Charmed, I’m sure

Exploring the play – emergent and otherwise  – of OD&D we have noticed recently that charm person in OD&D is a much more powerful spell in OD&D than in later versions of the game.  In OD&D the victim comes

completely under the influence of the Magic-User until such a time as the “charm” is dispelled (Dispell Magic).

Without periodic opportunities to shrug off the charm, the Magic-User casting charm will accumulate a growing mob of completely loyal followers.  In charming the occasional orc or goblin there is natural attrition as these allies-of-convenience set off traps and act as meat shields.  But what is to prevent even a low level Magic-User from slowly charming everyone around them and building an empire, one magically loyal servant at a time?  A few things to consider:

First, in a world where charm person exists and even the least accomplished of Magic-Users can cast it, this will be a common danger.  Those able to cast dispell magic will do so on themselves and their retainers frequently.  Established authorities, heroes, and higher level Wizards will seek to slay or co-opt Magic-Users indulging in this pasttime too often, and having a reputation for casting charm person will quickly become a liability in dealing with others.

Second, this permanent charm is easy to take for granted.  But a dispell magic can instantly turn a faithful bodyguard into a savagely vengeful enemy, who has had months or years stolen from their life.

Third, especially for player characters, charm person is not very efficient when used on what would normally be a hireling or retainer.  No matter how well you treat them or how long they serve you, thier loyalty will always be subject to dispell magic.  Like a mid-tier chess player, the magic-user who uses charm too often will eventually box themselves in, surrounded by a charmed retinue, unable to attract or recruit other allies.  In the long run, better to simply treat your retainers well, and earn their true allegiance.

(This does not apply, of course, to evil Magic-Users who charm everyone and treat them horribly… but they are generally the bad guys the PC’s are trying to kill, which reinforces the point).

Emergent Behaviors: The Sacrificial Hireling

DM: Albrecht the hireling asks for his share of the treasure so he can give it to his wife and kids before continuing on with your next adventure.
Player #1: Quick, let’s ditch him!
Player #2: I tell Albrecht that we need to go to the big city to cash in the jewels we found in the dungeon, and I give him a handful of gold to tide his family over while he comes to the city with us.
DM: Albrecht takes the money gratefully and says he’ll rejoin you in just a few minutes.
Player #1: We grab our things and head out of town before Albrecht gets back.
DM: You gather your possessions and leave the village. Behind you, you hear Albrecht calling your names as he tries to catch up with you in the monster-haunted dark.
Player #1: We ride faster!

In a previous post, I discussed emergent behaviors: interactions between rules and players that guide activity during play. Now we’ll take a look at the behaviors that emerge from the intersection between the old-school D&D rules for experience and for hirelings.

Hiring expendable minions is a time-honored D&D method for tackling opposition above one’s weight class. Hirelings get a share of the experience points and—by the book—a share of the treasure, distributed at the end of the adventure. Since wealth and experience that go to NPCs are wealth and experience that the PCs don’t receive, it is in the PCs’ interest for all of their hirelings to die before the end of the adventure! Those hirelings who survive may be cheated out of their share of the treasure, or worse.

DM: After regaling you with tales of his exceedingly profitable adventures with some of the other PCs, Bernard the hireling retires to his rooms.
Player #1: Let’s rob him.
Player #2: Huh?
Player #1: Look at all of those fancy rings he’s wearing! Let’s break into his room and steal it.
Player #2: I don’t think he’s going to leave his jewelry in his room when he’s not there.
Player #1: You’re right. I guess we’ll just kill him and take his stuff.

Depending on your style of play, this may be a feature and not a bug! A high death toll among subsidiary characters is common to the sword and sorcery genre. Conan’s companions often die to demonstrate the dangers he faces, for example, while both Elric and Kane are in the habit of leading whole troops of men to their deaths.

Some DMs, however, may not enjoy the sociopathic behavior this encourages in their players. That’s where the simplicity of early D&D comes in handy! The DM has any number of ways to penalize adventuring parties who leave a trail of dead hirelings while rewarding those who treat their hirelings well. Done well, these methods provide the players with meaningful, strategically interesting choices:

• Loyalty: Loyalty must be earned! Determine how loyal each hireling is, perhaps using the loyalty table in adventure B1: In Search of the Unknown. Apply modifiers based on the party’s behavior so that parties that treat their hirelings well are more likely to recruit loyal minions, while those that stab their hirelings in the back are more likely to recruit disloyal minions—some of whom want to do unto the party before the reverse occurs, while others are friends and family of deceased hirelings who want a little revenge!
• Morale: Trust is hard to acquire and easy to give up. In addition to using the morale system religiously, apply modifiers a heavy hand, starting all new hirelings with morale penalties and giving bonuses to morale with every successful adventure. Parties with a good record for keeping the hirelings alive get overall morale bonuses, while those who keep coming back with full pockets and no hirelings get steep morale penalties as their hirelings assume they’re going to die and bail from the party at the first opportunity.
• Reputation: Word gets around that the PCs are bad news! This makes it more difficult to acquire new hirelings, or imposes other appropriate penalties such as reaction roll penalties in town, higher costs to buy equipment, etc. Devious PCs can get around these penalties by hiring new hirelings in secret, pinning the blame on their rivals, or—worst of all—leaving the area for greener pastures where no one recognizes their ill name, and abandoning your lovingly-crafted dungeon in the process.
• Turn into PC: When a player character dies, you can allow the player to take over control of a hireling with all of that hireling’s accumulated experience points. This makes hirelings a valuable asset, especially if you otherwise begin all new PCs with no experience points. Hirelings go from being experience point sinks to experience point banks!

