Setting the Stage for Your Mind Theater

A drop-in replacement for (two-sided) B/X combat (it's probably missing a few things and I've not playtested it yet).  This is inspired by the video game Thea: The Awakening (which is very cool).

Think of characters (or groups of minions) as cards.  We're going to play them, between the party and the DM.  Each side has the characters they control, and the order they are played is mechanically important.

--

Cards may melee attack, missile attack, or cast a spell; (or) in addition they may actively defend.

If a card defends it receives a -2 AC bonus.  Characters with a shield add this bonus to allies behind them.  "Behind" means that a character is further away from the attacker than the actively defending character is.

A card may only melee attack the enemy card on either side that is closest to it.  Magical and missile attacks may attack "further" targets, but at a penalty.  Healing spells (friendly touch) may only be cast on the nearest friendly on either side.

Once all cards have been played, combat is resolved missile-magic-melee as normal, evaluating character actions in order of play.

So in addition to the description and narration of combat, we end up with a row of cards on the table, and they were played "left to right", representing the order those characters' actions will be resolved (edit: and just as importantly, who those actions can be directed at).  There's a lot of interesting tactics in where you play what kind of characters (mobs of Goblins are one card, and so are fragile Magic-Users), in terms of both offense and defense.

--

Determine Surprise as normal.  Distance is determined, and the side which has Surprise gets a "free turn" and then Initiative is rolled for round 2 if necessary.

Initiative: roll a d10 for each side.  The difference is the number of points the winning side has.

Each character class has a number of points that represents how costly it is to play that character during the first action in an encounter.  For now, think of it as generally how quickly the class can act in combat.

• Cleric: 3
• Dwarf: 3
• Elf: 2
• Fighter: 2
• Halfling: 1
• Magic-User: 4
• Thief: 1

(Not sure what to do with monster points yet.  HD doesn't seem to work.)

When a card is played, its intended action SHOULD NOT be announced--and may freely change up until the card's action must be evaluated.

Combat proceeds as follows:

1. The side with initiative may spend its points to play any number of characters before the other side plays anyone.  (This is one way to shield your Magic-User from melee.  If you have, say, 6 points, you can play Magic-User and then Fighter, shielding the caster.)
2. The second player plays a single card, and card-laying alternates 1-for-1 from there.
3. Resolve combat from "left to right" (played card order): missile, magic, melee.  Melee can only target the closest enemy card on either side of it.  Missile and magical attacks may do the same with no penalty, but may suffer a -2 penalty for each additional "range" to attack further targets.  Note that intervening characters actively defending add their bonus.
4. Actively defending with a card must be announced when it is attacked (or when a character behind it would be attacked), and this may not be done if the character has already acted during the round.

Follow-up posts with some testing shortly.

Inspirations and Principles

This is an unorganized list of things and ideas I think are important to what I'm trying to do, along with sources in some cases (where I think a good idea or implementation exists).

First, let's get some rough required elements for a "D&D".  This is my (initial, first, rough, undeveloped) list; yours might be different (and if it is, I'd love to hear about it).

Attributes

I don't like "Ability Scores", because I want to use "Ability" as a specific thing a character can do, or a modifier to a thing any character can do.  So Attributes tell you what a character is made of.  Abilities tell you what he can do.

I'm going with STR / DEX / CON / INT / WIS / CHA.  I don't necessarily love them, but they're definitely not bad when interpreted in the "modern" sense, meaning WIS has picked up a lot of Perception, CHA is useful to summoners, etc.

I'm also implementing Armor Class and Hit Points.  By which I mean, I'm going to call them that, and they will be used in the same way.  But they will almost certainly be calculated differently.  I'm saying I'm going with the D&D base set of physical combat abstractions: 1) how hard is it to incapacitate or inconvenience you, and 2) how much of it you can take.  If you are reduced to 0 HP, you are not necessarily dead, but most likely will be unless someone helps.

Race

Gotta go AD&D here.  I won't do it the same way, but Race-as-Class has never worked for me.

Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Halfling, Human.

Class

Let me say up front that I don't like Classes as they have been implemented in the games I know about.  There are two schools of thought: 1) Old School (pronounced "better"), which says you roll attributes and HOPE you play a class you dig.  The friction between what you wanted and what you got is half the fun of the games of my childhood ("Dude, I can't wear armor?"); and 2) the Pansies, who say, "Decide what you want.  During character generation you're going to get so many dice rolls and points to buy things with nothing is impossible."

1) isn't perfectly correct either; especially as a fan of mechanics, if I want to see how spell duels work, I'm making two mages.  The dice are relevant, but I'm deciding the final scores.  Right?

