We continue our quest to see what common ground, and what grounds for divorce, can be found between me and the esteemed Gary Gygax. I think we're up to...
P. 75 -- Out of nowhere, a herd of combat-matrix charts thunders across the middle of the book! In its midst are a couple that deal with psionics. I don't have a lot to say about the specifics of AD&D's take on psychic powers. I do say, when running a D&D game, that psychics aren't allowed. Unless you're my friend Kevin, who really likes psionic characters, and also happens to be my wife's brother, so I have a vested interest in Kevin's ongoing happiness. Yours? Not so much.
It's not that the system is bad per se, or that it lacks balance or anything like that.* The problem is that psionics feel wrong when stacked up against Vancian wizards and fightin' clerics. You can find some thematic and mechanical overlap with the latter two's spells-per-day, the need for rest, the idea of bargains with powerful inhuman entities... and then along comes this weird sci-fi-ish point-based system that, when next to those guys, is screaming "I'M AN OPTIONAL GAME MECHANIC! LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOKATME!"
What would be cool? A D&D game that only uses psionics for magic. No arcane, no divine. I think you'd get a bloodier version of the Deryni Chronicles. Someone should do that.
P. 80 -- Around 1979, there was enough debate about saving throws that Gary spent 7 paragraphs justifying and defending them. I wonder how much of this was necessary, and how much was an excuse to say "personae" a few times?
P. 81 -- Certain tubby lycanthropes have all the luck.You'll have to wonder how.
P. 82 -- Another extended defense of hit points. I grasp -- and even like -- the idea that characters have some resistance to damage beyond a small pool of points based on Constitution or its equivalent, whether it be luck or divine favor or the reflexes won by hard experience. This particular mechanic isn't how I'd do it, but people of goodwill can differ. What strikes me today is this sentence about an example 10th-level fighter: "It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points."
When's the last time you saw a high-level D&D character have a long period of rest and recuperation? You never have. That's not how the game has evolved. A pity. I think hit points, character mortality, healing magic, and several other things would work better and be more fun if we viewed hit points as a privilege rather than a right.
P. 83 -- I'm trying to skim for a sample every few pages, but this has been a rich vein. Now we've got a 20-item list of different insanities that can affect your character. It's almost devoid of game-specific mechanics and it's not using a current version of the DSM-IV -- so it's perfect for that Call of Cthulhu game you've been wanting to run.
P. 84 -- People who whined and moaned about how complicated CR was in 3e had clearly never read Unca Gary's advice on calculating XP.
P. 90 -- "The 'reality' AD&D seeks to create through role playing is that of the mythical heroes such as Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Kothar, Elric, and their ilk."
Kothar? I know most of the biggies. I collect many of these writers. Who the devil is Kothar?
Also, good luck trying to play Conan or the Mouser or Elric in old D&D.**
P. 92 -- "Another nadir of Dungeon Mastering is the 'killer-dungeon' concept. These campaigns are a travesty of the role-playing adventure game, for there is no development and identification with carefully nurtured player personae." Historically, I suspect this advice has been honored more in the breach than anywhere else. Also, if you're playing the Gygax-said-personae drinking game, do another shot now.
P. 94 -- A brief section on peasants, serfs, and slaves is followed immediately by a sample dungeon. The lack of transitions, whether text or layout, is like drifting onto a rumble strip. I'm awake now.
Sample map with 38 chambers, in the traditional D&D style that my wife describes as "drunken dwarvish architecture." Map key. Very detailed writeups of 3 chambers followed by an (Etc.). Quick rules on movement, detecting stuff, doors, concealed doors, secret doors -- there's a door fetish here -- and then we launch into an archetypal extended play example. I've seen this one elsewhere, I think; it's some kind of abandoned sunken monastery. In this version, the bulk of the dialogue is between the DM and a "Lead Character." Odd, to the modern reader, who is perhaps accustomed to allowing everyone to address the GM as desired.
