RPG and board game reviews and discussion presented from a game-design perspective. We review and discuss modern role-playing games, classics, tabletop gaming, old school games, and everything in-between. We also randomly fall in and out of different games, so what we are playing and covering from week-to-week will change.
SBRPG is gaming with a focus on storytelling, simplicity, player-created content, sandboxing, and modding.
This is one of the best OSR equipment lists and resources out there. This quickly drops into any OSR (or generic system) game and gives you an instant gear list with prices and weights.
You get gear sets and packages, so you can pick a pre-created gear loadout and get playing!
There is a discussion of encumbrance rules and an alternate system that uses slots. Are you playing an old-school game that doesn't have an encumbrance system, like Dungeon Crawl Classics, and want to add it to the game? This is your book, and since it only covers gear, it becomes an expanded gear book for the game that fits right in perfectly - with much more to buy and choose from.
You also get primitive gunpowder weapons, in case your DCC game is more Renaissance. A side note, the Crawl! issue #8 has a more DCC treatment of the subject, with some nice critical and fumble tables for firearms specifically in DCC, along with an expanded selection. There is nothing stopping you from using those tables with this expanded list of guns though (2 gunpowder-era guns in Crawl! #8, and 14 here plus bombs and cannons).
One of my highest recommendations, especially for using DCC to simulate old-school play, hauling treasure out of dungeons, and for players who love spending and shopping.
The Goodman Game's versions of B1 and B2 is a really cool book, huge is one way to put it, with a full reprint of the basic module plus a 5E update of the same. You get all the maps, plus the 5E versions of the adventures are expanded and statted for that rules set.
And I played it as a part of a Pathfinder 1e game recently. I used the old-school module and converted up to Pathfinder, and skipped the 5E version.
Let's say, my experience was definitely old school, but not the type of old school I like. Going into the kobold lair, killing the guards, having a swarm of rats attack, and then holding off a hallway where charge after charge from the kobold's living area fell in piles in the hall felt...it felt wrong.
Not heroic. It felt like invading a tribe's home and killing them all because they have loot. We ended up a bit shell-shocked after the battle, and it felt really scummy for all involved. Like the party did something wrong, and my players felt that as well.
Wait, aren't we supposed to be the good guys here?
The Kobold Insurgency
We had a random event I rolled for later, and I ruled because the kobolds were attacked this way, the local tribes banded together and formed a "kobold insurgency" in the area and a general war broke out. It didn't make the party feel any better, and they knew they caused it, but it kind of put a bookend on a really ugly feeling encounter we had there.
But ugly encounters happen, and not every fight can feel heroic. I know and so do my players. This is the hardships of being an adventurer, sometimes bad things happen and you deal.
And this reinforces the idea of consequences outside the published module in the game world. You tip the cosmic balance and there is a possibility of a reaction happening. And here, one did.
And it was fun bringing up the insurgency every now and then as the kingdom battled it, the checkpoints, the fires in the hills, the soldiers marching out to the mountains, passing burned out farms, the town criers announcing wins and losses in the campaign - it became a fun backdrop to the game and the players enjoyed knowing the mess they made had a larger impact - although one where if it never happened none of this would have ever began.
But perhaps it was destined to all along.
And no, they did not tell anyone of their involvement. It became a sort of open secret to the party, and with each random event tied to the insurgency they knew they would have to go out there and end what they started.
But, what was wrong with us?
Times Change
Back when we were kids, yeah, they are all evil, here is a room full of them! Yeah! Blast them like a hall full of creatures out of the Gauntlet video game and grab their loot! The modules of those days were simple, room X filled with monster Y sorts of places, and just having a map with keyed rooms was cool and saved us a lot of work.
And I am not dumping on this module, the Keep on the Borderlands, my brother and I loved this place and had our first campaign here with characters that lasted for 40 years. This is where it all began for us, and I still have the home-made maps we made with graph paper and coloring pencils.
But I guess my tastes changed. I like stories, plots, and adventures now. I don't want to go in a hole in the ground "just because treasure" and kill everything down there for XP and GP.
Yes, the kobolds are technically "evil" in this module, it is assumed, but with no support or trappings like demon statues and the like, it felt wrong. I helped rectify that by making the united tribes evil and despicable during the game, so it sort of balanced out.
It would have helped if the original module eliminated the non-combatants and painted the tribe as evil raiders with loot gathered from raids on innocent villages, then the raid would have felt justified. Perhaps this was an oversight on my part, but I was running the module as-written to give them that experience, so this I felt was an interesting topic to write about.
To Be Fair...
The 5E material was excellent, and pointed out some of the problems of the original adventure. The criticism of B2 being a "monster hotel" was correct and a fun admission of the original material's shortcomings. They did try to fix a lot of the issues in the adventure, provided better descriptions and updated encounters, and I wished I would had started with the 5E side of the adventure before I put it aside for the original version.
The 5E material also mentioned when the group would surrender, and clearly laid out non-combatants (and did not stat them), so a more modern sensibility and adventure designer made some great tone choices here. I never likes the classic modules giving hit points for younger non-combatant monsters (or even mention their presence), it just felt wrong to put players in that position where they could accidentally injure younger members of the tribe with a misplaced oil flask or fireball. Let those on the map be combatants and leave those there as the ones responsible for evil occurrences.
There is also a reasoning why the monsters are all here, something to do with the chaos altar present here that draws the monsters to this area despite their antagonism and differences. It is a weak reasoning to hand-wave and say 'because magic' but it is something I could have worked with if I had wanted to. There is a difference between running the old adventure as-is, versus having the kobolds aware of a mind-altering presence in the area of "evil magic" and having that affect their actions.
The party could see a group of kobolds not attack a bugbear because some dark magic willed them to, and that would have aroused suspicion and played into that overall story arc of this place. Once the altar of evil is destroyed, the Caves of Chaos would be as well, and the party could have a sense of accomplishment within a larger narrative and the monsters could go back to being monsters.
I give the 5E section props (and one which I wish I would have read a little more before I ran this), and the tone change between expectations then and now is one thing to be aware of when running older modules. I know, it should be apparent, right? Not all the time, and in this case I stepped on that rake and it hit me in the face.
Turning it Around
By the end of the game, the insurgency did come home to roost and they got drawn into the fight and helped end it. It did sort of put an end to what the party started, and they felt they had corrected a mistake - that wasn't really a mistake because the module was written in a different time and expected a different type of player - one more interested in math and loot than story or plot.
It was a strange situation where and old-school module met modern sensibilities and a desire to play more plot-based games, and I refereed it as having a real consequence that became a backdrop and end to the game. They had fun and we talked about our feeling afterwards, and everyone agreed the insurgency was a fun way to take what felt like a morally-dark old-school slaughter into a larger story and they thanked me for turning what was an ugly situation into something they didn't like having to fix, but they did anyways because they felt responsible.
I pointed out that the situation was likely a powder keg likely to go off not maybe by this, but something else, and they understood and agreed. It was turning lemons into lemonade, but it made sense of something that felt wrong in the beginning and provided closure for the group.
Next Time?
I would make this an adventure location with a reason for coming here, not just to clean the place out, but a kidnapped merchant and a rescue mission, or some other plot based reason to be here, get in, and get out. This would go from a "clear out rooms 1 to 100" sort of game to a adventure setting that serves as a background for a larger story. Not a place to clean out, but as a set where larger plots and stories happen.
Then again, is it a great setting for that sort of story, or is this just fan service? Again, I am struggling. No, realistically, you would not have so many tribes - some hostile to each other - within walking distance of each other. They would not walk out of their caves every morning, punch their timeclocks, and say "hello Bob" and go off to raiding and looting only to come back here later to live in a small, easily accessible, openly known about hole in the ground when they have a whole wilderness map to go make a camp or fortress in.
And when you think about it, the larger and stronger tribes would have wiped out the smaller ones years ago and taken their stuff, perhaps collapsed their caves, and left to go find somewhere more secure, private, and defendable.
And next time, yes, I will be smarter and start with the 5E version with the tone fixes and updated content. I can still swap monsters to whatever system I am playing, but it helps having the fixes and additions to consider.
The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia
Yes, I know B2 is a classic and near and dear to the hearts of many, but I need to mention the Labyrinth Lord module of The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia. This is a way larger experience, but conceptually the same, and a bit better constructed. If I have a "goblin lair" or a "kobold lair" map that out as a standalone, and put it on a larger "adventure area" map (or let the DM place it somewhere), and then you can have a "Caves of Chaos" style area without having it feel too cramped or connected.
