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

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of  Role-Playing!

Today while I am still going to look at DM DAVID's blog, I am going to pivot and look at a very good post of his titled 4 Pop-Culture Assumptions That Dungeons & Dragons Destroyed.

He starts out saying:

The media keeps telling us how we, the geeks, have won popular culture...   ... Fan culture is everywhere. So we forget that in the early days, when D&D burgeoned by word-of-mouth, no one had seen anything like it.

Let us stop right here for a moment. Geeks, Nerds, Dorks, and etc. What do these words mean? I am 63 soon to be 64. Geek to me is never a compliment, because the first definition that I go to for geek is "a performer at a carnival or circus whose show consists of bizarre or grotesque acts." Biting the heads off chickens is one of those acts. I realize it is different for most of you, but that is my default. How about Nerd? Nerd also for me is never a compliment, because the first definition that I go to for geek is "a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious." Similarly for Dork  which is "a  contemptible, socially inept person." This is all a product of where and when I grew up.

Further I was born in extreme rural West Virginia, my parents farmed with horses until early fall of the year I turned three when we moved to rural Ohio. I grew up on a farm. I had outdoor chores from the age of four. We had dogs, cats, chickens, cows, sheep, horses, a pony, a mule, some goats, some guineas, turkeys and geese. Some only for a while and others all the time. I fed animals, milked cows, helped butcher our meat instead of buying it at the store (and yes grass fed beef is better than factory farmed). I worked in the gardens, helped can hundreds of quarts of food, I mowed and raked hay, and many, many other things.

My dad only went to the 8th grade in a one room school and my grandparents ended school between 3rd and 5th grade. But in my under educated family every one read, the library had to install a revolving door for us. Used books stores loved us. And not just my immediate family, all of my family. We were always told, as long as you can read, you can learn anything.

In my family we were read to constantly, told stories from the last hundred years or more of our families and the people they knew, hundreds and hundreds of stories. We were both read and told fairy tales and all kinds of stories. My father made up stories to tell us. I soaked that in growing up.

I love the outdoors, I love animals, especially dogs and horses, I love hiking and sports. So I have always rejected these labels, I do not accept that I fit into some little box and further I do not believe that most of you do either.

I started reading and read every waking moment that I could, but I also spent a lot of time exploring the woods on our farm with one of the dogs. I built dams in the creek. My cousins and I built a tree house, we went fishing, we made our own bows and arrows, our own swords and spears and tons of other things, we road bicycles for hours around the country roads. On a free day when there was no farm work we were involved in we might leave on those bicycles and our parents might not see us for 8-9 hours. We did not have restrictions on hardly anything, I never had a curfew.

So as I said, I do not accept geek or nerd or dork as a label, never have and never will. You can make your own choice about labels.

He goes on to say:

Of course, little in D&D stands as completely new, but in the 70s, unless you joined a tiny cult of miniature gamers interested in fantasy, the game defied understanding. Unless you followed a few, obscure genre authors, you would never have seen anything like it. You shared popular assumptions that D&D would explode.

OD&D came out in January of 1974, I discovered it in Sept of 1975 in college. The group of us that was always at a minimum a referee and 12 players and at times had up to 30 players in one game and we always had a audience that grew or shrank depending on who was watching or playing in any given game.

This group of about 40 total college kids (all  of whom played OD&D at least a few times) did a lot of things together, we hung out for D&D, we went rappelling in a state park down a 100 foot cliff (men and women), most of us went skydiving together(not me, I could work through my fear of heights enough to rappel, but not enough to jump out of a perfectly good airplane). We had intramural flag football, basketball, water polo and softball  teams during college, all  of them men and women together. We went to all night Halloween movies together, ate together as group and a whole slew of other things. We all had a wide variety of shared interests.

As a group I do not think that we fit any pop culture assumptions with or without OD&D in our lives. This view of a "few, obscure genre authors" is nonsense for me personally, everyone I knew read those authors. I never had a sense that we were a tiny cult, I never felt the need to hide that I played OD&D and I never experienced anything negative. For those that suffered through the "Satanic Panic," I am really sorry that happened to you, but I never knew anything about that until around 2007 or so.

So he says pop culture assumption One:

Fantasy is for children and a few oddballs.

I did not grow up around that attitude out on that rural farm.

