The Lifespans of Elves

One of the more disagreed upon rules that crop up in a lot of old-school OSR/TSR games is based around demihuman level limits. Some of these arguments are from a game balance perspective (which is its own can of worms), but I find the more odious justification is based around the lifespan of the demihumans in question.

The argument goes something like this:

"Elves and dwarves live so much longer than humans that they would have to gain XP slower and hit a cap. If they advanced at the same rate as humans, then the setting will be dominated by elves and dwarves of god-like power. After all, if humans can hit level 14 in their meager lifetimes, what could an elf do with a couple hundred years to blow adventuring?"

It's one of those arguments that makes a good deal of sense at first blush, but for a number of reasons I've never put much stock in it.

The first is that NPCs are not PCs. Older versions of the game don't bother to treat NPCs with the same kind of care and logistics that we treat PCs with in the first place. OD&D claims that for every 50 elves encounered in a group, one of these will have "above normal" capabilities. Normal being "something other than a 1HD creature." It then asks you to roll some dice to determine its magic and fighting levels. According to the AD&D monster manual "For every 20 elves in a band, there will be one with above average fighting ability (2nd, or 3rd level). For every 40 elves encountered, there will be one with this fighting ability plus a 1st or 2nd level magic-user ability." The important takeaway here is that the majority of elves you bump into aren't adventurers in the same way that the majority of humans you bump into aren't adventurers. PCs are level 1 characters in a level 0 world.

The second is that prior to AD&D2e, the main source of experience for characters was gold. This has some very important implications. The first and most obvious being that you don't get XP just for living a very long time. Even elves have to go out there and schlep their dainty arses through the same mud and blood and bog that the rest of us adventuring folk have to and put themselves in just as much danger for every experience point earned.

The second and more profound implication is that assumption that the reason for adventuring is to get rich. You are out there to acquire treasure. The game is explicitly about going out into the unknown in search of gold. A funny thing happens over time, however. The richer you are, the harder it is to justify schleping your ass into some gods-forsaken cave where something is certainly bound to try to eat you. You already have more gold than you could possibly spend. This is actually built into the endgame of D&D as well. There is an assumption in early editions that you'd eventually start to settle down in a region, build a stronghold, acquire followers, and begin to play on a more regional level rather than a personal one. Your actions play out on a broader stage. At this point, it takes a lot more gold to convince you that it's worth putting your life in danger and hoards of that size are few and far between. You reach a natural equilibrium at a certain point and eventually retire from adventuring to manage other things.

The TL;DR of this is that it's easy to ignore the "elven lifespan" problem simply by arguing that even with their longer lifespan there is no reason to assume that their adventuring careers would be any longer than any other races. After all, what is the likelihood of Bill Gates coming out of retirement to work a hotdog stand any time soon? 

Statistics in the OSR market

My OSR house rules have slowly evolved into a game of their own, and I've been kicking around the idea of publishing them after 'Bastards is all grown up and finding its own way in the world. To this end, I've done some amateur market research by way of straw polls. I'm sure none of these are statistically significant by way of sample size, but here they are.

Screencaps are here from the time at writing, but if you want to weigh in, I'll leave links to each below the poll itself.

http://strawpoll.me/7025086/

This poll had the most results, and it confirms to what I predicted. The most popular edition chosen was Moldvay Basic, but nearly twice as many people weighed in and said that they didn't care one way or another about the specific edition. What did surprise me was that OD&D beat out BECMI/RC and AD&D by a decent margin. I can't be sure if this is because OD&D is more popular than I thought, or because more people thought it was underrepresented than the other editions.

Since the leading result didn't care what edition it was, that leads to the next question: how much do we care about faithfulness to the core material?

http://strawpoll.me/7044557/

The results here are more definitive than the first question, but we have an even smaller sample size. That said, it completely conforms to my expectations. Because OSR stuff is so broadly compatible, the overwhelming majority seem more interested in seeing innovation than faithfulness to the old rules.

http://strawpoll.me/7139460/

This last one I've been kicking around for a while. Book formatting is something I've written about before and it's an interesting topic for OSR. Depending on the edition and game, we've seen it done a number of ways. The results here surprised me.