It's a pretty good play example. Not my kind of gameplay, I can tell, but it lays out the writer's expectations very clearly. I've always hated it. The content and structure are fine, but then we have the bit on page 100. Our sample gnome is above everyone else when he discovers a secret opening. As it opens, he fails a surprise roll, gets bushwhacked by a quartet of ghouls, is paralyzed, and then by GM fiat, he's just eaten. End of the game, gnomey! Hope you weren't having fun!
This always takes me back to age 9 and my first roleplaying experience. It was some form of D&D, maybe even this one. What I remember most is how excited I was when I got home, rattling on and on to my bemused mother about how great my character was and all the things I was going to do and all the things I was going to make and all the wonderful plans I had now. Why kill that? Why take away the character? All our gnome did was have a clever idea about how to open a secret door. It seems kinda shameful to just throw a pack of ghouls at him and turn him into gnome-kebab because he failed one unexpected saving throw.
...well, I can see several pages of charts about NPC character traits coming up. Good time for a breather.
_________
* I haven't played/run with enough D&D psionicists to be sure, but my spider-sense tells me that this system is unbalanced in every version of the game I've encountered.
** On the one hand, yeah, you can house-rule that stuff in. On the other hand, if I have to house-rule the cool stuff, why buy someone else's game in the first place?
Showing posts with label Gary and Me. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gary and Me. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
I always wanted to ride a griffin. Or a gryphon.
Let's continue DMG-crawling.
P. 49 -- The rules for aerial combat take 3 pages, including a creature-by-creature breakdown of how different monsters fight when airborne. You can see D&D's wargame roots showing. It might be fun to combine these with my old copy of Dawn Patrol.
P. 55 -- I appreciate the attention that underwater adventures get here. Back in the day, I was designing an all-underwater 3e game, and this material would have been handy. It doesn't grapple with the problems of fire or metalwork, but there probably weren't many AD&D characters trying to build strongholds at the bottom of the ocean. On page 56 there's a reference to "the great air-filled domes of Atlantis." I'd love to know if that ever got written up.
P. 59 -- Probably my favorite illustration in the book. Nice work, Darlene.
P. 61 -- Now we're talking combat. This, as Tolkien said, needs a week's answer or none.
It's clear that the sense of time was very different in the early days of RPGs. Each combat round here lasts for 1 minute, instead of the standard 5-6 seconds in most of the games I know. When we combine this with the rules and rationale for hit points at higher character levels, it means that a brutal throwdown could take hours in the game world. That's an interesting stylistic choice, and one with some precedent in literature; I think of some of the minor Arthurian knights, like Bors and Ban, who were always bumping into each other and then battling for days at a time without landing any grievous blows. Still, I like fast combat rounds, since that's how most fights seem to go in real life. And also on Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior.
Also, we don't have the Weapon Speed table here (I've never owned a pre-2e PHB). I've seen it, and I think David Morgan-Mar captured it correctly here:
If you want weapon size to affect initiative in your roll-a-d6 system, why not just say that a hand-and-a-half weapon, or a weapon-and-heavy-shield combo, gives your character a -1 penalty while a two-handed weapon is a -2? Much cleaner.
P. 63 -- "It is common for player characters to attack first, parley afterwards. It is recommended that you devise encounters which penalize such action so as to encourage parleying attempts -- which will usually be fruitless, of course!" Aha ha ha! Excuse me as I wipe away a tear of helpless laughter. Or wait, are you serious here? Neither answer is encouraging.
P. 71 -- We have an extended example of melee combat here. It's middlin' as examples go, but it does contain a couple of the best character names in sword-n-sorcery history: Gutboy Barrelhouse and Aggro The Axe. Those names tell you everything you need to know about the characters attached.
P. 72 -- Pummeling and grappling have apparently been a bane to the hobby since the early days. Some things don't need to be realistically modeled.
Some good stuff, some bad stuff, some weird stuff. About par for the course so far -- and about par for the course in any RPG book. Coming soon -- psionics.
P. 49 -- The rules for aerial combat take 3 pages, including a creature-by-creature breakdown of how different monsters fight when airborne. You can see D&D's wargame roots showing. It might be fun to combine these with my old copy of Dawn Patrol.
