleric's not surprised, either. 

DM: "OK.  Meanwhile, Fred, you find the box is full of silver, perhaps two thousand pieces.  Morgan, you do find a pair of old boots, but nothing like a cloak."
Morgan: Fred will dump the silver and looks for hidden compartments in the box.  I'll try on the boots and see if I move silently--we could use a pari of elven boots!"

Again, note the assumption / insistence on "no stone unturned".  In a sideways manner, this is a good example of old school as well.  If you didn't find the secret door, you just didn't find it.  The DM generally wouldn't fudge rolls or railroad you if you needed to find it.  You probably just... didn't.  Of course all DMs would have handled that differently.  But players basically knew that there were not going to be gimmes.  Others have referred to this as being evidence of old school games requiring more player skill.  I haven't thought about it, but that seems like a pretty big leap of logic. 

DM (rolling another wandering monster check): "Fred finds a false bottom in the box.  It contains another smaller box of carved ivory that holds two gold bracelets set with jade."
Fredrik: "How valuable do they look?"
DM: "You think the jewel case is worth 100 gp and each bracelet is worth about 600 gp.  Morgan seems to be moving very quietly."

In the last post I mentioned treasure as experience.  This is 1300 gp in stuff, and 200 gp worth of coin, and a pair of magical boots.  Not a bad haul to be split four ways. 

Morgan: "GREAT!  I'll put the case and jewels in my pack and then watch the door as the others take turns filling their packs with silver."
Fredrik: "I'll dump out Dougal's pack and fill it with coins."
DM: "OK; the loading will take four turns."  (The DM makes the wandering monster checks.  As the party finishes loading, a large party of bandits approaches.  Since Morgan is watching the door, the DM gives a very high chance that the bandits will be heard.)  "As you finish loading, Morgan hears the tramp of many booted feet coming from the north.  It's getting louder. . . ."

Four turns?  Forty minutes?  What am I missing here?

I might be nitpicking here, but large parties of bandits wander around in dungeons?  A bunch of 1-hit-die NPCs looking for people to rob?

Morgan: "We'll beat a hasty retreat through the secret door.  Fred will go first, then me.  Silverleaf is next, and Sister Rebecca will bring up the rear.  She'll spike the door shut behind us."
Fredrick: "Before we do I grab Dougal's body.  We can't leave him behind."

Each character has just added an average of 500 coins of weight, and the dwarf is also dragging a dead human around.  I find it curious and a bit disappointing that encumbrance isn't handled here, but to be fair it was an optional rule.

DM: "OK.  As you reach the end of the secret passage, you hear a cry of discovery and a babble of voices afrom the room behind you.  Black Dougal's tools and rations have been discovered."
Morgan: "What?!  didn't anyone bring his things along?"

Expecting her party to be smarter than that... obviously she has to do things herself? 

All: "No!"

But no one says, "Why didn't you?" 

Morgan: "Nuts!  We're going to be more careful from here on, gang.  Anyhow, Fred will listen at the door.  I have my bow ready."
DM (rolling): "Fred, you don't hear anything."
Morgan: "Fred will force open the door."
DM (rolling): "It opens.  You see a square room, 30' on a side and 20' high.  Your door is in the west section of the north wall.  You don't see any other exits.  The room appears to be empty."
Rebecca: "What about behind us?"
DM: "The voices have died down and you don't hear anything."
Morgan: "We'll search the room very carefully, taking at least two turns.  Silverleaf and Sister Rebecca are looking for secret doors and Fred is looking for shifting walls.  I'm guarding the rear."
DM (rolling for wandering monsters): "OK.  You search for two turns.  You don't find anything, but something finds you.  A secret door that Silverleaf and Sister Rebecca didn't find in the south wall opens, and two hobgoblins stroll in . . . ."

The party searches for twenty minutes (meaning four characters get secret door checks at least once, but that's a ruling, not a rule), which was a good idea because there's another one.  Secret doors all up in the place.  Personally I don't like them sprinkled so liberally. 

OK, next time I'm going to talk about some mechanics, what they imply, and whether they do a good job or can be improved on.

D&D B/X: Sample Dungeon Expedition (1/2)

(I do not own any of the quoted content below.  If the content owner(s) wish me to take it down or modify its presentation, just let me know.)

From Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules (TSR/Moldvay, 1980), pg. B59:

THE SITUATION: This party includes four 2nd level characters and a 1st level dwarf: Morgan Ironwolf, a female fighter (the caller); Silverleaf, an elf; Fredrik, a dwarf; Sister Rebecca, a cleric; and Black Dougal, a thief.  After equipping themselves, these characters have journeyed to the Haunted Keep and discovered the trap door in room 4, leading to the second level.  As caller, Morgan relays the party's actions to the DM after the characters decide what they want to do.