He talks about a lot of things including the huge amount of money they gave Marlon Brando for the 1978 Superman movie:

For 15 minutes of screen time, Brando received $3.7 million up front, plus 11.75% of the film’s take, right off the top. The film’s marketing rested heavily on the actor’s performance.

FWIW I thought Brando was terrible in the movie, I thought it was bad casting and bad writing for his part of the movie and I have always thought the Fortress of Solitude was very poorly designed and completely at odds with the character of Superman. I do not know anyone that went to the movie because of Brando I think they just wasted their money.

I loved Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in the movie, even though Reeve was not quite muscular enough for the part. I felt it was shame that the script for that movie and all Superman movies are so poor, you had good actors with good chemistry in the lead parts, if only they had given them a good script. I would just once like to see a great script for a Superman movie with some imagination. From a writer that does not suffer from thinking this is impossible to write, of course if you think that it is.

He says:

The public’s unfamiliarity with fantasy contributed to the panic that surrounded D&D in the 80s. God fearing adults saw their teenagers obsessed with spells and children’s fairy tale nonsense, but darker and more violent. They settled on the only logical explanation, demon worship, because the culprit could not possibly be a really fun game.

I of course was in college, but when I went home I taught my two brothers to play who were 7 and 10 years younger than me. Mom and Dad never batted an eye. They were sitting within 10 feet of where we were playing and they just thought it was great that I came home and spent time with my younger brothers, and we played at winter breaks and all summer while I was in college and on the odd weekend I would be home. But my parents trusted me and they never told me there was anything I could not read. And yes you would have called my parents God fearing, but contrary to some peoples thinking God does not ask you to check your brains at the door, it is the complete opposite in fact.

Then he says pop culture assumption Two:

Games are terrible.

In the 70s, games sold as toys and they were all terrible. They suffered from stupid, and random mechanics: Roll a die and move that many spaces.

Growing up we played every board game in existence that we could get our hands on, we played at least two dozen different card games from an early age, a whole slew of things. We loved all of them, after all it was about having fun together, it was not about some rigorous evaluation of the "quality" of the game.

In college we played a number of different card games and board games, we played tons of Eucher and Risk, in addition to OD&;D and with a lot of friends that did not play OD&D. In Risk we took a piece of poster board and added the Pacific Ocean and all the major islands and drew in more connections to the continents. It completely changed the game dynamics and greatly increased the complexity. Hasbro should try it.

But when I discovered OD&D, I was hooked instantly, it was the next level above everything that had gone before.

Then he says pop culture assumption Three:

Only young children should roleplay.

People sometimes say that D&D did not invent the roleplaying game. Kids have always roleplayed; we just called it make believe. By spreading roleplaying beyond the playground, D&D alarmed parents, ministers, and other responsible adults.

I think one reason that my parents were cool with it was because my whole family and beyond my parents also played games, lots of games from board games to intense card games. When the adults told stories, they did voices and posture and took on the persona of the person talking in the story.

He says:

When D&D first reached mainstream attention, reporters painted the game as a “bizarre” activity enjoyed by “secretive” and “cultish” players.  Parents feared that playing a role in D&D would lead their children to confuse fantasy with reality.

My family never went with the herd on anything, they had their ways and were confident about their choices. Advertising was pretty wasted on them as were propaganda campaigns.

Then he says pop culture assumption Four:

Dungeons are just medieval jails.

Zombies and vampires appear everywhere in popular culture. Both archetypes seem medieval, but the popular conception of zombies only dates back to George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead.

The concept of a dungeon as an underground sprawl with monsters and treasures, is even newer.

Go back and read the Iliad and the Odyssey, go read Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, go read fairy tales from around the world. Go read Jules Verne and HG Wells and those that preceded them.

Watch the old monster movies starting in the early part of the 20th Century. Of course the B movies from the '50s and '60s.

Yes, OD&D turned the world upside down, but the pop culture assumptions, they are in my mind bad assumptions that were always at their foundation very flawed. The people who made those assumptions for the rest of us, were always out of touch with real people and they always will be. Now that I have thought about this, I have come to the conclusion that there is really very little that you could change in my life that would have made me better prepared to be an OD&D Referee.

DM DAVID hit this one out of the park!

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

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

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

Today (02/19/2020) is the 50th day of the Year of Blackmoor!

Today I am going to start 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.

First of all I am going to disagree with DM DAVID on part of the title of the blog post. Awarding XP just for combat is perfectly fine for those that prefer a murder hobo game. While it is not something that I have any interest in, if you do I would just suggest tweaking the XP awards to generate more XP. Now does it work for other game styles, no it does not, but to say it is universally terrible overstates the case.

