Another Overlooked Rule

Here's another rule from the LBBs I overlook. In my defense, it's probably because it's unclear exactly what it means:

Player/Characters must pay Gold Pieces equal to 1% their experience points for support and upkeep, until such time as they build a stronghold. If the stronghold is in a wilderness area all support and upkeep costs then cease, but if it is in a village or town not controlled by the player/character then support and upkeep must continue.

As a principle, I like the idea of "encouraging" characters to settle down and establish a stronghold in the wilderness. Unfortunately, this section of Volume 3 is unclear. How often must a character pay these costs? Once per month? Once per year? Likewise, is it all characters, from level 1 on up or only characters of a certain level or higher? I presume the former, but the text is silent on this point.

Regardless, it's a rule I haven't been applying in my current Dwimmermount campaign and I doubt I will retroactively employ, but I'll certainly keep it in mind should I ever start a new OD&D campaign -- once I figure out exactly what the rule is saying, that is.

On the Loss of D&D's Endgame

You'll find lots of gamers who will sing the praises of the Basic Rules published in the early 80s (either 1981's Moldvay version or 1983's Mentzer version) -- and rightly so -- but it's rare to find many who express the same affection for the Expert Rules, whether the Cook/Marsh or Mentzer version. I personally find that a bit odd, because, for me, the Expert Rules are one of those places I can clearly point to and say, "This is what D&D is all about."

I'm certain that strikes at least a few people as odd. The Basic Rules introduce not only the rules of the game, but also its default setting: the dungeon. If anything is "what D&D is all about," it's the dungeon and surely the Basic Rules do a far better job of describing that environment and what it's like to play in it than do the Expert Rules, which muddy the waters with all this talk of wilderness adventuring and building strongholds and creating magic items and the like. Right?

Well, I'm one of those oddballs who takes seriously the notion that Dungeons & Dragons, despite its name, is actually about more than dungeon delving. After all, OD&D devotes a goodly amount of its sparse verbiage to adventuring in the wilderness -- so much so that the term "sandbox" is every bit as significant for old school play as is "megadungeon." Indeed, OD&D makes it pretty clear that, after a certain point, the focus of the game shifts away from the dungeon and toward establishing and maintaining a "barony." If you read reminiscences of the earliest campaigns in the hobby, such as Blackmoor and Greyhawk, you'll see that this was the case.

The Expert Rules present this shift in focus not as an "add-on" or accretion to the Basic Rules but as a natural development of them. Exploring and taming the wilderness, building a castle, and ruling a domain -- these aren't alien to D&D; they're a major part of what the game was intended to be about. This only makes sense, given the origins of the game in wargaming and yet they're topics that got short shrift even in AD&D, never mind later editions. In this sense, I'd say that, for all my issues with the presentation of Cook/Marsh and Mentzer, they're truer to OD&D than were their various descendants.

I can't stress this point enough, because I think it's a vital counter-balance to the tendency to see D&D, especially old school D&D, as solely about acquiring ever more power in the service of venality. Not only do I think that tendency does a disservice to D&D's origins, but I also think it exaggerates the themes of pulp fantasy to ludicrous heights. While not every Picaro will eventually settle down, many will, particularly if their players wish to continue playing that character beyond a certain point. The Expert Rules showed how to do that; they were where D&D's endgame was fleshed out and revealed it as the logical extension of all that had gone before.

I hesitate to say that the Expert Rules are where Dungeons & Dragons "grows up," because that implies a childishness to dungeon delving that I don't think is appropriate. Nevertheless, the Expert Rules are where D&D grapples with the nature of what it means to have reached high level -- to have "grown up" mechanically -- in a fantasy world. Certainly characters could continue to remain aloof from the world around them, remaining outsiders forever on the make, but how satisfying would that be for their players? The Expert Rules offer up new options of play, things that characters could take up in order both to expand the scope of the game and to ensure that beloved characters can continue to be played even after it no longer makes much sense for them to continue adventuring. These are the rules for King Conan of Aquilonia, as opposed to Conan the wandering Cimmerian.

I am ever more convinced that the progressive deformation of the original Gygaxo-Arnesonian vision of the game is due to the loss of D&D's logical endgame and its replacement by vapid alternatives. Only by restoring that endgame can Dungeons & Dragons again become the game it was meant to be.

In Praise of Mentzer

I'm often rather harsh about the D&D rules written in the mid-80s by Frank Mentzer. Part of it is because they're products of a decadent era at TSR, when Sutherland and Trampier gave way to Elmore and Parkinson and when mass market appeal drove most design decisions. And the Mentzer rules are nothing if not mass market. Even moreso than Moldvay/Cook, the Mentzer rules were written for people unfamiliar not just with roleplaying games but also with the entire culture out of which D&D sprang. They're the first truly "post-D&D D&D" and it's very hard for me to look beyond that much of the time.

That's a shame, because, for all their concessions to mainstream acceptance, there's some good stuff to be found in these boxed sets, particularly Set 3 -- the Companion Rules -- from which I stole lots of ideas for my AD&D campaigns. For me, Set 3 was the fufillment of a promise on which D&D had never quite managed to make good -- to provide rules and guidelines for the endgame of a character's adventuring career. The Conpanion Rules gave us not only domain management rules, but also a mass combat system. Together, these two systems addressed issues D&D had had ever since 1974: what do characters do when the reach high levels of experience?