B/X Basic is about dungeon crawling.  There are no rules for movement outside of the dungeon, and no rules for what "civilization" might mean other than the coin values assigned to gear and treasure, and the hirelings rules.  Everything else is left as exercise for the reader.  The Expert Rules include rules for "overland" travel and encounters, but they begin with characters at level 4.

So here's a conscious design decision that I think gets mostly missed in the community: the assumption that D&D characters wouldn't be adventuring in any relevant way outside the confines of a dungeon environment until level 4.  It's not that people don't know that--of course they do--but rather that they confuse it with another thing that may or may not be true: the "slow" pace of leveling.  The pace of character development is trivially controlled in B/X.  Treasure is experience.  That's not to say that the designers intended it to be quick or easy; my point is that the DM has a "dial" for this and it's very easy to use.  If you want characters to level fast, have them find a couple of 2000gp gems.  Etc.

Back to "no going outside 'til level 4".  If one assumes that making it to level 4 is a long and arduous process threatened by a high mortality rate, then the Expert Rules kinda suck in the sense that it's hard to even qualify to play with them.  But what if the right way to think is that characters should level fast, as in, "The characters will probably level to 3 or 4 in the first dungeon or two that they visit.  These most likely house small dangers that the local populace can't handle.  Once they've secured their initial environs, they are ready to explore the wilderness."?

Put another way, the lack of wilderness rules in Moldvay is only a shortcoming if you assume a low (slow) likelihood of characters making it to the Expert Rules level. 

Perhaps THE defining element of B/X (and all D&Ds not descended from AD&D 1e, including those that came before): race as class.  The party has three humans and two demi-humans.  The humans have "job descriptions", but the others just "are".  I'm starting to waver on this, but I'm pretty anti- the class mechanic in general, and race-as-class is just bad.  I'm smart enough to know that I'm not the first person to figure this out, and indeed I assume that Moldvay and others knew at least as much about it as I do.  But the justfication completely eludes me.

(Lately I've been pondering a literal interpretation of race-as-class: that is, no one could be a Cleric, Fighter, Magic User, or Thief.  They could only be Dwarf, Elf, or Human.  Then they'd have skills or whatnot.  Yes I know that's the same as a Race.  But calling it a Class instead might matter in interesting ways.  Also, how about one of these new-fangled narrative games that love all that angsty and emotional stuff implement "Race as Class"?  As in, "This character is white and privileged.  This character is Mexican (Black) and gets treated suspiciously.  This character is Asian and has to take classical music as a skill.")

From B19: "The best size for an adventure party is 6-8 characters, enough to handle the challenges...."  So the sample adventure is slightly "understaffed", as it were.

The concept of caller is seen by many as antiquated.  But "back in the day", parties of a dozen players weren't that uncommon, making some organization necessary for DM sanity. 

(Massive respect to TSR for making one of the book's example characters, and the caller of this adventure, not only female, but a female melee expert.  It was 1980!  Women couldn't apply for a credit card without their husband's approval until 1974; dig what I'm saying?)

DM: "Having killed the hobgoblins, you open the trap door and find a set of stairs going down to the south."

Morgan: "We're going down the stairs."

DM: "After 30' you reach a round landing with two sets of stairs.  One goes down to the east and the other goes down to the west."

Morgan: "Fredrik looks down the east staircase and Silverleaf looks down the west one.  What do they see?"

Does "caller" equate to "leader", as in "can play other characters"?  Or was there "table talk" not included in the text?

DM: "The party's torches mess up their infravision, so they can only see twenty to thirty feet.  The west stairs go down ten feet and turn sharply south.  The east stairs go down at least thirty feet.  Also, Fred smells a rank, musty odor coming up from below."

Fredrik: "Hey everybody!  There's something down there.  I don't like it!"

Morgan: "Anyone want to go down the east stairs? . . . OK, we're going down the west stairs."

Explicit mention of torches means characters have to deal with some boring details of reality.  This is true for rations and exhaustion (one turn in six must be spent resting...) as well.  For those scoring at home, that's often called "grit".  The DM also explicitly mentions infravision.  This is more-than-tacit permission to speak in meta- terms, unless characters would actually know what infravision is.

Fredrik's "contribution" actually adds nothing.  The DM has already described to everyone what he saw, so it's just setting / context.  By no means is it specific to B/X, or even rare, but I personally have always disliked this particular suspension-of-disbelief.  Characters other than Fredrik are supposed to not know what their players do know, unless Fredrik tells them.

Morgan and the party choose the path with less (assumed) danger.  In B/X and most other games of the era, death was a very real (and perhaps even likely) possibility.  If you could avoid bad stuff, you did.  Now-a-days, players might instead choose to go right at what might be a problem, because the consequences tend to be quite different.

DM: "You go ten feet down the west stairs; it turns south to 20', 30' down; the stairs end and you step into a 20' wide corridor that goes east and west.  You see a door 10' up the west corridor on the north wall."

Rebecca (mapping): "That was the north wall?"