Now into this post:

When Dungeons & Dragons arrived in 1974, players rated experience points (XP) as one of the game’s most irresistible features. Now, all of D&D’s official adventures ignore the experience point system, and the official Adventurers League campaign has dropped XP.

In the place of experience, the official adventures and the league substitute what folks commonly call milestone advancement—leveling after story-driven accomplishments. The Dungeon Master’s Guide (p.261) calls this method story-based advancement.

Then he comments that DMs like milestone advancement because it is less work. Then he adds his little caveat that really what it does is give 

DMs lazy and total control over when characters advance.

I think this is hilarious! Why? Because I have read forum and blog posts galore where people do not like an old style D&D game because of that "terrible" thing called DM fiat. They do not like house rules, they do not like rulings instead of rules and yet in a paroxysm of (IMO) hypocrisy they embrace the complete DM fiat of "milestone advancement." Why do they embrace this? I believe it is simple, they embrace it because in practice most DMs use adventure modules and advancement becomes automatic and unrelated to being a good player that is able to use their wits to survive, instead that has been replaced with 99.99% cannot lose encounters in canned railroads. That is to say, in this system good players and bad players advance at the same time and there is no real penalty for being a drag on the rest of the party. Yes, a lot of groups complain because they have THAT guy in their game. When you give players this kind of game you rob them  (IMO) of the opportunity to grow, to learn and to become good players. I am not saying there are no good players, I am saying in this kind of game there is no reward for being a good player and no culture to help you get there.

Again please note I am not saying this is bad wrong fun, because it is not bad wrong fun. If you enjoy playing this way, please do. But as for me and my table, I do not want anything to do with this. My table my choice, your table your choice. Just because I have zero understanding of how playing that way could be fun, does not mean it is not fun. It probably just means I am old and set in my ways. Shrug, I will cop to that with this caveat, when I set down and run my game I will match my creativity and flexibility against any canned railroad.

Then he says:

While DMs dislike accounting for XP, adventure writers hate fitting XP in their designs.

As a ref I find accounting for XP to be part of the fun of being a ref. It is not hard to do, of course I have 45 years of practice at it as I only run OD&D.

He continues:

Designers who wanted fewer fights could add XP awards for accomplishing story goals, but these awards lead to the same outcome as just telling players to level up. Just telling players to take a level skips the math and planning.

Sorry I do not see the attraction of this. I give individual XP rewards to players based on what their characters did. I do give XP for gold (silver base in my game) that is divided up among the group and then I give individual XP for a whole slew of things headed by role-playing. My players know that creative fully engaged and immersed role-playing is rewarded.

Then he says this:

Experience points come weighed with another negative: Everyone agrees that the XP system commonly used for D&D’s last 30 years is terrible. Those three decades began when D&D’s second edition stopped awarding experience for winning gold, leaving the notion that characters only gained XP for killing monsters. That has never been strictly true, but players, organized play, and designers most often treated XP-for-slaying as the rule.

Dropping XP for gold had the possibly unintended consequence of encouraging DMs to run all encounters as combat only no other options and encouraging players to view it the same way, often given no option of viewing it any other way. I say possibly because I am not sure that the consequences were unintended at all. An all combat game may have been the goal. 

More tomorrow.

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

WIZARD FUNK 2 Kickstarter - A fanzine inspired by D&D fanzines and APAs from the 1970s

This Kickstarter has about 12 days to go, it is for Issue 2 of the Wizard Funk Fanzine. Issue 1 already exists and some of your backing options are to get Issue 1 in pdf or hard copy or both in addition to Issue 2. Or just get Issue 2 (34 pages) if you already have Issue 1. Issue 2 in pdf - 34 pages for One Dollar, seems like the best Kickstarter Deal ever. And again on Two Dollars for both. Or go the hard copy route.

The author, The Dice Bro (you can click on his profile to get more info) says:

Thank you for your interest in the first ever SECOND issue of WIZARD FUNK.  You see, there once was a bunch of games published by a small company in Lake Geneva, WI.   Those games were freaking awesome.  Nothing ever needed to be changed about them.  However, time passed.  High level business-folk became bored with not making more money.  So they encouraged role play game players to cast off the old and spend their bucks on the new.  Time passed again.  People went off to college, married, and/or got careers and stuff.  Then they had mouths to feed and bills to pay.  Then a few of us started getting old and pulled those old games out and started playing them again.  That's my story and I'm sticking with it.  If you buy this fanzine from me, then thanks for your dollars and I hope you like all 34 pages of good times. Sincerely, the Dice Bro.

