2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Forty-Seven

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary!

Today I continue my comments in regard to this post(XP Started as One of D&D’s Breakthrough Ideas. Now the Designers Don’t See the Point ) at the DM DAVID  blog.

I was commenting yesterday about this part of DM David's post:

When Gary created this aspect of the game, he needed to find ways to entice players deeper into the dungeon. If a cautious party could gain nearly as much loot on an easy dungeon level as on a deeper one, why go down? Gaining experience could become a safe—and dull—grind.

To draw characters to danger, Gary doubled the number of experience points needed to advance to each level, then matched the increase with similar increases in treasure. To rise in level at a tolerable rate, players needed to delve as far down as they dared.

So today we will continue on from this point.

He says that one of the benefits of this approach is that when new characters (lower level characters) joined a party with higher levels, the new ones would tend to "catch up" and this would make it easier to replace deceased characters and also was a moderating factor to level drain by monsters.

From this he segues into:

In the decade after D&D’s introduction, a mania for creating realistic alternatives to D&D dominated the hobby. Every D&D player who ever wielded a foam sword cooked up a more realistic alternative to the D&D combat system.

IMO non OD&D combat systems (at least the ones I have looked at) tend to run much slower and be a lot more complicated (even when they "claim" to be less complicated and to be "objectively" better). One factor in many combat systems is they extend to making character generation take a lot longer. Compare OD&D chargen (about 5 min) to 3E or 3.5E (which I have read is quite complex and takes hours). If it takes 5 min for chargen, then character death is a feature of the game. if it takes hours, then IMO character death is a bug. 

This one thing alone is the reason that I looked at but never played 3E/3.5E it just deviated too far from what I know as D&D. (Now in Classic Traveller chargen takes a while, but not hours, but you can die during chargen and have to start over, but 1. you are generating an experienced character with some or a lot of career in place instead of a rookie and 2. that is a feature of Classic Traveller you know when you start to play.)

Now DM David says something that I take issue with:

The XP-for-gold system struck players everywhere as unrealistic. In the original Arduin Grimoire (1977), Dave Hargrave wrote that in his game, “[Experience] points are given for many reasons, but NOT for gold or other treasure. After all, it is the act of robbery, not the amount stolen, that gives the thief his experience.” In 1989, with the second edition, D&D would follow suit. The game would never award XP for gold again.

I do not dispute that it is unrealistic, I dispute that any other system is an improvement or does anything that makes the game more playable. IMO using XP-for-gold is quite an elegant system, it is quick and easy to use. Of course as I mentioned in an earlier post that are a number of things I also award XP for, just not for killing things. Also please note that I am a big fan of Dave Hargrave and Arduin. Also to be clear,  run my game on the Silver Standard and award XP-for-Silver with Gold being present but more rare and appearing in the toughest to secure treasures.

He says:

Without XP for gold, only killing monsters earned specific experience awards.

To me when I looked at games that did this it was a red flag for a play style that I was not interested in myself (do what you want at your own table).

While second edition stopped granting experience for gold, “a character can earn experience points for successfully completing an adventure or achieving a goal the DM has set.”

I have to disagree with this too. IMO sucessfully completing an adventure is defined by the players from game session to game session and could be any number of things, but IMO the ref (DM) is not there to provide goals for the players, the ref is there to provide a complete sandbox living world where things are happening all the time regardless of what the players do through their characters. There are a multitude of things happening in the world, NPCs recruiting for any number of things, rumors, scams, caravan arriving and leaving, ships coming in or leaving ports, expeditions, and all manner of things. The players select the things they are interested in or just pick a direction and go - it is their decision and the goals are entirely their province. 

Granted you might have new players or players of other games or newer versions or shy people or whatever who for a lack of a better word are decision challenged, they may need to be taught how to think on their feet and how to make decisions and how to set goals.  An experienced ref should be up the challenge of doing this and helping the players learn to stand on their own two feet. I have no problem with helping players along for a few games, but I do inform them that I will be removing the training wheels and they need to learn the questions that need to be asked to elict the information they need from the ref/npcs and etc. I have seen a number of players over the last 10 years learn these things and be able to tackle more difficult things. They did not complain and they kept coming back, so for me it was very satisfying to see them do a 180 in the way they approached the game.

But neither dungeon masters nor published adventures tended to follow the advice. Everyone, professionals included, tended to ignore improvised awards for experience in favor of the set numbers printed for each monster.

This is I fear far too true and is what has lead to the current majority view that the murder hobo style is the original style and the best style. DO NOT get me wrong here, if you in your game at your table want to play the murder hobo style that is your business, go for it. It is just not for me as a ref or as a player. So I AM NOT calling you out for bad wrong fun to be clear.  Just do one thing for me, do not go around spreading the story that far too many do that the murder hobo style is the original way that ALL of the early OD&D gamers' played, because it is not true. 

I interpret (from many online stories I have read) murder hobos as killing anything that moves, even complete innocents if they need 1 more XP to level up. The torture of anything and everything for "fun" and complete disregard for all in game morals, social norms and legal authorities in tandem with a DM that buys into letting the players do that. If that is not the way you play, then IMO you are not a murder hobo. Again play anyway you want to at your table. It is not my intention to "judge" you.

My original group were always the "good" guys with a sprinkling of neutrals and that is what I like to ref and all my later groups have went with that as well. Again if you want to play the bad guys, go for it, as long as you are not at my table, no harm, no foul. Go have fun.


More tomorrow.