The bonus to this type of approach is you can create a classic experience, such as a kobold lair in the ruins of an ancient serpent cult temple, and have the room to create secret ways in, story and plot hooks, and even lost areas where remnants of the old serpent cult may still be around.
I prefer this style of setup to B2's, and this feels much more sandbox and open to me as a referee. The tribes of monsters have room to fight, skirmish, patrol, grab territory and resources, and retreat back to their defended camps and homes to plot another way to rule the lost valley where ancient power lies. Outside tribes could be called in as the war escalates. The players could pick a side, or their actions weakening one side or another could tip the balance of power and cause unforeseen consequences.
And you can ignore or move things around if you want to focus on one group of bad guys. You are not limited by the classic map's tight layout and structure. I would have liked the 5E adventure to space things out a little more with a larger adventure area and sites farther apart, but it is what it is. Messing with a classic that much would have been likely controversial.
In this sort of a "area map plus locations" setup there is more room for player agency and choice. If the story goal is a kidnapped merchant by one of the tribes, getting in, doing the rescue, and escaping are clear goals and you aren't "clearing a map" and you are not forced into areas that have nothing to do with the story.
A Great Book
Despite our strange play experience, I love the book and the work they put into this, and I am planning on getting the others in the series (and I hope they do the Slave Lords "A" series someday). It is clearly a labor of love with interviews, expanded material, a 5E conversion, and plenty to do. Highly recommended, but make note of some of the old school expectations and assumptions and feel free to wrap this into a larger story of yours that changes things up and makes "clearing the map" not the primary goal of the story or mission.
Then again, if you are just going for the old school feel with a modern rules set, dive in and have fun.
So someone went and took the M1E Traveller SRD and built a numbers-filed-off sci-fi game out of it that is functionally equivalent to M1E Traveller? This is what I love about OGL games, once one goes away (as that license did with M2E Traveller), a new game can be made to keep to flame going.
And thus, an OGL game like Traveller is born, but the strange part is, this is not Traveller. This is more generic hard-science roleplaying and a toolkit to take anywhere, develop new games with, and I am betting it goes new places from this point forward.
As Basic Fantasy, Mutant Future, and Labyrinth Lord became their own similar-yet-unique things, so shall this.
I am still loving and playing M2E Traveller, so why would I be interested in this? Because is is OGL and a lot of OSR in a sci-fi package. It feels rules-light. It pushes my M2E Traveller experience more back towards the 3rd Imperium, which honestly is the strength of that setting (but I still like DIY settings).
But the fact I like DIY settings makes me interested in this. With this, I could take my DIY setting and publish the thing. Spin up worlds, design ships, and get it published and share. It is a potent argument for putting my DIY ideas here while keeping M2E Traveller more tied to the official setting.
A Modern Option
Cepheus Engine RPG has a "modern" game as a pay-what-you-want option made out of the rules, which honestly the original Traveller made the house rules for my brother and I for our Car Wars RPG campaign forever in the 1980's. We used Car Wars for the vehicle rules, and Traveller for the interpersonal rules. It was a natural fit because the skill systems, 2d6 to-hit systems, and everything worked so damn well together. To have a OGL modern rules set just like the original Traveller system takes me back to my Car Wars days, and one of the best campaigns I have ever run.
It also held up very well, dealing with mutants, superheroes, vehicle battles, tanks, jet fighters, spy missions, intrigue, advancement, monsters, magic, and anything we could throw at it by the end of that game.
Want a superpower? Flight is a skill, rated from 0 to 5, and we made a speed chart. Armor powers? The same, but with a protection value on a chart. Want magic? A school of magic is a skill, such as evocation, rated with a skill level from 0 to 5, with damages and effects rated on a chart. It worked, and it worked damn well. The 2d6 Traveller-like system is a very versatile and expressive system and I love that is has escaped into the wild via the OGL.
I would love to even see a fantasy game based on this. I have the freedom to write one, if I wish. I could take OGL parts from OGL games, mash everything together, and come up with a mutant hybrid 2d6 fantasy game. A post-apocalyptic game. A superhero game. Whatever I want I get with the OGL, even if I make it myself and share.
People forget this. While I love my shiny new editions, and M2E Traveller feels a lot a like like 5th Edition D&D to me with its polish and speed of play, my OGL books will always be treasured for the dreams they came from, and the dreams and adventures they will continue to give humanity for all time.
OGL games are gifts to the world.
Celebrate them and cherish them, and it is great to see the birth of another.
Ever find a product that just rekindles your love of old school gaming? This is it, The book was a bit on the expensive side but for a high-quality 261-page book with great old-school art on almost every page? A cover by the immortal D&DG legend Erol Otus? A PDF you can keep on your phone or tablet and read through and feel the inspiration come back when you pick a page and flip through its deviously-crafted pages? And did I mention it has a promo cartoon?
It's campy. It's deadly. It's thoroughly old-school. It's crazy with flashes of black humor and the madness of its creator and I love it. I have only just began to dive into the pages of this one and I already feel the excitement. This one so masterfully captures what old-school gaming is all about in both flavor and style, and most importantly - the combination of rules and play. Let me lead you down into the darkness of this one and explain a little, if only you would gather around before you hastily dash off into the night...
What This Is
At its core, Barrowmaze Complete is a combination product covering Barrowmaze I and II, so you do not need the II book to have everything - it is all here. This is essentially an old-school mega-dungeon, but without all the mega-dungeon problems. The layout of the mega-dungeon are the tombs and catacombs under a huge area of ground, the burial mounds of an ancient civilization lying underneath a foggy moor. There are hundreds of mounds to break into and explore, all for the loot this civilization buried with its ancestors, so you can be sure the grave robbers and other ne'er-do-wells are lurking about busting into these forbidden places, getting themselves killed, or killing the others who loot the tombs and head back to town with sacks of loot over their shoulders.
And the marsh itself is deadly and dangerous, especially at night, and it is far enough away from town that you have to conserve daylight to be able to excavate the ruins of these tombs and get out before the night falls and the certain doom of twilight descends upon your party.
What I love about this is it marries lore and a real understanding of grave-robbing mechanics to an old-school experience. You need to physically dig up these places. Many are hidden. You need to bust through mortared-up walls with sledgehammers to get at the good stuff - and all that work makes a lot of noise. Any noise invites wandering monster checks. This sort of risk versus reward feeling extends through the overland plus the expansive underground, the more noise you make, the less chance you have of getting out of there alive.
And then there is the question of time. You may have a great run in the underground spaces only to find out you miscalculated and it's night outside. Torches matter. Light matters. Nightvision matters. Being able to find traps matters. Supplies matter. Resource management is critical to survival. All the low-level "manage or die" stuff that makes old-school gaming so fun matters and this adventure was built to support smart play through realizing you can't rest out here, you need to get in and get out, and there is no way to come out ahead without willfully walking into a place that will most likely get your character killed. This is the perfect tour-de-force of old school sensibilities and gaming and a hallmark example of an adventure written to bring out the best of why we love this genre of gaming.
Old School Death Metal Dungeoning
One thought I kept having was this adventure was like finding an old death-metal record by some band that no longer exists. And when you put the vinyl record on the turntable you are both terrified by the noises coming out of your stereo speakers but amazed by the genius of what this band was able to do with both what they had and the time this was made in.
One of the things I love is the unholy marriage between old-school mechanics and story. This place is infested by the undead, so you would think bringing a cleric or paladin along would activate easy mode, right? Well, it turns out an artifact, the holy grail of evil itself, is lying underneath the boggy fens and foggy moors of this place and it makes turning dead harder - sort of a home-field advantage for the undead team should you choose to venture forth in their domain. It is a small special rule, but this adds so much flavor to the place my heart sings along with the chorus of evil-dungeon master glee.
The excavation rules, the numerous bricked up walls and sealed off tombs, the ever-present "make a noise and we all die" sort of feeling where the noise of one encounter's combat could trigger the roll for another just gives this place an atmosphere leagues better than many of the "places of the dead" adventures I have ever read. The tombs force you to break through walls to explore and find the good stuff, and in doing so you could possibly seal your fate by the noise you make.