P. 55 -- I appreciate the attention that underwater adventures get here. Back in the day, I was designing an all-underwater 3e game, and this material would have been handy. It doesn't grapple with the problems of fire or metalwork, but there probably weren't many AD&D characters trying to build strongholds at the bottom of the ocean. On page 56 there's a reference to "the great air-filled domes of Atlantis." I'd love to know if that ever got written up.
P. 59 -- Probably my favorite illustration in the book. Nice work, Darlene.
 |
| It's a Viking ship, but he's no Bergman character. |
P. 61 -- Now we're talking combat. This, as Tolkien said, needs a week's answer or none.
It's clear that the sense of time was very different in the early days of RPGs. Each combat round here lasts for 1 minute, instead of the standard 5-6 seconds in most of the games I know. When we combine this with the rules and rationale for hit points at higher character levels, it means that a brutal throwdown could take hours in the game world. That's an interesting stylistic choice, and one with some precedent in literature; I think of some of the minor Arthurian knights, like Bors and Ban, who were always bumping into each other and then battling for days at a time without landing any grievous blows. Still, I like fast combat rounds, since that's how most fights seem to go in real life. And also on Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior.
Also, we don't have the Weapon Speed table here (I've never owned a pre-2e PHB). I've seen it, and I think David Morgan-Mar captured it correctly here:
If you want weapon size to affect initiative in your roll-a-d6 system, why not just say that a hand-and-a-half weapon, or a weapon-and-heavy-shield combo, gives your character a -1 penalty while a two-handed weapon is a -2? Much cleaner.
P. 63 -- "It is common for player characters to attack first, parley afterwards. It is recommended that you devise encounters which penalize such action so as to encourage parleying attempts -- which will usually be fruitless, of course!" Aha ha ha! Excuse me as I wipe away a tear of helpless laughter. Or wait, are you serious here? Neither answer is encouraging.
P. 71 -- We have an extended example of melee combat here. It's middlin' as examples go, but it does contain a couple of the best character names in sword-n-sorcery history: Gutboy Barrelhouse and Aggro The Axe. Those names tell you everything you need to know about the characters attached.
P. 72 -- Pummeling and grappling have apparently been a bane to the hobby since the early days. Some things don't need to be realistically modeled.
Some good stuff, some bad stuff, some weird stuff. About par for the course so far -- and about par for the course in any RPG book. Coming soon -- psionics.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Return to the DMG
Let's pick up where we left off.
P. 25 -- "Each player character will automatically expend not less than 100 gold pieces per level of experience per month." The mechanical logic behind it is sound enough if you're playing a game where acquiring giant heaps of treasure is assumed. But the implications of it bother me...
LANDLADY: Sorry about this, Mister Thrashovore The Bloody-Handed, but your rent's going up.
THRASHOVORE: Again? It just went up last week!
LANDLADY: Well, yes. But now you've gone and killed the Pale Green Dragon With Luminescent Spots what's been hanging around our swamp. So we have to charge you more.
P. 31 -- Why can't I be an expert in Humanoids & Giantkind - Demography? This NPC sage can. And he/she gets to cast some spells too. Could be a fun PC. Kinda useful, not a powerhouse, guaranteed to bring some interesting complications into the group (who's going to carry his pile of encyclopedias?). But we're looking at a game that doesn't want you to play that way. Not for any clear reason that I can see; maybe it just never occurred to Gary Gygax that someone would like to have a PC like this. He missed out.
P. 34-35 -- I dig the little cartoons. Not in an ironic or mocking way -- these are clearly the work of someone who's having fun with the whole idea behind D&D. Some of them are terrible failures as jokes, but we can't all be Rich Burlew. I'd award someone a pile of bonus XP for doing this in one of my games.
Also on page 34, discussing henchmen, we learn that they are "useful in individual adventures as a safety mechanism against the machinations of rival player characters...". What kind of machinations are we getting up to?
P. 37 -- "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." At last, RPG scientists have found the Unified Field Theory connecting AD&D to Ars Magica!
P. 38 -- I like the idea that low-level cleric spells are a result of godly behavior, mid-level spells come from the god's servants, and high-level spells are a direct gift from the deity itself. You could build some fun roleplaying encounters with this concept, or even structure a campaign around it.
