2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Fifty-One

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

Today I am going to try to finish looking at this post XP Versus Milestone Advancement—At Least We Can All Agree That Awarding XP Just for Combat Is Terrible at the DM DAVID blog, but I have a feeling this will be a long read, just saying.

So let us continue with DM DAVID saying:

D&D builds around three core activities: roleplaying interactions, exploration, and combat. Awarding XP just for monster slaying rewards just one of those pillars. This twisted incentive shapes play.

I think this is an eminently fair statement. In OD&D, IME, the primary goal was exploration - you started out and the goal was to explore the referees world, the wilderness, the dungeons, the villages, towns, cities and maybe, just maybe other worlds too. During the exploration you hoped to discover great magic, fantastic treasures, and strange mysteries much in the vein of the Star Trek original series:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!

I was ten years old when I heard that for the first time. I was already a big fantasy fan and a big science fiction fan. I dreamed of traveling the universe and then I learned of the fatal speed limit of the universe that we cannot even approach let alone exceed. My hopes of traveling the universe were dashed. Yes, we went to the moon when I was 13, and sadly we failed to follow up on it. I thought 50 years later there would be at least 2 million people living and working on the Moon, at least 200,000 people living and working on Mars, a well established mining operation in the Asteroid belt, and another 20,000 people living and working on some of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. I thought 100 years later we would have figured out how to move Venus further from the Sun and terraform it, put a moon in orbit and speed up its rotation, along with mining operations on Mercury and checking out Pluto and exploring at least out to the limits of the Kuiper Belt and looking to eventually reaching the limits of the Oort Cloud. 

So when OD&D came along I was primed and ready for it. I loved the exploration as the primary feature of the game. While I enjoyed the roleplaying and having some combat was fun, it was the exploration that hooked me. Then a month or so in I got to see the Three Little Brown Books of OD&D and I got to start being the referee. I loved the world building and having players explore that world through their characters, I loved adding portals and having them travel to other worlds. I ran games that lasted from 8-12 hours in length and sometimes longer. We started with 12 players and over four years averaging about 18 players per game, with up to 30 players at the high end on one occasion. We always had other college kids hanging out watching the game (players and an audience).

The idea of having nothing but combat is so foreign to me, I cannot even wrap my head around it. I am currently playing with a couple of friends in another guys 2E AD&D game. Every encounter is combat, but we lobby for that to change and we are working toward having a stronghold on an island and importing villagers and tradespeople.

The saddest thing for me is that I cannot play in my own world and I have not found anyone who does anything close to what I do for a world to play in. Fortunately for me, I love to referee and world build more than I like to play.

To continue:

For example, players in the third-edition Living Greyhawk campaign understood that their experience came from killing monsters, so many players felt resigned to solving every problem with violence. You might be able to succeed through stealth or diplomacy, but only battle guaranteed XP. 

At least the 2E game I am playing in does give XP out for things other than combat, although combat is a major component. But we three older guys in the game are not "resigned to solving every problem with violence."

He quotes:

Erin Adams writes, “As a story-focused player, I’m not a huge fan of XP because it seems to skew the focus towards combat. I enjoy letting the DM decide when it’s time to level up because it often feels like a reward. Leveling after a tough social combat feels just as satisfying as leveling after a boss fight.”

Because I do not see story as pre-existing but as something that is created during play and told afterward I am not "story-focused." However, for me the exploration and the roleplaying are both more satisfying than combat. I strive to have plenty of encounters that provide a range of options for the players and I feel my game has ample combat, I just do not limit it to that. My players get to explore and discover all types of odd things, strange magics and I love it when players are surprised and amazed with the things they find.

He says:

DMs and adventure designers tend to dislike XP because milestones offer an easier route to the same bottom line. But computer games prove how compelling XP feel to players. With every battlefield victory, gamers see their score rise, leading to higher levels and greater power. This feedback of rewards keeps gamers hooked. We all love stacking wins and watching our scores rise.

On the contrary, as a referee I love XP, varied XP. But I strive to run a game where higher levels and growing power are the cherry on top of an awesome banana split with all the fixings. I like to run a game where higher levels and growing power are just an extra bonus, but have the game be fully satisfying even if they did not exist. When you run a game, the players start at first level and never make a peep about getting to higher levels - then you have a fun game where the rewards of play are great enough that the players enjoy the low levels just as much as the later levels.