And there are optional insanity rules tool that turn this wonderfully crafted gem of player apprehension and terror into a Call of Cthulhu masterpiece where the halfling rogue you depend on for that backstab damage goes insane at just the wrong moment and runs away, only to fall into a bottomless pit to be gone forever, no save allowed. And in that moment you realize your party is doomed because you ventured too far in this time, the halfling was carrying all of your oil for the lanterns, and you won't have enough light to make it out of here without stumbling into more monsters or other traps.
It is like the beginning mission in the movie Aliens where the squad of space soldiers gets in way over their head and all hell breaks loose. Only here, this is old-school unforgiving rules like some insane rage-quit game and you laugh at the incredible stupidity of it the gory demise of the characters around the table and realize what you got into was all you and your group's fault.
Puritanical Sensibilities on the Tabletop
You know that feeling? Your greed put your characters here and they all paid for it.
There is that puritanical "you shall be judged for your sins" sort of feeling that runs through old-school games like the sermons of the 1980's equated tabletop-gaming with evil worship, and I love the morality play here. While gaming is not evil worship, this adventure paints a rather harsh and unforgiving lesson that greed knows no good end that actually meshes quite well with those fundamentalist teachings of yesteryear. To pursue greed is to pursue evil itself, as your character makes a selfish decision to save their own skin and run while leaving your friends behind as a terrifying horde of skeletons busts out of a sealed up wall and engulfs them all. Playing old-school games really gets you 'close to the metal' of morality and sacrifice, and it brings out that "what would you do" moral choices (good or bad) that I assume those preachers did not want young parishioners to make for themselves.
Moral choices. What would you do? Is gold and power worth a part of your soul?
It was funny because back in the day we bought our first copy of Dungeons and Dragons from a religious Christian bookstore. They likely sold it as a sort of a game that taught morals, good versus evil, and the hippie-like holy-rollers that ran the store were cool and probably used it as a teaching game to kids on how to make the right choices in life.
Do you kill a helpless goblin? Do you steal? Do you do what is right, or something that benefits only you? Do you abandon your friends in a time of need? I love that sort of feeling in B/X games, like the game allows you to make good and bad choices and you live with the results of your choices.
And the game doesn't tell you what choice to make.
You bring that to the table. Your faith and beliefs. Part of your character or not. And you live with the outcome. You can choose to live by your beliefs, or not, and see what happens in a safe environment of make believe.
I love those choices, because to see the faces of people that you thought you knew when push comes to shove and they shove the elf covered by green slime into the nearest pit of fire because they have no way of fighting the green slime once it devours the elf and then comes for them is priceless. And then the player who was playing the elf and the look on that person's face? Yes, priceless. Dude, I thought you were my friend! And you don't get those moments if the character design system creates characters too painful to lose, too enshrined as heroic icons, and a rules system that promises fairness and balanced play.
If I ran a Pathfinder game this way? I would get players who would never play with me again because some feel there is some unwritten contract of challenge level written into the rules they would point to and say I wasn't DM-ing the game right. I have seen this happen, and I see this "GM as DVD player" sort of design decision written into almost every modern pen-and-paper game that puts balanced story-based play ahead of a more harsh sandbox and brutal survival style of play that I love. To each their own, and if you have fun with a game please keep doing so - but hard player choices are what I love seeing in old-school games.
At what cost power? At what cost fame and fortune? How do you deal with limited resources, an ever-present dangerous world, and a ticking clock of death? I don't feel today's video-game inspired "story type games" get it, where layers of character protection, hours of iconic hero character-generation, and some assumed hidden contract of GM fairness can even tell a story like this. The new games really can't, and I feel old-school shines when you want this sort of experience. It is why some people love to read horror novels, and some people can't and won't.
To me, old-school gaming is the fantasy equivalent of Call of Cthulhu, but you don't need artificial insanity and horror rules for characters to give the game its sense of terror. If you run the game right, the players are the ones in terror and going insane with every door they open or wall they have to bust through. No game, besides Paranoia, comes close.
If at the end you can all laugh and say you had a good time, like walking out of a theater playing an intensely scary horror movie, the experience was all worth it and you all had fun. Maybe you stood with your friends. Maybe you stabbed them in the back. The game gave you that freedom, and since your characters were a bit more disposable and easy to create you could laugh about it and not feel three hours of character design time and backstory authoring were wasted.
That is why I play old-school games and B/X.
Devious Dungeon Design
I admit, I saw the words mega-dungeon and my stomach did a complete one-eighty. But this isn't your typical mega-dungeon, this is more a cross between B1 Keep on the Borderlands and the S1 Tomb of Horrors. It is a huge area with many small mounds and mini-dungeons that you can map and explore over an entire campaign. The secret is, without giving too much away, the mega-dungeon lies underneath this place and you could break into it at any time. There are entrances everywhere. You may not even know you are, in fact, since there are many smaller tombs (completely mapped) that can fool you into thinking "this is it."
There could be a mound you dig up that provides and unwitting entrance into a connected part of this evil place. You could find an entrance inside one of the mini-dungeons. A pit descending straight down into the earth could link to a part of this place. You could explore a part of the mega dungeon and think it was an unconnected mini-dungeon without even finding the secret door leading deeper in. You could stumble upon a collapsed entrance that with you magic and powers now never be able to dig through, but later at a higher level...
The ability to go in and out, map, explore, and get back to town without having to traverse through seventy previous conquered levels is the great strength to this dungeon. The farther you go overland towards the source of evil, the tougher the wandering monsters get, so the risk/reward and danger of taking the overland route is still very high - even for higher-level characters.
Also, there is a system in the appendices for creating random tombs of any size, large or small, deadly or empty, so the possibility of expansion is very high. A referee could drop his own version of the Tomb of Horrors right into this place as an add-on dungeon and players would never know better. A level underneath the Barrowmaze perhaps more deadly? A deep catacomb with insta-death traps right and left? A giant additional complex with its own story, yet connected to the overall theme? This is all possible, and the adventure as a framework for further sandbox-style fun is very high, which increases my love for this adventure even more.
Oh, and there are rules for restocking cleared rooms with new traps, monsters, and encounters over time. This is less a "burn through it" module than it is a complete campaign sandbox with a near-infinite level of re-use. Who knows, maybe the characters lost on a previous expedition show up as guest zombies and undead fiends on future runs. There is an organic level of re-use and a living dungeon feeling here that I love in a setting.
Campaign Support
We also get three towns and a campaign map with this adventure. Normally, this falls to the level of, "nice to have" but I feel there is something really important here. This is set in the fantasy campaign world of an area like Detroit is in our world. A run-down, hopeless, poor, broken down, forgotten place of end-of-the-Earth lost hopes and shattered dreams. The towns are infested by opportunists, grave-robbers, and thieves. The people that come to these fetid hovels are interested only in one thing - either stealing from graves of a lost civilization or getting rich off the fools who do so.
We have towns, maps, characters, portraits, and little backstories for all of them that tie them to this place. There are those you think you can trust, and those you shouldn't but have to. Watch your words, because that shop-keep you shared your plans with just may try to make a coin or two selling your plans out to the local bandits who prey on people like you and your merry band. You may stumble out into the fading light with that bag of 50 looted gold pieces and that bag full of potions into an ambush by eight good-old-boy local bandits with crossbows in their hands, greed in their eyes, and murder in their hearts.
There are factions lurking about, both connected to the town and also some of the denizens of the maze to worry about. There are secrets everybody holds. There are cults and cutthroats wandering the streets at night. There are hushed conversations happening when your merry band enters the tavern. Other parties of fools and grave-robbers wander about, doing the same exact thing you are doing. You may wander upon a camp excavating a tomb with workers led by happy-faced dwarfs and elves only to later go by this same camp and find them all dead or missing. Or worse, the entire lot of them turned into flesh-hungry ravenous zombies and they now wander the bog looking for living flesh upon which to feast.
If you subject the players to NPCs that seem perfectly normally busy, competent, and focused on one task and then end up as mincemeat for the unseen Blair Witch style evil that lurks out here you are doing a good job as a referee of this adventure. The farmer they buy cheap food from many times goes missing. The friendly group of nightwatchmen that guard the gate and always fight off the monsters chasing the party all end up dead one night. A shopkeeper who gives the party great prices and information suddenly refuses to deal with the party out of some fear. A mad traveling priest starts shouting at the players one night, saying they are going to get the town killed, and then he disappears without a trace.