P. 39 -- So a couple pages ago, I wasn't allowed to ask my henchmen about their alignment or religion. Now I can't ask about their spellbooks either? Seems like a forced scarcity. The interpersonal economy of Gygaxian D&D is weird.
New goal -- get people to use the phrase "the interpersonal economy of Gygaxian D&D."
P. 47 -- "Naturally, the initial adventuring in the campaign will be those in the small community and nearby underground maze." [Should that be "initial adventures"?] That's not natural unless you make it so. By the time I ran my first D&D campaign, when I was all of 14 years old, we were primarily moving from one large urban area to another through unforgiving wilderness, playing with the plots of kings and mystics. I don't think we ever went into an underground maze. Not that you can't, just that you don't have to, and so we found our fun in the fresh air instead. There's nothing wrong with dungeon-crawling, if that's what you like. There's something wrong with assuming it's How To Play The Game.
Okay, looks like a lot of rules for flying and sailing coming up next. Take 10, people. We'll regroup in a while.
P. 25 -- "Each player character will automatically expend not less than 100 gold pieces per level of experience per month." The mechanical logic behind it is sound enough if you're playing a game where acquiring giant heaps of treasure is assumed. But the implications of it bother me...
LANDLADY: Sorry about this, Mister Thrashovore The Bloody-Handed, but your rent's going up.
THRASHOVORE: Again? It just went up last week!
LANDLADY: Well, yes. But now you've gone and killed the Pale Green Dragon With Luminescent Spots what's been hanging around our swamp. So we have to charge you more.
P. 31 -- Why can't I be an expert in Humanoids & Giantkind - Demography? This NPC sage can. And he/she gets to cast some spells too. Could be a fun PC. Kinda useful, not a powerhouse, guaranteed to bring some interesting complications into the group (who's going to carry his pile of encyclopedias?). But we're looking at a game that doesn't want you to play that way. Not for any clear reason that I can see; maybe it just never occurred to Gary Gygax that someone would like to have a PC like this. He missed out.
P. 34-35 -- I dig the little cartoons. Not in an ironic or mocking way -- these are clearly the work of someone who's having fun with the whole idea behind D&D. Some of them are terrible failures as jokes, but we can't all be Rich Burlew. I'd award someone a pile of bonus XP for doing this in one of my games.
Also on page 34, discussing henchmen, we learn that they are "useful in individual adventures as a safety mechanism against the machinations of rival player characters...". What kind of machinations are we getting up to?
P. 37 -- "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." At last, RPG scientists have found the Unified Field Theory connecting AD&D to Ars Magica!
P. 38 -- I like the idea that low-level cleric spells are a result of godly behavior, mid-level spells come from the god's servants, and high-level spells are a direct gift from the deity itself. You could build some fun roleplaying encounters with this concept, or even structure a campaign around it.
P. 39 -- So a couple pages ago, I wasn't allowed to ask my henchmen about their alignment or religion. Now I can't ask about their spellbooks either? Seems like a forced scarcity. The interpersonal economy of Gygaxian D&D is weird.
New goal -- get people to use the phrase "the interpersonal economy of Gygaxian D&D."
P. 47 -- "Naturally, the initial adventuring in the campaign will be those in the small community and nearby underground maze." [Should that be "initial adventures"?] That's not natural unless you make it so. By the time I ran my first D&D campaign, when I was all of 14 years old, we were primarily moving from one large urban area to another through unforgiving wilderness, playing with the plots of kings and mystics. I don't think we ever went into an underground maze. Not that you can't, just that you don't have to, and so we found our fun in the fresh air instead. There's nothing wrong with dungeon-crawling, if that's what you like. There's something wrong with assuming it's How To Play The Game.
Okay, looks like a lot of rules for flying and sailing coming up next. Take 10, people. We'll regroup in a while.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Time to visit Gary Gygax's home turf
I won a copy of the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons DUNGEON MASTERS GUIDE (a result of some stuff I made up, courtesy of Swords & Dorkery). Is the redoubtable Jeff Gameblog Rients right when he calls it "one of the great texts of the hobby?"