The domain management and mass combat systems in the Companion Rules are simple, straightforward, and abstract. They depend very heavily on referee adjudication and there's a high degree of randomness to both of them that might offend some sensibilities. Quibbles aside, they're both quite old school in their approach and I like that. I played the heck out of both of them back in the day and eventually generalized the domain management system to cover random campaign events and the fate of entire nations rather than the single-hex baronies for which they were originally written. I also used the mass combat rules to wage wars between nations in my fantasy setting. Together, they gave that setting a healthy dose of unpredictability that gave it an air of "realism" it might otherwise have lacked. For example, a civil war broke out in the major good nation of the world and that sparked innumerable adventures, not to mention far-reaching consequences that I doubt I'd have chosen had I instead plotted out its future history myself. This is excellent stuff.

Another aspect of the Companion Rules that I liked a lot, even though I never incorporated them into my AD&D game, was the way Mentzer introduced paladins, druids, and other such classes into the game. They were kind of proto-prestige classes but far more elegantly implemented and far more grounded in the history of D&D. For example, I see in the druid an echo of the notion that OD&D clerics must side either for Law or Chaos once they reach 7th level or they cannot advance any further. Likewise, the paladin offers up a viable interpretation of the line that Lawful fighting men "may opt to become paladins." I've often considered reworking many AD&D sub-classes into a similar kind of scheme and may yet do so one day.

I'll admit that I'm not at all fond of the Master Rules, let alone Immortals, both of which strike me as huge missteps compared to the Companion Rules. Those final two boxed sets are the result of a corporate completist mentality rather than as answers to questions most D&D players had at the time. It certainly doesn't help that I think those sets also highlight the limits of D&D and not in a positive way. There is only so far that the game can go before it loses its identity and the heights of power detailed in the Master and Immortals rules are several steps too far in my opinion.

I'll continue to quibble about the Mentzer rules, because there's much to quibble about, but it's quibbling "within the family," so to speak. Frank's old school credentials are not in doubt nor is his grasp of the history of the game. I am, as I hope this post reveals, very fond of his Companion Rules set and believe it's the only real treatment of D&D's original endgame ever written. I'm not blind to the virtues of later rules sets, but I do have very specific criteria for what I like and what I'll consider using. That means I can be convinced that I'm off base when it comes to my criticisms of this or that. In the case of the Companion set, I need no convincing.

D&D and Miniatures Gaming

Much wisdom over at Retro-Roleplaying. Read and learn.

Two Possibilities

Having thought more about it, this is what I am regarding my old school project. I see two distinct projects, both of which have powerful appeal to me, both because they're interesting in their own right and because they address real needs in the old school gaming community.

The first is very straightforward -- a pulp fantasy "adventure locale" that's a "module" in the classic sense. It'd be a plug and play area that the referee could easily pick up and drop into an ongoing campaign without any trouble and that would suggest -- rather than outright provide -- lots of adventure ideas through descriptions of locations, NPCs, monsters, spells, magic items, etc. In short, it'd be both a sandbox and a toolbox in one.

At the moment, I'm calling this idea The Forbidden Isle, because I see it as the creative descendant of both The Isle of Dread and Dwellers of the Forbidden City. What I'd create would be a small tropical island chain, with a single central island, on which an outpost of civilization has been established by traders, explorers, missionaries, and the like. The eponymous Forbidden Isle was once, in the distant past, the center of an ancient and advanced culture that fell into decadence, evil, and barbarism and its ruins can be found across the archipelago. Naturally, survivors of the advanced culture still exist, using their powerful magic and technology to toil away in the service of the evil to whom they have sold their souls.

Ideally, The Forbidden Isle would allow me to illustrate many aspects of old school gaming that I think have been lost in contemporary RPGs. Likewise, I'd be able to use it as a springboard for some of the pulp fantasy rules mods I've been tinkering with. I don't think you can get more pulp fantasy than a remote tropical island filled with the ruins of a decadent evil civilization.

The second idea I have is for what I'm calling Endgame. Basically, it'd fill in the blanks on the lost endgame for OD&D and its descendants. One of the things that's clear if you read any of the old timers reminiscing about, for example, Gary's Greyhawk campaign is that, after a certain point, the game changed. High-level characters settled down, built strongholds, engaged in politics, and the players took up the roles of henchmen, hirelings, and others because their original characters were too bogged down in the demands of leadership to be able to keep adventuring in the traditional sense. Somewhere along the line, this endgame for D&D was lost, replaced instead with the cartoonishness that is "epic level play," a kind of fantasy superheroics that is alien both to the origins of the hobby and its literary antecedents. I can think of few things that'd nicely help to differentiate old school play from its bastard children than a proper treatment of what "high-level" really means.

Endgame is a fair bit more ambitious a project than The Forbidden Isle and I think its audience might also be smaller. Of course, the audience for both of these projects may be small in any case. I have no expectation that I'll get rich off either idea, but my whole purpose here is to try and produce a modern take on old school gaming and that means I'll need to make at least enough money to recoup any investment I put into this. And, sadly, my experience is that grognards are, quite frankly, a tight-fisted and miserly lot. On some level, I can't blame them; they have all the products they'll ever need and old school gaming doesn't encourage the supplement treadmill we see among new school products.

At the same time, the old school community needs new products to attract new blood. We cannot afford to remain insular and sterile or the values and styles we hold dear will one day disappear entirely. Consequently, my hope is that I might be able to do the impossible: convince grognards to buy something genuinely new with contemporary production values and artwork. I'm not interested in producing nostalgia pieces. What I want is to make new products that exemplify old school game play and philosophies -- a bridge from the past to the present. To do it right, though, I somehow need to appeal to the old schoolers out there without frightening off gamers who might in fact like old school products but are (justifiably, in my opinion) somewhat turned off by the stodginess and/or bile that sometimes surrounds us grognards. I'm not sure it's possible but I do want to try.

And this is where things stand now.