Low risk. Easy Challenge. It's an amateur fanzine my friends. Me and Me Mates do all of the design, art, writing, editing, collating, stapling and shipping. We are old school enthusiasts. Trust us. We're old. We went to school. And last but not least, we're highly enthusiastic about the subject matter.

The pledge levels are $1.00,  $2.00, $5.00, and $10.00. Two Dollars gets you both pdfs one of which is already fully existing.

Here is what he says about the contents of Issue 2.

I wanted to flesh out whats going to be in WF2 just in case you were wondering whether or not to pledge.  Wizard Funk 2 will feature the following:
1) Original D&D discussion,commentary and anectdotes.
2) Art: cartoons, illustrations and maps by various artists.
3) An original adventure by Tony Elam. He is a major contributor to the gaming world. Look him up! This adventure was written for AD&D 1st edition. But it will also be great for Original Edition enthusiasts.
4) Hopefully an interview with a former employee of TSR.
5) A two page dungeon by The Dice Bro.
6) Play reports from an interesting old school campaign
7) New monsters and magic item descriptions
8) A history lesson
9) Old School D&D trivia
10) And more...
Finally I will be hiring a professional online printer: most likely mixam.com.
Again, thank you for your interest in this fanzine.

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.

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

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

Today is the next to the last day of 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.

He next throws in an obligatory paragraph to comment on "the countless video games that adopted experience points," and the whole leveling up tropes. Personally I have no real interest in video games or computer games with one exception, I love Civilization, Civ I and Colonization, Civ II and Civ III. I loved all of them. 

I keep a computer with Windows 7 on it to run Civ III, the earlier ones will not run on it and none of them will run under Windows 10. So my days of being able to play are numbered. Civ IV and the new Colonization based on Civ IV are unplayable for me because of the extremely fuzzy graphics which do not work for a color-blind person, I was very disappointed when Civ IV came out and they abandoned the graphics that worked for an old guy for a new graphics system that is just visually painful to look at. The later versions after Civ IV I will never look at because I know they will not be playable for me.

Back to looking at XP and 2E AD&D:

When second edition stopped awarding XP for gold, D&D superficially became more of a game of killing than ever. Except D&D matured anyway. Adventures started spinning stories deeper than that one time we killed a minotaur for gold. Originally, every character chased treasure; now, characters pursue adventure for justice or for honor or for countless other reasons, including treasure. And that worked so long as when players joined a game, they joined an unspoken pact to find reason for their character to accompany the other characters in following the plot.

IMO it was not superficial, I think at a lot of game tables it was not superficial at all. I completely disagree with his short statement that D&D matured "anyway". It assumes that D&D needed to mature which is not a fact in evidence. The whole :

Adventures started spinning stories deeper than that one time we killed a minotaur for gold. Originally, every character chased treasure; now, characters pursue adventure for justice or for honor or for countless other reasons, including treasure.

has two problems. One problem is that contrary to the above assumptions, back in '75 in the first OD&D game I ever played in, when we were just using the original three little brown books in the woodgrain box that our referee had, our game by this description was already mature from day one. We did in that first game "pursue adventure for justice or for honor or for countless other reasons, including treasure." Among the twelve players, ten of us were there for "countless other reasons", two were primarily for treasure. 

The second problem I have with this is the assumption that people make that OD&D gaming was not "mature", that it was a shallow game played by shallow people who "only" chased treasure. Of course those people have perhaps never seen an OD&D game played by an early ref and players

Then he starts talking about the "newer, story-driven play style." Before I get deeper into this I would like to point out that when Arneson and his players talked about story, they were not talking about adventure modules (they did not yet exist) and they were not talking about pre-scripted railroads from which players were not allowed to deviate. 

Do not get excited here and misunderstand me. I realize that not everyone who talks about story driven games is talking about the railroaded nightmares where players have no freedom to make any meaningful decisions. But again you need to understand that some of the claims that are made for "story-driven" games are things that are not the sole province of "story-driven" games. 