DM: "Yes, the door is in the north wall."

In B/X, one of the players is expected to draw a map of what the DM describes.  The designers of course knew that in "reality", the characters would be able to clearly see their surroundings, so to introduce the possibility of error via the DM's poor description or the player's misrepresentation, and then to highlight a relevant exchange, makes a very clear point: a player mapping the party's environs, and therefore potentially getting it wrong, is important.

Morgan: "We're going to the door.  Silverleaf, Black Dougal, and I will listen."

DM: "As you step into the corridor, a breeze from the west makes your torches flicker."

Rebecca: "Is it strong enough to put them out?"

DM: "No," (chuckling) "not yet."

Note the use of "good DM technique".  The DM doesn't just say it's 20' wide corridor, but adds the breeze detail.  People make this really weird assumption that the old school games didn't involve detailed description and dramatic interactions.  The good ones did.  There just weren't "rules" or even guidelines for doing it.  You were expected to figure that part out.

So the party gets reminded about threats to their limited resources (in the form of torches going out).  Plus, they've been "cued" that perhaps something interesting lies westward.

The DM's chuckling and "not yet" point to the then-prevalent "Gygax School" of DM-ing.  While the DM was not supposed to be "out to get" the characters, he was supposed to make things difficult.  Very difficult, some would say.

Morgan: "Then we'll listen at the door."
DM (Rolling three dice for listening): "You don't hear anything."
Morgan (After a discussion with the others): "We'll leave the door and go down the passage to the west."
DM: "After 30' there is a side passage to the south, 10' wide. The main corridor continues west. You notice the breeze is stronger and your torches are beginning to flicker even more."
Fredrik: "I don't like this."
Dougal: "You've got infravision."
Morgan: "We'll take the side passage."
DM: "OK. After 50' you find doors to the east and west. The passage continues south."
Morgan: "Silverleaf, Fred, and Black Dougal will listen at the west door."
DM (rolling): "Black Dougal hears muttering voices."
Dougal: "Do I understand them? I speak Common, Orc, Goblin and Elvish."
DM (after deciding on a chance for Dougal to recognize goblin language through the heavy door, and then rolling): "No, the voices aren't loud enough."

How does a 2nd-level thief know four languages, two of them spoken by hostiles?  I've no problem with knowing languages, but if he knows four of them, shouldn't he also be experienced to the point of, say, 4th level?  Or if the argument is that he studied them, am I to believe a "thief type" spent years in a classroom learning grammar and pronunciation?

B/X combat is ridiculously deadly (unarmed goblins do 1d6 damage, and only two of the seven character classes start with more than 1d6 HP), while a character can have accumulated this kind of knowledge by level 2 (a level 1 Elf with an Intelligence of 18 starts the game reading and writing eight languages) .  There are loads of specific mechanics provided for combat, but outside of generic Charisma and Reaction tests, there are literally zero mechanics for writing / speaking / singing languages as a specific skill.

This can be interpreted in two rough ways.  The first and common is that B/X (and old school RPG in general) is about combat.  This is understandable, as a breakdown of the types and number of rules would show a serious bias towards tactical conflict.  But the second interpretation is more fruitful for the purposes of gaming: there are rules for combat so that every game is roughly the same in that respect.  The fact that there are no rules pertaining to, for example, witty repartee with Ozrik the Orc means that games may differ in that respect, meaning they should be roleplayed.  More directly, one should not assume that a lack of specific rules means a topic is not part of the game.

Morgan: "We're getting ready for combat. Fred and I will force the door."

Dougal: "I'll guard the rear!"

This clearly suggests the first interpretation is not far off the mark.  But let's give the benefit of the doubt and say this was actually a (wise) defensive precaution.

DM: "OK.  The party is set, with Black Dougal guarding the rear."  (Rolling to see if the door is forced) "it opens.  You see half a dozen goblins."

Fredrik:  "Let me at them!"

DM: "You can't be surprised, but they can be . . . " (rolling for surprise) . . . "no.  Roll for initiative, please."

Morgan: "Fred rolled a 2."

DM (rolling): "The goblins have the initiative."  (Rolling reaction for the goblins)  "They must have heard you, Fred.  They charge, yelling 'Kill the dwarf!  Chop them to hamburger!'"  (Combat is now resolved, morale checks taken, etc.  The goblins fight until all are dead.  It is now time to check for wandering monsters, but the DM's roll indicates that none appear.)

At this point I don't think it's possible to keep up the ruse.  Fredrik sees things to attack and decides to attack them.  No parley, no testing the waters or feeling each other out.

Homework for the next post: if the game is about combat, why is a combat between 6 goblins and 5 characters totalling 9 levels skipped?  There's a door between the party and the goblins, and another door behind the characters that might have more baddies behind it who are probably not deaf to the sounds of melee....

Yes, there's (at least) an example of combat elsewhere, but couldn't this have been a really cool illustration of the game played well?