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

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

Let us see if I can wrap up all 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 today.

To continue on from where I left off yesterday DM DAVID says:

Even today, players still mischaracterize D&D as a game that only awards experience for slaying, mainly because every monster lists an XP number, while diplomatic and other challenges lack them.

I would contend that the reason D&D is portrayed this way is because in many venues those who support the murder hobo trope are quite vocal in promoting the game style that they like and the designers, regardless of what they say they do, have specifically designed to support this play style. (Again play anyway you like at your table, I am just making an observation here.)

To continue he says:

Meanwhile, the game’s designers abandoned experience points in favor of milestones—leveling after story-driven accomplishments. Mearls wrote, “In the past, we’ve always defaulted to using experience point rewards for everything. However, for narrative-driven adventures like adventure paths, that approach can prove troublesome. Designers have to jam in the ‘correct’ number of combat encounters to make sure the PCs level up at the right pace. Adventure design thus becomes a process of matching up the right flow of XP to the correct tempo of the plot. Otherwise, if characters don’t level up at the expected rate, subsequent chapters in an adventure path become too difficult or too easy.”

Everything that Mearls laments here is a self created problem. Ignoring the incomprehensible "narrative-driven adventures like adventure paths" jargon that means nothing to an OD&D guy who does not use purchased worlds or adventure modules, where he laments having to "jam in" the '"correct"' number of combat encounters. His further laments making sure the character level up at the "correct tempo to the plot." This is all self-inflicted. And "subsequent chapters in an adventure path", holy railroad Batman!

*(see bottom)Mearls appears to be oblivious to what has happened here, and seems to be completely out of touch with the history of the game. One of the caveats about house ruling your game is that you should (as the referee or the later term DM) read all the rules and understand them so that when you change them, you know why you did what you did and then if you do not like it you can change back or try something else. That is what Arneson did he tinkered with the rules his entire life, he never had a frozen in time final iteration that was written down, he tinkered all the way to the end. These designers in publishing the different iterations of D&D (i.e. new sets of house rules) lost their references to what went before and did not IMO understand why they did what they did.

I would contend that other than Gygax and a select few others, that after they were gone and TSR moved on without them (and later WotC) that the understanding of the OD&D rules, i.e. the foundation of the game was almost completely lost. And that now the WotC designers not only do not understand the OD&D rules, they also do not understand any of the TSR iterations that proceeded from that. How else could Mearls whine about getting "XP flow" to match the "correct tempo of the plot"?

In an OD&D open-ended sandbox game there is no preordained, imposed (forced on the players) plot. There is no "expected rate" for the characters to be leveling up. Even more pronounced, is the complete lack of any attempt to make sure that everything is "balanced" and that all encounters are neither "too difficult or too easy" in an OD&D open-ended sandbox game. It is not a bug, but a distinct feature of the original game style that players should always expect that any particular encounter could be too easy or it could be too difficult or it could be almost exactly even or anywhere along that entire spectrum.

Why is this a feature? It is a feature because in the original game style it was not assumed that combat is the only option. In the design example that Mearls speaks of, the assumption is that all encounters should involve combat. 

Go back and read that last paragraph again and think about the implications of that design mindset.

• If all encounters involve combat and there is a set path to follow and leveling on a schedule is important to the plot, then all of the following must be true: 
• If you do not give XP for gold and only have combat as a way of resolving encounters, then there really is no other way for characters to earn XP.
• Then to ensure that characters level at the rate the railroad demands the adopted solution per Mearls is just "leveling after story-driven accomplishments" which let us be honest is just a hand waving DM fiat with any objective standard removed. DM fiat, that thing that so many claim they hate, the thing they claim is problematic.
• Encounters must be carefully balanced to ensure that characters do not die(not too difficult), because that would mess up the story (railroad).
• Encounters must be carefully balanced to ensure that they are not too easy, so that players do not have to think about the fact that they are not really being challenged or stretched to learn how to grow as players.

