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

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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?