I've never gotten to experience LBB OD&D, but I've always loved the physical presentation of it. The amateurish doodles give it a naive charm, and the nostalgia factor is high. The actual booklets themselves have a kind of versatility that you lose in single-volume sets, as they allow you to have multiple people looking different things up simultaneously. If you can acquire them separately, it also means you can have multiple copies of the character creation section if you need it to speed up the process. I think it may also be less intimidating to initiate a new player into the game with a half-sized 30-page booklet than handing them the 300-page player's guide from certain other editions of the game.

For the first day or so that I monitored this poll, all four options were at a dead heat, with at most a vote or two between them. I assumed that the single volume 8.5x11 would ultimately win out, as it is the most common form RPG books take. I was pleasantly surprised that the 6x9 took the lead. I've written about how much I love this format ever since I picked up the Burning Wheel Gold book.

Even if the above changes significantly after the time of posting, I think I will stick with the 6x9 as the target size for a new book. This is not just because I genuinely enjoy the form factor for it, but because it creates a secondary possibility as well. It's easy to lay out the book at 5.5x8.5 (half-page LBB size) first and create the game in such a way as it can stand as multiple booklets and then just slightly upscale the same layout to fit a single-volume 6x9 without changing page numbers. Print on demand being what it is, it would be easy to offer both for people to pick at their preference. I can easily see someone using the single-volume hardback and a couple extra character-creation booklets at the table.

Sacred Cows in DnD

Yesterday I talked a bit about Iterative design and the inherent problem of The Ship of Theseus. That got me thinking about my own current projects. Specifically, my AD&D/Lamentations mash-up, and the nature of D&D itself.

The wonderful thing about the OSR movement is that it's a bit like Linux. The core mechanics of D&D are extremely versatile and can be made to do a ton of different things. Everyone in the OSR movement is basically working off the same Kernel, but everyone has customized their own distro to suit their preferences.

In layman's terms: we're all basically using the same engine to power the game, but every variant uses that engine in slightly different ways. And that's awesome. Not just because it allows for ridiculous flexibility, but because the end results are largely compatible. It doesn't matter if the module I'm running was written for AD&D, AD&D2e, Moldvay Basic, White Box, BECMI, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lords, or Swords & Wizardry, it takes very little effort to use it in the framework of Lamentations of the Flame Princess or my own home-brew.

This does raise some interesting questions though. It would be easy to define D&D as the above system, but we also have to take into account 3.x, 4th edition (controversial, I know), and even 5th or D&D next. Each system is as alien to each other as it is the TSR era game. Clearly, changing the way skills work, classes work, special abilities work, spells, etc.. can all be heavily modified without worry.

At what point does the game stop being "D&D?"

The easiest argument would be "If it has the name, it's D&D," but this is intellectually dishonest. First, it precludes Pathfinder, which is effectively a direct iteration of 3.5, and it ignores the fact that the name only has meaning because people associate a certain kind of experience with it. Yes, we could take a 78 Chevette and call it a Mustang, but that doesn't mean people will accept it as a Mustang.

My immediate thought is that D&D requires the following design conceits in order to be "D&D."

• Iconic Six Stats - you could certainly switch this around, but it's such a trademark by now.
• Character creation based on classes - I just can't see a point-based character creation system being accepted as "D&D."
• Earning of experience points - The moment it switched to something like Spiritual Attributes or BW style "beliefs" I imagine people would disqualify it.
• Level-based advancement - This is a constant throughout every incarnation of the game, and something that separated D&D from other fantasy games early on. 
• Saving Throws - this is such an odd and counter-intuitive abstraction that it's practically unique to D&D style games.
• Attack roll - math directly tied to class advancement, rather than being an independent skill

That's my immediate thoughts. I can also imagine some questions coming up if you changed, say, the d20 to 3d6 or something but I'm not necessarily sure either of those would "disqualify" the game from being a D&D game.

What do you think? In your opinion, what are the constants required for a game to feel like a D&D game? 

D&D: Customization vs Complexity

The problem with rules-light games is that after a while, characters can begin to feel mechanically samey. The fewer the options you have to individualize them, the more likely Fighter dude A is going to look like Fighter dude B. The reverse issue is that the more options you have to differentiate Fighter dude A from B, the more rules you need to add to the game, the more reading that has to be done, and the more things that have to be remembered.