...I think the answer depends on whether you grew up reading it. I didn't. The most formative text for my GMing style is the first edition of West End's Star Wars RPG. I never owned a DMG before 3e came out. Maybe I'll tell the story of how I got my first DMG, or how I ran a 2e campaign for many years without one, but not just yet. I'm a historian by training, and Jeff's right that this book had a huge influence on everything that followed, so let's see what we find inside. This may take a while.
Right off the bat, we have a Jeff Easley cover showing some hooded guy opening double doors from inside while a horde of sketchy little demonoids swarm behind him. So we're dealing with a reprint. The earliest versions of this book had a different image by a different artist -- some adventurers, an efreet which is easily mistaken for a demon, the fabled City Of Brass. People have all kinds of opinions about the visual arts, and the moody/expressionistic/amateurish/whatever-you-call-it style of very old D&D has strong adherents. I prefer Easley's technique and composition, although thematically the original cover comes out ahead.
Enough about that. Here are some words...
P. 8 -- Gary Gygax thanks a bunch of people in his foreword. Most of them are names you'd recognize if you know the wayback history of D&D, but one is Jack Vance. Did he actually play D&D? That would be the best thing ever in all possible worlds, except in Vance's own The Dragon Masters.
P. 9 -- "...at adventure's end you will secretly note any player character movement on the alignment graph." No I won't.
"The fun of the game is action and drama. The challenge of problem solving is secondary. Long and drawn out operations by the referee irritate the players." Uncle Gary is right on the money here. A great deal of GMing advice boils down to these 3 sentences. I'd reprint them in bold 150-point type on the first page.
P. 11 -- Lookee here: it's different methods of generating ability scores. Even back in 1979, people wanted to roll 4d6, keep the best 3, and assign them as desired.
Just below that is a section on using wishes to increase ability scores. Apparently if the stat in question is 16 or higher, each wish will only increase it by one-tenth of a point. Gygax's players got a lot more wishes than I ever did.
P. 12 -- Our first random chart, and far from our last. I've held every opinion it's possible to hold on random charts. These days, I love them. I could get a lot of use out of the Secondary Skills Table.
P. 13 -- But we can take it much too far. The chart for random chances of contracting disease is definitely more detailed than most games would need. And the subsequent chart -- chances of random parasitic infestation -- makes me wonder exactly what the folks in Lake Geneva thought of as "fun." And, my God, the whole next page is for determining which part of the body has a disease/parasite, and the subsequent effects thereof. Didn't we just get a whole speech about how D&D is Yes To Game And No To Realism back on page 9?
P. 16 -- Here's another gem that gets left behind in most modern RPGs: rules for (and lists of) followers that high-level characters will acquire. I'd forgotten about the whole high-level-PC-gets-stronghold system in early versions of D&D. That appeals to me much more than excursions to the Astral Plane or wherever.
P. 21 -- Monster PCs, and why you don't get to have them. I think this rationale is weak. Although it's true that much of the fantasy and folklore D&D draws from is human-centric, that's a correlation rather than a causation. And saying "nonhumans aren't as good because they have level limits" skips right over the burning question of why those limits exist (hint: to make sure the game is human-centric). I can see going with a mostly-human game as a matter of style and tone, or just to keep the mechanics simpler. Did that myself with my longtime Gorbadin setting.
But I don't think that's what went on here. Quoth Gary Gygax: "This [request for a monster PC] is done principally because the player sees the desired monster character as superior to his or her peers and likely to provide a dominant role for him or her in the campaign." We'll see this theme again.
P. 24 -- Alignment languages. One of the oddest quirks of the game. I'm no fan of alignment; maybe you are. We can argue about it another day. What we can't do is find a way that alignment languages make sense or make things fun. If anyone knows why these were conceived and created... I don't know whether you should share that insight or bury it deep where the sun will never touch it.
...whew. That's a lot of writing for only 10% of the book. And today's plan was actually a Cyberpunk post. But I can't find the out-of-date webpage I need for the Cyberpunk thing, and this took shape, so who knows what tomorrow will bring?