On the other hand in an open-ended game where all encounters have many options of which combat is only one, then the following is true:

• Giving XP for gold and for role-playing works really well and encourages a more robust game that is not just an endless bloodbath, in which role-playing and creative out the box thinking become the expected paradigm.
• There is no preset plot (no railroad) and no set schedule that says it is of uber importance that here and here and here, the characters must level up. Instead the players can level up as it naturally flows from the game.
• In each encounter, the players must learn to decide what course of action they should take. They learn to talk and not immediately resort to killing. They learn to flee instead of biting off more than they can chew. They learn to bargain and negotiate. They learn to make alliances both short and longer term. They learn to bluff and trick opponents. 
• They learn to be concerned about their reputation and to make the most of their Charisma. This is crucial to long term campaigns where players make their own goals and objectives and consider the consequences of their actions and make plans with long term thought. 

Here is another thing you may not have thought of, in the original game, most of the stats did not give pluses or minuses to actions. No +1 to hit or +1 to damage for instance. Nevertheless, in OD&D in the original game style there were no dump stats. But on the other hand low stats did not make a character unplayable either. IMO it was the best of both worlds.

The bottom line for me is if people want to create great stories, quit trying to force a pre-created story on the game. Give the players and yourself as the referee the freedom to create story the old-fashioned way - let it develop naturally through play. Give your creativity free rein to improvise off of the things that your players do and discover new possibilities by leveraging the creativity of your players as they respond to your world. The creative give and take between the referee and the players that an OD&D open-ended sandbox game was designed to foster and encourage will lead to stories created during play that your players will talk about years later as fond memories. Things that you never could compose ahead of time.

DM DAVID says(regarding Mike Meals):

When Mike complains about jamming in combat encounters, he reinforces the canard that the D&D rules only allow XP for killing monsters. Even a long-time designer never considers other XP awards. To be fair, story awards that help characters meet the level requirements of an adventure yield the same result as a DM announcing that everyone gains a level. Milestones lose the math, but they also lose the hook of small XP rewards for successes, seeing progress, and then earning levels.

This is so true, by and large other XP rewards are not considered and they resort to handwaving DM fiat, "OK you all leveled up" and the thrill of earning your levels is lost. I remember the thrill of leveling up bitd and I remember how excited the players were when their characters leveled up. I really think that joy and excitement has been lost at many tables. I have still observed that in my game in 2009 when my latest campaign started. 

He closes by saying:

The fifth-edition hardcover adventures lack enough monster-slaying XP to keep characters on pace with the adventure’s target levels. 

Does this seem as odd to you as it does to me. Ask yourself why this would be released this way?

The designers could have added XP awards for other accomplishments, but they show little interest in supporting XP. This disinterest posed a problem for those of us who ran the hardcover adventures for the Adventurers League through the first 7 seasons. The league used experience then, and if the characters had only earned XP for slaying, they would never reach the levels targeted by the adventure.

Again I say: Does this seem as odd to you as it does to me. Ask yourself why this would be released this way?

I may have violated the letter of League rules by awarding extra XP for overcoming non-combat challenges. I may be good, but I’m not completely lawful. Don’t tell the administrators.

In other words, the DMs were forced to fudge things to make them work with the Adventurers League. Just my opinion, but it seems to me that WotC and its designers just dropped the ball and did not care enough about the customers to fix the problem. They just could not be bothered. On the bright side they did not stop the DM (at least at that point in time) from just finding his own solution to the problem.

What Arneson and Gygax created with OD&D proved in many ways, regardless of all the criticism of it not being finished nor polished, remarkably difficult to improve on the simple and workable elegance of many of its rules not to mention (Yeah silly since I am mentioning it) the ease and simplicity of house ruling and tweaking to suit your own taste.


*I have been informed by a reliable source that Mike Mearls is an experienced 1st Ed AD&D player and DM so he is not oblivious and does indeed understand the history of the game. Which would mean that he does know what the solution is - getting rid of "narrative-driven adventures like adventure paths in railroaded adventure modules" and putting XP back in the game in the form it used to be. I have to assume he is complaining because he knows fixing the problem is not possible as long as Hasbro/WotC owns the IP. Which of course is not his fault, he lacks the power and authority to fix things.

Tomorrow on to looking at another post.