He then follows with several quotes about the lure of XP and the measure of control that it gives players and how it encourages them to take risks. He quotes Scott “The Angry GM” Rehm who says:

“Growing in power feels good. Making progress with your character feels good. Making progress in the game feels good. Winning feels good. And connecting the extrinsic rewards with the intrinsic good feelings makes everything feel even better.”

DM DAVID says:

XP makes an especially good fit for more open campaigns where characters wander without an overriding narrative shaped by a hardcover or a DM’s plan.

In more story-driven campaigns, where hooks and clues lead players through an adventure, and where the DM adds achievement XP awards, the players’ control over their advancement looks more like an illusion.

The players who preferred milestones all touted the freedom from bookkeeping. Instead of feeling distracted by the game of seeking XP, they felt focused on story and character.

Now here is where I think the beauty and power of OD&D really shines. In an open-ended sandbox OD&D game it is not necessary for the players to know the rules beyond what it takes to run a character. Most of what a player needs to know takes five minutes to learn. The thing that Dave Arneson did in Blackmoor was he kept all the rules in his head and close to his vest. He made notes that mainly were only useful to him because he was creating the game on the fly and tweaked things from game to game as he tried and discarded things that did not work and replaced them with things that did work.

Dave Arneson is famous for saying:

"Don’t ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know."

In other words the players are free to immerse themselves in their characters and in the game-world, it is the referees job to take care of the vast bulk of the game mechanics. This is exactly how  I (we) ran the game back in the day from fall of '75 to the spring of '79. We were fortunate, we only had two of us that were referees, when my friend brought the  game with him to college he would not allow anyone else to look at the rules and everyone except me fully accepted that and never asked again. 

But I wanted to do what he did and when he realized that I was serious he invited me in and in a short time I was doing the refereeing and he was playing. A short time later I had my own copy of the rules and in four years no one asked to see them. IMO this is the sweet spot of playing OD&D and D&D in general. IMO if the game has enough rules that the players have a legitimate need to see the rules, then there are too many rules and they are interfering with having fun.

Now it does require that you trust the referee, but why would you play with someone that you do not trust or at least someone that you are willing to give the benefit of the doubt and see how it goes? I have run the game a few times without any access to the rules at all not even the Attack Matrix. Once I even ran OD&D without dice or rules. The players told me what they were doing and I told them if they hit or not and for all the other things they did in the game. I was telling some people about the game and they wanted to know what it was like so I ran it 100% theatre of the mind, no rules, no dice, no paper, no pencils. We had a blast! 

I know some of you are horrified! Saying but, but, but how could you be consistent, how could you be fair? It is called trust, friendship and integrity, when you are trusted and you do not violate that trust it is all good.

In OD&D players should focus on their intended actions and engage with the world you as referee have created in their minds instead of gaming the rules and rules lawyering. The rules can be as complex as they need to be because only the referee needs to know them. The rules can be flexible in different situations and can be tweaked over time because the players are not highly invested in a rigid framework. This is Dave Arneson style gaming the original game style of Blackmoor. 

DM DAVID goes on to say:

Milestone advancement works best when players know what achievement will earn their next level. Adam N. Dobson writes, “My group unanimously prefer milestones. The goals are made clear and they pursue them without feeling that they have to kill everything. Milestones are more inventive, immersed, and versatile.”

While his group prefers milestones due to their experiences, I completely disagree with Mr Dobson. It is not true that using XP creates the feeling that characters have to kill everything. That is not true at all. It is also not true that "milestones are more inventive, immersed, and versatile.”

Now can XP be used in such a way that players feel their characters have to kill everything? Yes, you can run the game that way and IMO it is a perversion of the way OD&D was originally run. (Again play anyway you want, no bad wrong fun.) And even though it is not bad wrong fun, it is still a perversion of the original play and referee style. Which is why it creates problems for players who want to do something besides kill.

But the "inventive, immersed, and versatile" part, that has nothing to do with XP or milestones, that has to do with the referee, the person running the game and with the players that are playing in the game. "Inventive, immersed, and versatile" is an ability that referees and players develop and hone during play. The referee must be inventive and creative in his world building and in reacting to the actions of the players, and the players must be inventive and creative in acting in response to that world. Those things lead directly and IMO inevitably to immersion. When those things exist, then versatility and flexibility are baked into the mix.

OK on another post tomorrow.

Watch: The Secrets of Blackmoor - The True History of Dungeons & Dragons