You also need to realize that some people do use story as a synonym for "railroad." For many of us the word story is tainted by its long term association with railroad games. Again I realize that it is a sometimes true and sometimes not true thing. But please be aware that story game has a lot of bad baggage associated with the term. Again, game any way you want to at your table and I have no problem with that at all, there is no bad wrong fun here in what I am talking about. If you like a game that has rails that run from beginning to end, more power to you, count me out, but go have fun. I just want you to understand where I am coming from discussing philosophical differences.

So he goes on to say:

In the newer, story-driven play style, some players stopped seeing the point of counting experience. Those players included current D&D head, Mike Mearls. “Tracking experience points and using them to award levels makes a lot of sense in open-ended games, where the players can go where they wish, tackle the specific challenges that appeal to them, and create their own goals as a campaign progresses. In this type of game, when the players decide to assault the lair of a blue dragon, their primary goal is most often the treasure and XP they’ll gain for defeating it,” Mike wrote.

“In a more story-driven campaign, however, that lair assault could have a more complex purpose. Defeating the dragon removes a threat to the realm and creates a key event in the campaign’s story arc. In this type of campaign, treasure and XP take second place in the characters’ goals, behind the dragon’s importance in the narrative. The reward lies in making the kingdom safe and completing the mission, not necessarily in collecting loot. Leveling up might feel like the best way to mark that campaign milestone, even if the XP earned by slaying the dragon doesn’t quite cover it.”

Here is the mistake that people like Mike Mearls and the majority make IMO: They wrongly assume from (IMO) possible ignorance that you cannot have these things in an open-ended sandbox game, "where the players can go where they wish, tackle the specific challenges that appeal to them, and create their own goals as a campaign progresses." 

Here is the difference in the modern "story driven" campaign the DM typically uses an adventure module with the characters' goals and motives dictated and baked in. However, in an OD&D open-ended sandbox game the players get to choose their goals and motives. For instance the Paladin that I played would have been for defeating the dragon (with or without killing it) primarily for removing the threat to the innocent folk of the realm and not for treasure. 

He would not have cared about creating a key event in the campaign's story arc. Why? Because in an OD&D open-ended sandbox campaign, story arcs are not imposed as pre-written things from a purchased campaign world or from an adventure module series or even from a homebrewed world that the DM has written a future history for.

You see in an OD&D open-ended sandbox campaign story is not imposed on the game, story is created during the play of the game. Story is what you talk about and relive after the game is played. It is not written ahead of time and imposed by fiat on the players of the game. As an aside, considering how some rail against DM fiat, I fail to understand how they seem to like DM fiat when it comes to story.

In original game play, the referee creates a world with a lot of interesting things, players make decisions and do things, and the referee responds to the players actions with the decisions and actions of the NPCs and the monsters and this goes back and forth. An excellent referee allows the game to breath and grow in response to the players. An excellent referee has the fun of being as surprised as the players as to the twists and turns the game takes and the created story is an original creation that because there is no pre-written goal or conclusion, everyone referee and player alike get to enjoy together as all are surprised by the events that no one could predict. What fun is it for the referee if he knows ahead of time how things will end. Especially if he is putting his thumb on the scales to make sure there is no character death.

Another feature of original game play is that there are no DM untouchables. The players are not limited in their interactions with the game world where some things are off limits. If the players choose to turn the world upside down, they are free to do so. The concept of breaking the world does not exist, the players are not handcuffed and the referee does not have things that he does not want the player to do because it will ruin his "story". In OD&D open-ended sandbox games the players cannot ruin the "story" because whatever "story" their actions create are just as good as the "story" that would have been created had their actions been different.

He goes on to say:

In addition to faulting XP for failing to serve narrative campaigns, D&D’s designers disliked the bookkeeping behind XP. Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo, the designers behind D&D’s 3rd and 4th editions wrote, “We think that XP systems are better left to computer games.

Again, this makes no sense to me and it seems obvious to me that these people really do not understand the roots of the game and how it worked. You would think that these two could not possibly have that level of ignorance, but there words imply that, "Yes, they are that ignorant." 

One I am not even sure what he means by narrative campaign if he is not talking about a railroad, because IMO narrative is everything everyone says in the normal play of the game with the alternative being a script. Because in OD&D open-ended sandbox games that can be both "mature" and "complex" XP-for-gold serves extremely well. IMO no one has yet improved on OD&D. Because for me the choice is between freedom for referee and players (OD&D) vs less freedom for referee and players(everything else). I come down on the side of freedom.


More tomorrow.

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.