Set up reliable NPCs and expectations early on, and then suddenly and slowly start taking them all away to instill a sense of terror and hopelessness in the players. This is not some static town you would find in a video-game to go restock supplies at and rest at the inn, the town and its people are an integral part of the horror and dread, and the actions players take have consequences. Raid the were-rat lair and get away? One night the were-rats show up and raid the town, NPCs are killed, and buildings are burned down (and stay down for the rest of the campaign).
What do you do?
Did you cause this with your actions?
There is enough room here for the referee to make their own factions, plots, and stories, and have them wander through the area. Some may interact with the players, some may not, or some may have what they did found later and the players wondering why or how did this happen?
Another group of "adventurers" may open up a tomb with something that shouldn't have been disturbed, getting themselves all killed and now a rot-mummy covered by deadly poisonous gas-spewing mushrooms wanders an area of the bog. You may not know what others did and wander into their stupidity. Others may trail you into the bog for nefarious reasons. They may get eaten alive, or survive long enough to turn on you when you wander out of a tomb battered and bruised. You may choose to be the bandits yourselves and enact some revenge upon them, only to incur the wraith of others.
Remember when I asked, "what would you do?" Yeah, that moral question comes up big time in the campaign aspect of this adventure when you deal with the town and the oft self-serving people that live here. Played right there is a whole lot of intrigue and backstabbing going on outside the dungeon, and that adds another layer of fun to this adventure and its surroundings.
Cons
This is expensive, even $30 for the PDF, but I chose for the book-plus PDF option and that is more than twice the price. There aren't many player maps, if those are important to you. This is really focused on the Labyrinth Lord system (and other B/X clones), so if you play other Pathfinder or D&D 5 type systems you will need to convert, and you may lose some of the danger and flavor.
You need to have players interested in old-school games, and because they can't read this adventure, they may not understand the excitement behind it (I admit the high cost here is a benefit because not many players would be willing to fork out this much to cheat). Again, you have to be good at communicating why they should play this over the more player-friendly and story-focused modern games, but you may be lucky and have a crowd of old-school fanatics ready and willing to be able to dive in and lose dozens of characters in an old-school romp.
To me, the creator of such a cool setting deserves to be rewarded, so I feel the cost is well worth it and contributes towards me supporting the hobby and those who create within it. I will get a lot more enjoyment out of this than a $70 AAA video-game, and I will have a physical book to read and enjoy for myself. If this inspires me I am happy to support it, and this does inspire me.
Other Stuff
There is an "illustration book" of S1-style pictures that can be printed and used as flavorful player handouts. There are also news spells and items in the book, plus an impressive collection of monsters - a 24-page mini-monster manual with pictures and statistics for each. You get pre-gen characters, plus a section covering rival adventuring parties. You also get a B/X and Labyrinth Lord 2-sided style character sheet that is absolutely to die for with beautiful art-filled borders and plenty of space to create your certainly doomed character with.
You get a complete random dungeon generator focused on creating these types of tombs, and a record and worksheet for each one you generate. The adventure encourages expansion with mini-dungeons of all sizes and levels, so the potential for supporting a wealth of unique user-generated content is very high. Make a low-level dungeon that stretches on for a dozen rooms. Make a mid-level deathtrap of secret rooms and deadly puzzles. Make a cultist headquarters. Make a bandit hideout overrun by were-rats. Make a high-level mini Tomb of Horrors style character killer dungeon with rewards and wealth worth chasing...but at what cost?
I Took a Chance on This...
...and I am happy I did. It rekindles my excitement for OSR games, and it gives me something that was written by fans for fans, and it shows an understanding of why we enjoy the games we do. No matter your flavor of OSR, be it B/X, Labyrinth Lord, or some other game, this one I feel is a keeper. This one is a keystone for me, something that makes me want to expand my OSR collection, buy books, and build a library of fun that I can enjoy and share with other players and fans.
More on this, hopefully soon, but I have a lot of reading and enjoyment myself diving into this book and discovering the contents inside. Don't ever discount that part of enjoyment, some of us just enjoy reading adventures for fun and imagining all of the possible dangers and stories within.
To get to play this some day? A dream for me, and I hope I can share my enthusiasm with the lucky group I get to run through this. That is what I feel drives our hobby, that love and enthusiasm for the games that we play, be it OSR or the more modern games. If you love it, play it and share it. I like the horror-movie feeling of OSR games, but I also appreciate the more movie-like experiences of the story-based modern ones as well. I have played a lot of modern games though, and to each their own, but discovering old-school games and adventures like this that appeal to that dark and dangerous horror-movie game side of our hobby?
That I get really excited about. This looks to be a lot of fun for months and months, and I can't wait to begin diving into it. Even if I can't I know I am going to enjoy reading this one and imagining all the possibilities.
This is an article about the new digital tools suite for D&D 5 and it looks pretty slick. I have HeroLab for Pathfinder, and that program has become the only way to play for us. I want to check this software suite out and see what it can do for my group - so, nicely done and written - thank you!
Now, my thoughts and feelings. The problem I have with both Pathfinder and D&D is the character generation time, even in the article, they mention it took a GM and seven players three hours to create a party of characters. Even the author says it takes him 30 to 45 minutes to create a character by himself, and that is with proficient rules knowledge.
And here I was thinking Pathfinder was the one that took a lot of time, and that D&D 5 was actually faster. I guess as time goes on, those 'critical path' choices become clear and the game's balance and mechanics push players more towards 'good choices' for combat and critical game activities. It is like hard drive space in a way, you always find a way to use it all up no matter how much you have. In pen-and-paper games, character generation time seems to go up to an hour no matter how hard the designers try to streamline.
I have been through those 'where did the three hours go' character generation sessions way too many times, and it is hard to get players to go through that and come back the next week. In my feeling, it throws a huge wet blanket over that first, magical 'getting started' session that should be about adventure and having fun, not filling out a character sheet the length of a tax form and then having to come back the next week to see if you made the right choices.
Yes, pre-generated characters help - but they take the critical 'player creative input' out of the game. We are in an age of 64-bit smartphones that do amazing things and connect the world, how hard could it be to design a rules system that gets you started in 5 minutes?
In a perfect world, I would never use a computer program to wrangle complex character creation systems, and it could all be done as we did it when the game started. Throw 3d6 in six scores, pick a race, pick a class, grab some gear, and go.
The simplicity of the retro-clones calls to me, I know.
But the new games allow so much customization!
True, but unlimited choice is not always a good thing in games nor in life. It can paralyze and cause people to not choose anything rather than make a choice and go with it. I would rather have my complexity creep in after level one (in character advancement) than force it on players before they get started with the game.
Just my feelings of course, and I still appreciate robust character design systems - but there is a point where I feel complexity starts hurting the 'new player experience' and also play-ability.
It is why my shelf still holds a nice collection of retro-clones and they continue to inspire me to this day. Sometimes the original ways we did things need some respect and study, and that those simple times had a merit of their own.
I feel this one is mostly a mess. It shows some of the worst failings of the d20 system in rules design, and attempts to rules-ify and feat-ify basic "I do this and I say that" roleplaying. What should be in-character banter between the player and referee is slogged down by rules, stat-blocks, and game systems.
DM judgement and player creativity are replaced by book reference and rules structure. It feels terrible, especially when compared with the elegance of other systems in these situations like Savage Worlds or FATE.
Why? Because what this book forces you to do is buy feats and sink character points into skills that take away from combat, which many players will not want to do. There is little support for 'well rounded' characters in most d20 systems, as you are making choices between "combat effectiveness" and "non-combat ability" every level, and combat effectiveness usually wins. You must keep up with the Jones' - aka, the monsters and opponents of the world, so choosing "combat" is typically the safer way to go.
So now, what should be "handle it with roleplaying" is now "we can build characters around social combat rules" and I feel something huge is lost here. If a player, without a character with a social build, roleplays wonderfully in a Game of Thrones moment of drama and heartfelt appeal - am I supposed to coldly refer to the rules, state they do not have the feats to make such an appeal, and deny the roleplaying based on a failing of "social combat?"
Please, d20 game designers, stick to combat rules, which the d20 system does well. Keep the rules out of the roleplaying area, and let people play. I feel anytime designers try to make d20 do something other than combat it usually results in a complicated mess of charts and rules that takes the fun out of the game (there are a couple exceptions of d20 designs that do this well, but not D&D as a whole). Especially if you start putting a "social feat tax" on characters who want to be social, and now they suck when standing in a party alongside the established builds and highly-tuned killing machines the game has gotten us used to.