But the point is that I think Class is a requirement if I'm going to call the game a D&D, so I'm doing it, but hopefully (I have a concept) in a way that does what is needed better.

Skills

I'm not doing Skills.  I understand why they can be good, and relevant, and blah blah blah.  But I think the MASSIVE amount of bloat is not worth it.  One of the reasons people love Moldvay so much is that it's small.  1e, too.  In 2e they had the right idea--let's incorporate 10+ years of playtest data and fix some things and add what people are house-ruling--but it was the beginning of the end for many D&D fans.  That's why BECMI, Moldvay, 1e, OD&D, etc. have a following, imo.  They're just massively smaller, tighter games.  So, my D&D will be too.

Critical Hits

I'm going to include Critical results, but in a different way, including specific effects.

Magic

I don't know yet.  Systemically, this is probably my least favorite system in canonical D&D.  I am inclined to go Power Words, and I need to pull Ars Magica off the shelf.

--

Within those things, here's some stuff I dig:

13th Age has some kickass mechanics for combat.  The fighter's choice moves especially.  I also really like the Icon idea--not gods, but people you need to know about.

Pathfinder kinda cracks me up.  The discussions I see on Reddit just baffle me--it's so blatantly a contest to see who can come up with a way to theoretically do a lot of damage.  That's cool, I actually like that, and hope I can satisfy Munchkin types with my ruleset.  But isn't there anything else in the fifty seven million pages of books worth talking about?  I like Pathfinder; it does what it sets out to do well.  And I think about the top 20% or so of rules is really good stuff.

From Warhammer (I only have 1e), I like the idea of "careers", meaning a way to develop a character with transient focuses.  So you can start as a Dwarf Cobbler, but work your way up realistically into a Soldier or Mercenary gig and retire middle-class, fat, and happy.  Your buddy who started as a Human Noble is going places you are not.  But so what?  Are you telling me the Dwarf Cobbler story isn't a good one?  The point is that you can move a character through phases where your development focus changes.  I dig that.

From Dungeon World, some of the class moves are really great.  And the idea of building a Steading by descriptors is right up my alley.

From Rolemaster, those beautiful, beautiful crit tables.  If you don't want to use them, don't.  But I'm telling you, when you tell the Rogue he's lost an arm at 1:45a when he has a mouthful of pizza, you'll be glad they're in there.

Let's Make a D&D

Partially out of frustration, partially out of curiosity, and partly because I geek like that, I'm going to write a D&D, and talk about how and why here.

Let's establish that I want to make a D&D.  I'm aware that term is intellectual property that belongs to someone else, so it won't make the box cover, don't worry.  What I mean is that I don't want to make a "retro-clone" or something that gets tagged #OSR.  I want to make a D&D.

By which I mean, there is no other game even close in terms of identity.  Nearly everyone involved in RPGs knows what D&D is "about".  And most of them have a decent clue about the mechanics.  So what I want to do is take that concept in their heads--what D&D "is"--and make a game that tries to do those things.

So when I say "Let's Make a D&D", what I mean is, "Let's Build a Set of Rules That Does What People Think of as D&D".

To which you're ready to respond, "Wtf?  That's every fantasy game."  Right.  But almost all of them do what D&D does in the same way.  Pathfinder (obviously), the OSR stuff (obviously), etc.  The one exception I know that's gotten traction is Dungeon World.

And I think that's a good model.  What DW does is take many of the D&D-specific "tropes" and make them work mechanically differently, almost always in service of creating drama and narrative momentum.  That's the new part.  There are classes and levels, but they're handled in more of a "feat" fashion.  You still roll to-hit, and I think you even add an Ability modifier.  But the results are different--they're not just "you may roll your damage dice" or not.

For what it's worth, I think Dungeon World is a great game--it generates more smiles per time unit than anything else I'm aware of.  But I don't enjoy it at all.  It rewards the part of RPGs I find the least interesting--the RP.  So I give it a 10/10, but I also gave away my hardcopy.

The point is I think Dungeon World does what I want to do--it's a legitimately new way to do an old thing.  So I want to make a Dungeon World.  Except what I want to make is an anti-Dungeon World.

(Somehow I managed to omit this paragraph from the post:

And what I mean by that is I want to focus on mechanics.  Types of random distributions and to what they are best applied.  Class (as in C/F/M-U/T) as a way of granting more specificity to a character instead of just restricting him.  Blah blah blah.  Follow-up posts will be roughly organized by mechanical topic.)

Sorry and thanks for reading all that.  Here's the point: I'm going to write a game that is basically going to be a "remix" rather than a "reskin".  I'm going to take as many things that make D&D "what it is" as I can and try to make them work better.  We have almost 40 years with this stuff.  It can be done.

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?