Let's say for the sake of argument that I have a specific idea I want to play with. I want to pattern my character after Logen Ninefingers, The Bloody Nine of Joe Abercrombie's First Law books. What are my options?

Specificity by Fluff: Core Archetypes Only
In OD&D, BECMI, Moldvay Basic and games that mimic these (Lamentations of the Flame Princess, for instance), Logen is just a fighter. My character customization options are: roll up stats, choose fighter class. This is simple, effective, and relatively fun. It's how people played for years, and stands up pretty well I think. The only problem is, if I want to play Logen as he is written, I'm either just role-playing his berzerker-rage, or the DM has to make something up for me (usually a rule stolen from another version of D&D). This is perfectly servicable, but you can't take house-rules into account for a discussion on game design.

Specificity by Diverse, Narrow Classes
In AD&D1e variants, the core classes give way to "sub classes," which become more specific. I can now play him as a berzerker class if I wanted, and that does give me more specificity and preserves the ease of learning / ease of play, but it still constrains my customization options to being stats+class (though AD&D generally gives me the option of race as well). Some people play this level with weapon proficiencies as well, which can be nice. The real rub here is that now his berzerkergang thing is the defining feature of his character, which can be a bit confusing when faced with the question of "why can't he do the things normal soldiers can do?" (after all, he has to lose something in order to avoid simply being better than the fighter.) What I gain in specificity, I lose in flexibility.

Specificity by Layering rules: Kits, Skills, and Powers
AD&D2e seems to have made an honest attempt to address all of this by introducing the much loathed Skills & Powers book, as well as making Non Weapon Proficiencies part of the core book. If that wasn't enough they also have the Complete Guides around for me to choose class kits, in addition to my pre-existing ability to choose sub-classes. Honestly, this all sounds pretty good in theory: I can now roll stats, choose class (or subclass) and race, choose weapon and non weapon proficiencies, fiddle with Skills and Powers, and tinker with all of the above via the class kits. In practice though, this can become a tangled mess. The various sub-systems don't interact well with each other, the implementation of kits is clumsy and notoriously unbalanced. On the bright side, it does address my original problem: Logen can now be a fighter with the berzerker kit and not feel like he's pidgeon-holed himself. On the down-side, it is an absolute crapshoot to deal with. The redeeming factor here however may be that all this clutter is optional. The new player sitting down for the first time can more or less roll up a dude without having to learn much of anythign about the system up front, just like in B/x.

Specificity by Integrated Abilities
D20 takes all of the above and integrates it into a unified system. For a lot of people, this was awesome. All of the customization options of 2e, but inherently meant to work together (and thus theoretically balanced). I'll not get into how well that succeeds. I never was much of a fan of the setup, but it does allow me an incredible amount of control over exactly what kind of character I want to build. The rub here is that for me to have all of those choices as a standard, non-optional part of the game as written, I need to read all of that and understand all of that. The first time player needs to read all of their class skills, all of their class abilities, all of their available feats and what those feats require as prerequisits and coordinate all of this so they can make sure they can get what they want down the line. Gone is the "roll up a character and go," but you do have more direct input over your character.

Specificity by Classless Point Buy
This doesn't apply to D&D, but it's the obvious other extreme counter-point to b/x. Abandon classes entirely, and make all skills and special abilities available on a customizable point-buy. It is the ultimate amount of customization, but also the most complicated player buy-in.

What we're seeing here is that you can't really have your cake and eat it too. The more you are allowed to tweak your character, the more complicated the system becomes. AD&D2e might have been the closest attempt to a compromise, but suffered from poor implementation. At the outset, it seems like 3e attempted simply to codify and integrate all of the ideas of 2e but in so doing it made them all mandatory, losing the flexibility and ease of play. 

The ideal system (for me, at least) would be one that featured some kind of escalating complexity. First level characters can start somewhat broad, but as they develop and earn experience points, they have some way of becoming more specified if they so choose. In a game like this, I want players to be able to get started as easily as possible. The less player buy-in required, the more likely you are to make things get going. Once everyone is moving forward, they can dip into the more advanced rules at their own leisure.

I'm kicking around some ideas on how to best make this happen, but I'm not willing to commit them to paper just yet.

Until then,