If these options were in the game on the ground floor, I could feel differently, since the default assumption would be "you build balanced characters for combat and social play." But still, creating strict rules for social roleplay feels so backwards and against the spirit of the hobby I sit here and wonder why.
I want to play a diplomat who is just as good with a sword as the fighter is, and I want my diplomat to feel like he or she can contribute equally when in combat or out of it. Making me lose combat effectiveness just because I want my character to be talky takes away from the fun of the game, and it further pushes apart the "roleplay" players from the "combat" players when the game should bring them together.
To the book's credit, it provides some new character archetypes and build options that are fun, but the whole notion of creating a class around a Batman-like "secret identity" vigilante seems odd. My rogue or mage could have a secret identity too, you know. I could even have my mage or rogue be a vigilante. Seriously. I don't need this level of classification, and I don't need making every job-based noun a character class. The build options are fun though, and the art is pretty.
Why give all these social rules for roleplaying, and then give us hundreds of spells meant to short-circuit it? We have spells to sense lies and motives, make others seem as dishonest, and all sorts of other spells which feel like they are "quick and easy outs" for mages in social situations. Why go through a whole Sherlock Holmes adventure interrogating suspects, putting together clues, and figuring out who has the motive to lie about who killed Mr. Boddy when this complete spellbook of "forensic lie detection" powers can do the same with the wave of a magic wand? The very thing the book tries to do, create a framework for social adventures, feels marginalized by the spells in the back of the book.
Seriously. If we are trying to find out the killer, are we going to go through the detective work, or just have someone cast a spell?
Someone cast the spell and let's get on to the next combat encounter. Yes, the book says "magic is frowned upon in polite company," but really? Bust out the lie-detector, we are trying to save the world here. Divination is already a huge deal-breaker when it comes to D&D and mystery games, and after this book's spells are introduced into the mix, running social and intrigue games feels worse. Yes, there are some tricky counter-counter spells in here meant to counter divination, but I don't want to play a game of divination-counter escalation and spell-counter-spell when doing the Sherlock Holmes thing.
And not in every mystery because it feels forced and artificial. Who done it? Whoever can cast the anti-divination and social magic is a prime suspect.
Other games do this better. If I want to play mystery and social, Pathfinder is not my first choice nor would I want it to be (see Divination magic, above). I expected a "how to run a mystery" or "how to create a social adventure" type material, and it feels like we just got a bunch of misguided rules that will be ignored because:
People who play the game for tactical challenge will ignore
People who play the game for roleplaying will feel burdened by
Referees who are used to rewarding great roleplaying will ignore
And the rules drive these two groups apart instead of bring them together. You force social characters down a path buying social feats and powers (making them weaker when playing with the other side), and you put combat characters on their well-trodden path down of combat effectiveness (and also the path the game is balanced around).
There are times when I feel the old-school games of "roleplay is up to the players and referee" is the best way to go. If you need a stat that affects the chance of success, let it be charisma, and leave it at that. No feats needed. No skills needed. No rules or charts needed. Just your CHR modifier, and of course, the referee's judgement based on what you just said, how the NPC feels, and what is being asked for.
Come up with a DC, add your CHR modifier, and roll.
This is a fascinating discussion of the D&D 5 OGL release, and I encourage you to check it out and participate. Some of the posters brought up some interesting facts about the 5E SRD, namely it is missing a bunch of feats, spells, backgrounds, and other content. Some of this was an oversight (and will be corrected, thank you Wizards again), and other parts are because the items in question are product identity.
It brings up an interesting question about usability and forking.
Without everything in an SRD, designers may clone the missing parts to make a functional game from the SRD. This happened with the 3.0 SRD, and we have a forked product (see any of the retro clones, Pathfinder, and so on). It reminds me of the current OpenOffice and LibreOffice relationship in a way if you are familiar with that, you have one that is controlled by an entity, and another that is controlled by a community.
Will Wizards find a way to license the missing pieces so they can be used in a convenient way? I am sure their new PDF sales site is a way around all this, while delivering a OGL version gives indie designers enough to work with to create games from the main rules. It is a good solution to open up the parts you want to make compatible and the generic systems without giving away the farm, so Wizards still deserves a heap of praise for being so open and bringing back the OGL for 5E.
You can still build a 5E-like game with this SRD. Getting an open-source "plays like D&D" version out of this with all the mechanical parts, but it feels a little less possible than the 3E SRD version. You can get there, but it is going to require a lot of new content that will be under the OGL. It won't exactly be D&D with all the cool powers though.
It is partly because 5E is a very tightly-tuned game, with lots of stuff in it that is custom to the Wizards settings. It's a good thing and a bad thing I suppose, since I like rules that are closer to the source material, but that makes the system a little less generic. An OGL "5E compatible" game will play like D&D, but it won't be D&D down to the spells, classes, feats, and other parts.
The forking issue is an interesting question. Will a fan-supported version of the game pop up with 100% open content? The forking question is interesting, because something supported by a community feels like it has more energy and community impetus behind it. I don't know. I would love to see a retro-clone based on 5E style play, or wait, isn't that 5E itself? Then again, any fork has to compete with the official game, so there is that issue. The 3.0 SRD is out there and also well-understood and used, so there is another angle here worth thinking about.
It is a problem which time may fix as Wizards revises the document and comes up with other ways of licensing things. I would love to have an additional "product identity" license and open-ish reference source for the missing material, but then again, I would like them under the OGL. But then again, I understand why they aren't there. Another part of me says, "why are they worrying about all this? They are D&D!" It is an interesting conflict and set of conundrums around this release, and I am sure it will all get worked out in some way.
D&D 3E introduced us to this wonderful concept of the 15-minute adventuring day. It goes something like this:
"Hey guys, I used all my spells in that last encounter. Let's go back to town and rest."
Now, this existed before 3E to be fair, and this issue has really been seen more with D&D than other role playing games. Part of the problem is D&D itself, adventures are designed around a series of encounters with CRs that are supposed to balance play and use up resources at a predictable rate. This does not always work, and I feel CR misleads us in a number of ways:
Randomness leads to greater or lesser resource usage
The CR system is too simplistic to deal with the complexity of the game's classes and powers
Players don't care about balanced fights and "burn down" every encounter
The first one is interesting, and yes, a series of bad rolls will double or use up your entire excursion's resources (spells, potions, powers) and you are stuck. Since the rest of the encounters in the dungeon were carefully balanced around you having some resources to deal with it, it's game over man, time to bug out. One encounter drops your party resources to zero, and if this is a "one time only" dungeon with an objective (like most should be), you have lost. That's it. Bad dice have let the bad guy get away with the princess, and that's the knocks of a story-based game.
Yes, the d20 with its wide variance is partially to blame here, it isn't the best die to use if you want a strong average, but with D&D it's what we got.
Another side note. D&D 4E tried to solve this problem with at-wills and encounter powers. the designers of D&D 4 were trying to solve a lot of problems, and this one they did a pretty good job at (tactical miniatures wise, not role playing wise). They introduced the concept of regenerating powers and healing surges, and that kept the party going into the next part of the story. For story-gaming, D&D 4 had a lot of nice improvements over D&D 1-3 and D&D 5. Mind you, the design of D&D 4 did not lend itself to roleplaying all that well, but as a tactical miniatures game where you played stories, it was interesting (counting the first 3 books or so before everything started going to the lower planes).
The second point is also interesting. In some ways I feel the CR system is overly simplistic and it does not take a lot of factors into account. One the other side, if it did the CR calculation system would be something as complex as calculus to figure out encounter balance. With Pathfinder, I have seen reports that modules designed against earlier versions of the game are now too easy with the power creep introduced in later books, and that encounters need to be toughened up to be a challenge again. Old CR does not equal the new CR, and the rating slips as time goes on.
Burn downs. This I have been waiting to talk about, because every player coming from an MMO knows about this one, and this is how most videogames train players nowadays. When you are in a MMO, in each encounter you 100% burn down all your powers and abilities in order to beat it. It does not matter if it is a hall fight or a boss fight, you keep pressing every button, keep hitting every power as its timer comes up, and maximize your damage output to 100% in every fight. In the old Everquest, this wasn't the case and you had to practice careful resource management through a zone. Past that, most modern MMOs make you burn down as fast as possible in order to get through a fight.
The reason? It's flashy! It's more exciting! It solves players from complaining the dungeon is too hard and filling up your customer service system with too many tickets.
