Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of Role-Playing!
Today is Part 68 of my series on OD&D, with The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures Vol. 3.
**For those coming in, in the middle of this series I am giving you my take on OD&D during my first exposure starting in Sept of 1975. For this first part it is just the first three books of the original woodgrain box set and prior to obtaining the Greyhawk, Blackmoor and later Supplements.**
Today we are looking at evading and how that works:
So this is pretty straight forward. It does point out the importance of scouting and striving to remain undetected while doing so.
This is actually one of the more complicated things in the original game with all of the different things that need to be factored in, most things being much simpler. I generally used a much quicker and dirtier method that relied more on running everything in real time at a breakneck pace and eyeballing all of these factors on the fly. I have found that running it like that instead of slowing things down for all of the rolling and factoring, just works better at maintaining immersion. Players, at least in my experience, do not feel like they are being treated better or worse than they ought to be, because of the shear fun of this type of chase that emulates the best chase scenes from the movies, where even the audience does not have time to catch their breath and no one can guess the outcome until it has arrived.
When you start trying to play this out by the book, in my opinion it is just not worth it and winging it, assuming that you have good instincts, is a lot more fun for everyone.
Trying to run this by the book is quite math heavy and while none of it is difficult in anyway, it can be time consuming, unless you are skilled at doing percentages in your head.
I really think that this is much better adjudicated on the fly. It does require that the players have a high degree of trust in the referee. However, that is a given IMO for D&D. The social contract is that the players trust the referee to be the impartial judge of the type that Dave Arneson promoted. The referee's job is not to abuse that trust. IMO it just comes back to how honest are you as a referee. If you are of high integrity, then you can walk this line.
I posit that swamps and other similar terrain also have this benefit, anywhere it is hard to maintain line of sight between the pursuer and the pursued.
Running this on the fly is really just IMO the application of common sense. When you look at these factors as a whole you can see this out spread itself out before you and you just describe what happens along the way.
I favor long chase scenes as it leaves the players out of breath IRL and deep immersion is possible. also the thing that is not really considered here is that there is a good chance that at least some of the time the players are pursuing and not fleeing.
If you read my posts the last few days, then you already know that I think the whole rest thing is overdone and that those living on the age will be toughened in and will not require a lot of extra rest over and above a good nights sleep.
Tomorrow we get into building Castles and Strongholds.
Today is Part 68 of my series on OD&D, with The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures Vol. 3.
**For those coming in, in the middle of this series I am giving you my take on OD&D during my first exposure starting in Sept of 1975. For this first part it is just the first three books of the original woodgrain box set and prior to obtaining the Greyhawk, Blackmoor and later Supplements.**
Today we are looking at evading and how that works:
So this is pretty straight forward. It does point out the importance of scouting and striving to remain undetected while doing so.
This is actually one of the more complicated things in the original game with all of the different things that need to be factored in, most things being much simpler. I generally used a much quicker and dirtier method that relied more on running everything in real time at a breakneck pace and eyeballing all of these factors on the fly. I have found that running it like that instead of slowing things down for all of the rolling and factoring, just works better at maintaining immersion. Players, at least in my experience, do not feel like they are being treated better or worse than they ought to be, because of the shear fun of this type of chase that emulates the best chase scenes from the movies, where even the audience does not have time to catch their breath and no one can guess the outcome until it has arrived.
When you start trying to play this out by the book, in my opinion it is just not worth it and winging it, assuming that you have good instincts, is a lot more fun for everyone.
Trying to run this by the book is quite math heavy and while none of it is difficult in anyway, it can be time consuming, unless you are skilled at doing percentages in your head.
I really think that this is much better adjudicated on the fly. It does require that the players have a high degree of trust in the referee. However, that is a given IMO for D&D. The social contract is that the players trust the referee to be the impartial judge of the type that Dave Arneson promoted. The referee's job is not to abuse that trust. IMO it just comes back to how honest are you as a referee. If you are of high integrity, then you can walk this line.
I posit that swamps and other similar terrain also have this benefit, anywhere it is hard to maintain line of sight between the pursuer and the pursued.
Running this on the fly is really just IMO the application of common sense. When you look at these factors as a whole you can see this out spread itself out before you and you just describe what happens along the way.
I favor long chase scenes as it leaves the players out of breath IRL and deep immersion is possible. also the thing that is not really considered here is that there is a good chance that at least some of the time the players are pursuing and not fleeing.
If you read my posts the last few days, then you already know that I think the whole rest thing is overdone and that those living on the age will be toughened in and will not require a lot of extra rest over and above a good nights sleep.
Tomorrow we get into building Castles and Strongholds.
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