...I think the answer depends on whether you grew up reading it. I didn't. The most formative text for my GMing style is the first edition of West End's Star Wars RPG. I never owned a DMG before 3e came out. Maybe I'll tell the story of how I got my first DMG, or how I ran a 2e campaign for many years without one, but not just yet. I'm a historian by training, and Jeff's right that this book had a huge influence on everything that followed, so let's see what we find inside. This may take a while.
Right off the bat, we have a Jeff Easley cover showing some hooded guy opening double doors from inside while a horde of sketchy little demonoids swarm behind him. So we're dealing with a reprint. The earliest versions of this book had a different image by a different artist -- some adventurers, an efreet which is easily mistaken for a demon, the fabled City Of Brass. People have all kinds of opinions about the visual arts, and the moody/expressionistic/amateurish/whatever-you-call-it style of very old D&D has strong adherents. I prefer Easley's technique and composition, although thematically the original cover comes out ahead.
Enough about that. Here are some words...
P. 8 -- Gary Gygax thanks a bunch of people in his foreword. Most of them are names you'd recognize if you know the wayback history of D&D, but one is Jack Vance. Did he actually play D&D? That would be the best thing ever in all possible worlds, except in Vance's own The Dragon Masters.
P. 9 -- "...at adventure's end you will secretly note any player character movement on the alignment graph." No I won't.
"The fun of the game is action and drama. The challenge of problem solving is secondary. Long and drawn out operations by the referee irritate the players." Uncle Gary is right on the money here. A great deal of GMing advice boils down to these 3 sentences. I'd reprint them in bold 150-point type on the first page.
P. 11 -- Lookee here: it's different methods of generating ability scores. Even back in 1979, people wanted to roll 4d6, keep the best 3, and assign them as desired.
Just below that is a section on using wishes to increase ability scores. Apparently if the stat in question is 16 or higher, each wish will only increase it by one-tenth of a point. Gygax's players got a lot more wishes than I ever did.
P. 12 -- Our first random chart, and far from our last. I've held every opinion it's possible to hold on random charts. These days, I love them. I could get a lot of use out of the Secondary Skills Table.
P. 13 -- But we can take it much too far. The chart for random chances of contracting disease is definitely more detailed than most games would need. And the subsequent chart -- chances of random parasitic infestation -- makes me wonder exactly what the folks in Lake Geneva thought of as "fun." And, my God, the whole next page is for determining which part of the body has a disease/parasite, and the subsequent effects thereof. Didn't we just get a whole speech about how D&D is Yes To Game And No To Realism back on page 9?
P. 16 -- Here's another gem that gets left behind in most modern RPGs: rules for (and lists of) followers that high-level characters will acquire. I'd forgotten about the whole high-level-PC-gets-stronghold system in early versions of D&D. That appeals to me much more than excursions to the Astral Plane or wherever.
P. 21 -- Monster PCs, and why you don't get to have them. I think this rationale is weak. Although it's true that much of the fantasy and folklore D&D draws from is human-centric, that's a correlation rather than a causation. And saying "nonhumans aren't as good because they have level limits" skips right over the burning question of why those limits exist (hint: to make sure the game is human-centric). I can see going with a mostly-human game as a matter of style and tone, or just to keep the mechanics simpler. Did that myself with my longtime Gorbadin setting.
But I don't think that's what went on here. Quoth Gary Gygax: "This [request for a monster PC] is done principally because the player sees the desired monster character as superior to his or her peers and likely to provide a dominant role for him or her in the campaign." We'll see this theme again.
P. 24 -- Alignment languages. One of the oddest quirks of the game. I'm no fan of alignment; maybe you are. We can argue about it another day. What we can't do is find a way that alignment languages make sense or make things fun. If anyone knows why these were conceived and created... I don't know whether you should share that insight or bury it deep where the sun will never touch it.
...whew. That's a lot of writing for only 10% of the book. And today's plan was actually a Cyberpunk post. But I can't find the out-of-date webpage I need for the Cyberpunk thing, and this took shape, so who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)