So many videogame and MMO players are trained to burn down.
Now, many players get it when they begin playing pen-and-paper. They get the careful resource management game. The games fight this though, and try to make things easier on players by giving them infinite-use attack cantrips (D&D 5), or multi-shot built-in class attack powers (Pathfinder). D&D 4 had infinite-use at-will powers and auto-recharging encounter powers. Even 3E had a plethora of multi-use wands, scrolls, and other items that let you blast away with rechargable wands of magic missiles and fireball staffs. You see the burn-down starting to creep back in.
Player power has increased dramatically over the last 15 years of D&D to keep up with the MMO arms and expectation race.
Personally? I find burn downs boring and resource management more compelling. I like story-based play (a separate topic entirely), but I appreciate games that force you to make hard choices.
In old-school gaming like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord, giving a magic user infinite ranged attack cantrips would be unthinkable. Today, shooty and flashy are the new thing and the new norms. In the past, you didn't doll up with magic items and carry around enough rechargable magic items to blow through days of content. If your DM was stingy, you pulled the "go back to town" thing. If he wasn't, you loaded up for bear with enough magic to blow a hole in the side of White Plume Mountain.
In older editions of D&D and today's OGR games, the magic item economy is sparse, and you don't get into it as much. A wand of magic missiles is rare and special. A +1 sword is Excalibur. You survive on your wits and a player's ability to coax room descriptions out of the DM's head to avoid the trap of doom in the next room. Then again, the story in old-school games was a lot like today's 'sandbox" games. Do you survive? What do you do? Old-school games focused on the stories of the characters in that personal survival story, and not the DM's or module writer's story.
I blame Vampire: The Masquerade back in AD&D 2E days for this "module as story" stuff really. Vampire showed us a wonderful roleplaying game focused on personal stories, and AD&D had to follow suite and try to make dungeoning "story gaming" as well. Vampire did story gaming elegantly. AD&D had a lot more trouble making that leap because of the abstraction and resource management, and that theme of "story dungeoning" has stayed with us ever since, even across 3E's magic-card-if-i-cation of the rules.
So this pesky resource management game is getting in the way of completing tonight's story dungeon! Let's punt, take a mulligan, and head back to town to ignore this archaic D&D resource management system and continue on, shall we? If you are going to be in any way realistic about this dungeon master and reset the encounters, make us roll for wilderness encounters, or make us 'lose' the story for taking a break in the middle, then I guess you are a horrible dungeon master who hates well-told stories and famous module designers, right?
I am being sarcastic, but I have had those feelings come up at my table before so they are there.
There is an internal struggle here that I feel D&D has never gotten over. There is a simulation side to old-school D&D with the resource game, and if you have never played an old-school game, I recommend you do to see what I am talking about. It is a different game. Health does not auto-recharge. What you take in is it for possibly 100 rooms. The game is simple and deadly. Characters die frequently. You struggle. There is a mental game going on where you pry descriptions out of the DM, be clever, avoid fights, and survive.
3E and Pathfinder? Stuck in the middle of storytelling and resource management. Deck-building RPGs at heart.
4E and D&D 5E? Storytelling games at their heart and trying hard to shed old-school D&D's resource management game. Heavily MMO-influenced with recharging and infinite-use powers, with D&D 4 being the more MMO game, but D&D 5 shooting for the feel of 2E's story-dungeoning feel.
None of them are bad, and players love each for different reasons. This is not an argument one is better than another. You play what you love. But, you need to understand what each one brings, and where the conflicts are. If I ran D&D 5, I would go for more story than resource management, because that's what that game does best. I would adjust the story if players felt their party needed to take five, and advance the story in a logical way that reflects them having to take a breather. The show would go on. There wouldn't be a 15-minute adventuring day because the story reacts.
In old-school games? Yes, you can bet I would come down like a ton of bricks on a party that wasted its resources in wasteful burn-downs and had to retreat to town. Old school games are the Old Testament of resource management sims. Roll for wilderness encounters to and from the dungeon. Roll for wandering monsters all the way down to the point you left off. The dungeon's residents react and adapt to the last incursion, setting up traps, moving to rooms deeper (or to ones you thought you cleared), clearing out, or calling for reinforcements. You take a 15-minute day, and I will make you regret it for the next 15 days, but that is the old-school dungeon master's job.
The trouble comes when the game's designers try to please everybody, and tell you that the game is good for all types of play. It's cool marketing speak, but it isn't true. Some games do things better than others, and that's okay. Another problem arises when the game's designers put in systems geared to resource management when the game shines in story-based play. I can't blame them, the marketers said 'make it appeal to everybody' so sometimes you get systems in games better ignored than used. It happens, and game design isn't a perfect science.
Know what you like. Know what your players like. Most importantly, know what you expect from a game, and how a game shapes that experience.
One of the interesting things about the new D&D 5 edition is we are back to one-shotting players and taking characters out of the game. There are one-shot 'take you out of the game' spells, official podcasts with DM insta-kills, and the old-school feeling of deathtrap dungeons and random PC death is back big time. It is cool to see the old-school feeling back!
Right?
But, um, dude. What about my story?
What do you mean your story?
When I generated my character, there were these tables, and they were all like, hey, wow, you get a random story attached to your character when you spin him up. And I was like, cool, hey, that is pretty nifty, now I can be like those dudes from Lord of the Rings and all. Then you made me make a save-or-die saving throw and insta-killed my guy.
Dude, not cool.
Hey, don't blame me, old-school is back. This isn't D&D 4, a game that goes out of its way to make sure nobody feels slighted or marginalized at the table, that everyone's contributions are important, and those "ruin the night for one player" moments were written out of the game. Those days are over. This is the return of the real, and we are back to the old way of doing this, so toughen up and get with us old-schoolers, right?
Dude, I liked my story. Why have a story on your guy if the game is telling you to run around and kill our player characters off like some psycho in a slasher flick?
Oh yeah, I forgot this isn't AD&D, or even a retro-clone like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord. In those games, some of the true old-school classics, your guy was just a couple 3d6 rolls and some hit points, and you didn't even get a story chart to roll on. Heck, you didn't even name your guy until he got to third level and was worth caring about.
Yeah, well. Dude, I grew up playing World of Warcraft, and I am pretty used to the idea that losing my guy warrants a call to customer service. He may be the same hero who saves the world along with 5.5 million other players, but that's my story, and I am entitled to it.
Well, we have to be fair here, would you be that angry if I, as DM, insta-killed your Pathfinder character?
Well, dude, yeah. I put a lot of time into that build!
As I recall, you copied that build from someone else's forum post.
Dude, not cool. Even though someone else came up with it, I punched it into Hero Lab. Plus the paper I used to print it out, and the toner. It's a lot of work.
So let me get this straight. You don't play the old-school games because player death is easy, the characters are too simple, and the story parts are more compelling than the mechanics?
If I am going to spend my Saturday playing a game, I want something out of it, dude. I want my character to be a part of something, to matter, and for my choices to mean something. Just 3d6 in six scores doesn't mean anything to me, I want to design my guy, and have those choices matter. I want there to be some story to play through, and for that story arc to be a part of character design.
What about the concept of 'you make your own story?' You know, where what you do in the face of impossible odds is the compelling narrative, and watching dozens fall before the one true hero rises is a part of the fun?
Dude, the first guy I spin up is the one true hero.
But D&D 5 has save-or-die!
The game also has built-in stories. Where is the fun in having my character get killed before his aunt finds out he is a thief? This is story-based game.
Story-based does not mean 'player protection' from bad decisions. Even story-based games are like that. You walk a tightrope here, if you make great decisions, you may get the satisfaction of advancing your personal story. Fair trade?
Not if it is save or die. Dude, even if I played this for the combat and tabletop side I would be pretty pissed if I failed a save-or-die saving throw. All that work, all those adventures, just game over. It's a pretty rotten thing taking a character off the board with one roll. If I fail, I want it to be because of my bad decisions, not a cheap "you lose, thank you for playing" 50-50 roll. It's the cheap thrill of Russian roulette with my player character, not cool.
Where this Started
You know, sometime long ago these games used to be about the thrill of working through a simple rules system that was deadly and absolute, and working out a way to survive and profit despite the sheer impossibility of survival. Many characters did not make it, because they were just that, playing pieces in Monopoly where you laughed if one of them fell off a cliff and you chalked it up to "how the game works." They were easy to spin up because they were so disposable, and you weren't supposed to invest yourself in them all that much.
Nowadays, things have changed.
How so?
I agree that if you are playing a story based game, save-of-die sucks. I also think it sucks in a tactical game, because it robs you of your input, and it does feel like a Russian roulette mechanic for cheap tension. In a classic old-school game, I see its place though. Old school isn't about fair, and you stayed away from save-or-die monsters or situations, because you got XP directly from treasure, not the artificial challenge rating of monsters. Somewhere along the line someone introduced the concept of "if it is a good fight, players deserve XP" when that wasn't in the game.
The concept of XP for a good and balanced fight that you will most likely win comes from the admission that the game is mass-market entertainment. I feel it is a dumbing down of the concept, making the game more like a videogame, and putting in an artificial slot-machine constant-feedback reward system that keeps players coming back.
Save-or-die was in old-school games to discourage you from doing a straight-up fight with that medusa. It was better to sneak past her, find a way to deal with her other than combat. If you stole her 1,000 GP brooch, you got 1,000 XP. Any way you got it was fair game.
Nowadays, the medusa is engineered to be a fun encounter 'worth' the XP she is assigned. You get no XP for treasure, so you are forced to fight her for the XP. In a way, it is more bloodthirsty because you are putting a point value on a life (defeated however), rather than a goal or a treasure. This is a concept taken straight from videogames that reinforces the "kill for experience" sort of very basic and almost darkly sinister motivation for the game. Now, 'killing' means 'defeating in any way, knocking out, etc' in many games, but the points are 'owned' by the encounter.
There are also 'story XP' which is a system that attempts to cover story-players as well.
I do feel D&D's reward system has been messed up for a while, ever since AD&D 2nd Edition where they started the story award XP system formally, and also reset monster XP along those levels.
If the game wants to be story based, then remove XP for killing things.
If the game wants to be hack-and-slash, then remove story XP.
Reward Systems
Personally? I like story-based XP systems. I think XP for killing is a bit cold and bloodthirsty, like a genocidal bounty system. I liked the XP for GP thing of old-school play though, in a fun sort of way because it encourages creative play. The goal is to out-think the monsters and grab the loot. You are like this group of Ocean's 11 thieves looting and sneaking your way through dungeons, each person with a special ability (healing, fighting, sneaking, magic) but with only one goal - grabbing the loot the easiest way possible.
If the king wants to pay your party a "story award" of 10,000 GP for rescuing the princess, then pocketing 10,000 XP is also your motivation. The XP are nice, but really everybody, we are here for one reason and one reason only, shiny gold coins.
In this context and the original game's motivation of "XP for treasure" a save-or-die mechanic makes sense. You are a playing piece out to accumulate as many GP as possible. Yes, some monsters and traps are "save or die," but the balance is to not fight them or be stupid enough to step into them. You certainly don't get XP for the artificial reward of "beating" them, so trick, avoid, and circumvent these monsters as best you know how and the tools given to you will allow.
So, save-or-die is in there, but it is something to avoid?
Exactly. It is a different design and motivation for the entire game. Balance issues clear up because there is not an artificial reward tacked onto a creature, so there is no need for a CR system to rate difficulty. An owlbear is an owlbear. Fight it if you think you can, or avoid it if the dungeon designer was smart enough to put another way around. Save-or-die was a disincentive, not a game design mechanic someone needs to balance.
The definition of "railroading" in pen-and-paper games changed too. In the old days, railroading was that a module designer forced you to solve a problem one way, or forced you into a fight you could not avoid. When RPGs went story-based, railroading was forcing you to play the story the module designer's way. In the old definition, railroading was more about giving the players choices in how they wanted to approach a situation. It was about the freedom to approach a problem and allowing for that.
It is partly D&D's problem because of its heritage. D&D by its nature is a "big tent" game that takes inspiration from many fantasy sources. This means the reasons people play the game are just as varied, and the game has to support many types of reward systems. It needs videogame XP for hack-and-slashers. It needs story XP for roleplayers. It got rid of XP for GP, which I think is a mistake.
Understanding Fairness
But yes, understanding reward and motivation are key to understanding why save-or-die mechanics work in some games and not others. It is ultimately about that feeling of unfairness, but to decide if something is unfair, you need to understand both the motivation for play and how the reward system works. Some games have simple motivations, so judging what's fair is easy. Other games are more complicated, and you layer in characters that take hours to design, or story systems on top of bounty systems, and things get more complex.
Fairness is ultimately judging if a reward is worth the risks, and not feeling cheated should things not work out. In a way, fairness measures how you feel about defeats and successes, and the satisfaction of the proportionality of a reward given a risk.
This is a complete game book for five bucks. Yes, it isn't 1980 anymore, this is 2015, and this is a seriously great value for such a great retro-clone old-school game.
Did you see the monster expansion for Basic Fantasy?
Seriously, what in the roleplaying world is going on? Four dollars?
Ordered.
For those of you in the know, Basic Fantasy is a retro-clone that keeps the best parts of D&D 3.5 and throws the rest of the complicated parts away. It uses a D&D 3.5 style rising AC and target number where the monster's AC is the to-hit target number, yet clones most of the original D&D spells, feeling, and flavor. It is a seriously cool game that gets back to the hobby's roots, is simple, and most importantly...
Look at those prices.
You can download the PDF of the main rules for free, so this game is great for groups that want to play something yet not invest a lot of money in expensive books. Does it bother me that this isn't D&D 5? Not in the least, and in fact, I welcome a return to the old days in spirit and feeling, where dungeoning was deadly, your ability to pry room descriptions out of the referee in real life gave you a better chance of survival, and you didn't need rules longer than an IRS tax form. I love the old-school rules and feeling of freedom in both refereeing and playing.
Your real-life wits mattered, not your character build.
Best of all, the old-school rules this was inspired by came before the influence of videogames and MMOs which tainted our hobby. It is purist, it is old-school cool, and it is cleaned up slightly with some sane compromises that old-school D&D should have had.
Think of it as a sort of classic-retro Monopoly sort of game where you are playing the game as it was meant to be and you'll get it, and can sell it better to players.
You know what's better?
I picked up six modules for under four bucks each in my order. Take a look at these:
Morgansfort, a starting base adventure module for under four bucks. This reminds me of the old "Keep on the Somewhere" style modules that gives a party of adventurers a home base with some intrigue, inns, shops, NPCs, and other necessities that allow the party to have a home when they aren't out dungeoning. Seventy pages too, which puts it just a little under the size of a Pathfinder adventure path installment.
The Chaotic Caves, a sandbox style starter module that mimics some of the old 'pack in' starter modules of the old D&D game. For under four bucks you get a starter module that gives you that 'just starting out' experience.
Eight books for about thirty dollars? Mind you, most of this is content for the game master in 352 pages of adventures and campaign locations, and there is a 170 page rulebook (with free PDFs) for the players. About 70 pages of the basic book are monsters (with the rules being about 100 pages long), plus an additional 84 in the monster expansion for about 154 pages of monsters. All this for a grand total of 606 pages of fun for the price of one D&D 5 or Pathfinder rulebook is a great deal.
Considering all the play time you will get out of these, it is like picking up a classic retro game collection on Steam and having months worth of material to play with. Yes, you need players that are interested, but sometimes a deluge of releases like this at these prices can attract an interest all their own.
This is what I like to see, the old-school community seriously stepping up and putting great stuff in stores like Amazon at prices that shock the customer. This is how old-school competes with the thirty-dollar (fifty retail) art-book games that continually try to redefine what the original editions got right in numbers, simplicity, and feeling the first time.
Who would have know that 2015 was going to give us some very cool old-school gaming surprises such as this? This is very cool stuff, and worth supporting and playing.
"Take a look at this," the computer sales clerk says, "Dual SLI cards, the latest Intel 8-core, 64 GB of RAM, and..."
"But does it play Minecraft?"
Minecraft is a cultural phenomenon, and it is also one of the dominant forces in gaming today. It "gets it" by being so simple. It isn't complicated, it doesn't need RPG stats, and it doesn't need the latest game engine - it just is what it is, simple and infinitely expandable. It is also fun.
I am reminded of old-school gaming in this regard. Go into the dungeon, steal the loot, get XP, and avoid monsters. Combat isn't supposed to be exciting or well-balanced, this is a dangerous world and you have limited resources, so cheating the system is a part of the game. Fighting sucks, and it is an overall loss if you have to go in with spells flying and spells slinging.
I think that is a huge difference between true old-school gaming and the old-school clones (and I feel D&D 5 is an old-school clone as well) - there is this notion of a balanced, fun combat experience. This started with the magic-card-if-ication of D&D with 3E, where yes, tactical combat is a big draw of the game, and of course "modern" game designs have to make every aspect of the game fun and enjoyable. With 4E, we went back to the tabletop, and everything was 'balanced and fun tactical combat'. With 5E, we still keep the 3E balancing, but 2E's scripted story-gaming comes back with players having parts written in for them during character generation, and builds and combat are designed to be satisfying.
All choices are good, right?
Not really. Combat isn't supposed to be enjoyable or balanced in true old-school gaming. The rules aren't designed to protect you from bad choices, lousy rolls, or stupidity. You are a lucky hit away from a kobold killing your cleric, a poison dart killing your thief, a fireball killing your fighter, or an accidental step into a pit full of green slime away from melting your expendable magic user. Avoiding combat is what makes the game fun, tricking monsters, sneaking through the dungeon and disarming the traps, and putting the royal golden corkscrew to the dungeon master's well-thought out design.
Old school gaming is closer to a puzzle game or a text-adventure game than it is Diablo 3. You listen, you think, and you act carefully. You avoid combat if you can. You beat the dungeon master's diabolical designs. You sneak out with the golden chalice and the princess, and laugh as the dragon wonders "what just happened?"
With Minecraft, yes, combat is enjoyable, but it is also something that doesn't net profit (other than xp and an occasional item). Some combats are less enjoyable, and should be avoided (creepers). The zombies will show up, and you need to defend your fort. The game is not all about "enjoyable combats" though, since building and exploring are the game's main focus. There is a theme in Minecraft of "make your own fun" and I feel this is closer to an old-school game's philosophy than the more modern balanced/fun videogame-inspired designs.
In an old-school game, you were given a bunch of pieces and told to "make your own fun". With newer games (starting at 2E), you were given "stories" to "play through" and (with 3E) "balanced combat systems" to enjoy "building characters" with (4E and 5E). In an old school game, a 9 hit die green dragon could come stomping into town, and players were left to figure out how to deal with it through wits or clever roleplaying. Fighting it? Out of the question.
In newer games, we get the concept of "CR" or challenge rating tool to build encounters with, and a dungeon master who pulled the green dragon plot on a group would be frowned upon for not "balancing the encounter". It is really an alien concept pulled from self-balancing videogames, and one I feel that has no place in old-school gaming. If a party of level one characters wanted to go out and lure an owlbear into a pit and steal the beast's loot while it tried to climb out - so be it. That owlbear could probably clock them all in two rounds, but the risk and danger is what made the game fun.
The dungeon master didn't 'balance' things, the dungeon master created the world, and the players judged risks and were free to explore and adventure wherever they chose, and against whatever level of challenge they thought they could get away with. Sound familiar? Yes, that's Minecraft. A dangerous world where you could do anything you want, and there are no 'stories' or 'balanced fights' - you make your path through the world, you cheat death, and you deal with the challenges by working with what you find.
You are free to make your own adventures, and you are free to take as big of a risk as you can find out there in the world. The more you explore, loot, and exploit - the better off you are. And if you can do it all while avoiding unnecessary fights? Genius. In a way, it is philosophically the same game.
It's an odd choice of words, but this is a thought I haven't been able to get out of my head. I feel D&D, and most commercial properties, suffer from this sort of repetitive "Spiderman Syndrome" problem.
When you think about Spiderman the last few years, the movies around the character and "legend" can't seem to break out of the typical "origin story plus headline villain" cycle. The character feels like he is stuck in the Green Goblin, Gwen Stacy, Jonah Jameson, Doctor Octopus cycle of retelling that story over and over again. You could really say this applies to all superheroes, with Batman's origin story and the Joker, Superman and Lex Luthor, and you could go on and on. I feel Spiderman highlights this the best because the character has been rebooted the most recently, with the largest visible cultural impact (or lack thereof).
It's the curse of being a superhero, I guess. You are doomed to forever be rebooted, and having the same story told about you again and again in slightly different ways. It is the fairy tale curse in a way, the Three Little Pigs gets told over and over again, and the story may have a new style this time, but the legend and story never really changes.
With D&D, it's different. D&D is a game you tell your own stories with, so there are some similarities to the "retelling of a legend" thing I have been thinking about. But you have to realize the only thing that makes D&D, well D&D, is the collection of "product identity" that goes along with the game, such as:
Beholders
Lolth and the Drow
Mind Flayers
Owlbears
Displacer Beasts
The game worlds like Faerun and Grayhawk, along with signature adventures
Original characters like Drizzt and Elminster
Signature magic items unique to the game
...and so on. If you ever wondered why these monsters are featured so prominently on products, this is the reason why. It is brand identity, and I have no problem with that being highlighted, since that is what makes the game, well, the game.
Planescape too figures into this as well, being the de facto setting of the game since 3rd Edition. You may pick and choose a starting world, but every edition since 3rd has you plane-hopping after a while since of course this was popular in Planescape, and they kind of grandfathered the setting into every edition since. It solves the "what world are you starting on" problem easy since in the end, it doesn't really matter, you will be plane-hopping early in your career and the books tend to assume it. I have a big problem with this being an assumption of the default world setting, but that is for another discussion.
So Spiderman? We come back to this default mythos, and yes the setting plays into this. If you try to create other stories with Spiderman for a while, yes it works, Spiderman versus the Nazis, killer robots, mercenaries, or any other villain of the moment fits here, but the character isn't really the character unless he goes back to his roots. Eventually the story needs to be told again, with all the original elements and enemies in place, and here we go again.
With D&D, it feels like that again, at least for me. Here we are with a version that plays more to nostalgia than something new. I love nostalgia, and I love seeing stories rebooted, but there is a part of me wondering questions like, "What will be the next Planescape style setting that will shake things up?" With catering to the past, we give up on the future in a small way. I guess the answer is there will not be a Planescape for our generation, and we will be listening to the "classic rock" of Faerun, Grayhawk, and the other greatest hits of the last 40 years of roleplaying.
I like classic roleplaying, and I like my classic rock. But I also like the new stuff, new stories, and new music. I like it when a movie studio resists he urge to do another reboot of an origin story, and give us something new with a superhero. Something we haven't seen before.
It's just I can't feel like I can tell compelling stories with the above list of product identity anymore. I have done that for the last 40 years, and heavily with 4th Edition. I have had my legends with Drows and Githyanki space pirates, Mind Flayer cults and Beholder fortresses. With a new generation of players who hasn't seen all this before, I mean, it's great to be them. Play on and discover this anew, more power to you.
For me, it feels like watching another Spiderman reboot, and looking at my watch and counting the minutes until the Green Goblin shows up again.
With commercial properties, there is that "brand stagnation" but occasionally, something magical happens and we get the Planescapes or the Venom or the Bane, and the familiar is now something new, while still retaining that sense of familiarity and tradition. The problem comes when that good horse is rode until dead, and that which made the brand new and fresh becomes another trope in the mythology.
And then we need something new. Something to make the familiar "this generation's" version of the game, or the hero. When it doesn't come, we feel slightly let down since that process of renewal hasn't happened this time. Sometimes you need to completely throw out the old to do this, and it takes a lot of bravery and creative vision. It happened a little with D&D 4 with the new cosmology and breaking with tradition, but it quickly went back to the familiar when the shortcomings of the rules weighted down the setting - when the two were independent ideas.
So in a way, our myths are our prisons. The safety of the familiar is what keeps us coming back. We go back into Plato's cave, but it may have new carpets and a fresh coat of paint this time, but it is still the same cave. To be honest, I am waiting for that next Planescape or that next Eberron for D&D, something to shake things up and fire me up (for or against it, either way).
But it needs to be new. It needs to be fresh. And it needs to change things while keeping a tiny handhold on the familiar, just for nostalgia's sake. But if nostalgia gets in the way, it needs to go. Right now I am finding myself attracted to other games and the new experiences there. It is a natural cycle, but it also highlights the curse of the familiar.
And I just switched my station from classic rock to what is this? It is something new and cool and I have never experienced before, and while someday I may return back to Classic Rock 99.9 and relive those days; but for this moment, I am hearing something I have never heard before and life begins anew.