Over and above these mechanical concerns, you may wish to consider talking to your players. If there’s some element of play you’re not happy with, clear and open communication is your friend! Unless you’re gaming with jerks, your players should give serious consideration to whatever you need to enjoy the game.

DM: A horrified scream echoes from the tunnel behind you, then chokes off into silence.
Player #1: That’s where we left Weberran the hireling on guard, right?
DM: Yes, and it sounds like his voice, too.
Player #1: Good riddance! That saves me the trouble of killing the coward myself.

Ultimately, all of these solutions paper over the problem without solving it. As long as there’s a mechanical benefit to disposing of your hirelings mid-adventure, players will be tempted to make it happen. The only way to get rid of the issue entirely is to attack it at its source: the interaction between the rules for hirelings and the distribution of experience points.

The simplest fix is to give hirelings their shares of experience points whether or not they survive the adventure. This removes the impetus to eliminate the hirelings during the session, as the PCs gain no extra benefit for the hirelings’ deaths! At this point, any homicidal urges on the part of the PCs and their players are an expression of play style rather than an outgrowth of the system, and you can react accordingly.

Flavorful Fighting II: Retroactive Justification

You know how when a cat trips or runs into something, it gives off this look of wounded dignity that says, “I meant to do that all along”? This is an important principle when handling combat in a tabletop role-playing game. Don’t worry what your character (or NPC) intended to do when you rolled the dice! When describing the result of a roll, act as though that’s what you intended all along.

Did you miss that club-footed kobold for four attacks in a row? Are you really such an inept fighter? No, you were just toying with him. Really!

How does she keep hitting you? You’re in plate armor and have a 17 Dexterity! Could it be that she recognizes your fighting style, perhaps from training under the same swordmaster that you did? Then again, it could simply be that the cobra bite that you thought you shrugged off earlier is still slowing your reflexes.

So you were trying to take that bandit alive, but you punched him too hard and now he’s dead. Sure, maybe you just don’t know your own strength, but it could also be that knowing smirk on his face that dared you to do it. He must have wanted to die. Why? What secret do the bandits hold that’s worth dying for?

The game’s fiction need not be wholly defined in advance. Adding things retroactively can be a good thing. Writers and storytellers do it all the time, so why not do the same in your game?

Sandbox Dungeon Master’s Toolkit: Nudges and Libertarian Paternalism

A successful sandbox game has to balance extremes. Too much restriction and you get the Straight Line Dungeon where player choices barely matter. Too much freedom and you get the Hall of 10,000 Identical Doorways where the players have no basis for choosing one over another. When you mention that one doorway has a trail of bloody footprints leading through it, as a DM you’re using a nudge to help players navigate between these extremes.

Although I’m unable to resist the lure of discussing the theory of nudges, let me avoid burying the lede by putting this d20’s worth of cool nudges for sandbox play up front:

1. An under-detailed dungeon map showing major threats and implied objectives. (#1 – #5 need to find their way into player’s hands to be useful!)
2. A scavenger hunt list giving sub-goals that need to be completed, some of which specify what and where
3. A world map on which the style used to write the place names tells them something about what’s there
4. A city map on which “special locations” are distinctive from the rest of the mass of anonymous, of no note, buildings.
5. A cross-section map that shows intriguing dungeon levels and their interconnections without showing how to get there from here in a top-down view
6. Chalk on dungeon walls or blazes on trees showing where other adventurers have been
7. A trail of small-value gems has been laid down in a regular, deliberate-looking pattern
8. A trail of coins in an irregular pattern, as if someone was carrying a bag of loot with a hole in it
9. Mule-pulled wheel ruts dug unusually deep, as if a wagon was laden with some very dense metal
10. Players find part of the Rod of Law, and it points towards the other six parts
11. Players find a wand or magic sword that detects treasure
12. The sound of screaming or cries for help (#12 – #15 are assumed to be coming from a particular direction)
13. A hubbub of voices and laughter
14. The smell of baking bread
15. The sound of a hammer striking an anvil
16. Adventurers’ corpses, lying in a heap as if struck down unexpectedly, still carrying their gear including bulging sacks and glowing swords
17. Adventurers’ corpses, sprawled as if running in terror from a certain direction, stripped of their gear with PC-level thoroughness (gold teeth extracted, bellies slit to check for swallowed gems), perhaps with bloody footprints showing which way the looters went
18. Adventurers’ corpse, carrying directions to a treasure divided into steps. (Careful study of the steps that the former owner would already have completed to get to this point where his body was found shows that either he made a mistake or corrected a persistent error in the directions as written).
19. Monsters or NPCs fleeing from a certain direction, dropping their goods in order to run faster
20. Monsters or NPCs rushing towards a location, leading mules with empty saddlebags, mining equipment

Let me also add as a matter of practical advice that nudges like this are especially useful for one-shot sessions of adventure. It doesn’t need to be the case that sandbox-style play is poorly suited for convention games, as folks wind up suggesting in this EN World thread. What is true is that campaign-length sandboxes tend to give players more room to develop their own nudges toward adventure and information about which options will lead where they want to go. (A long-running campaign also has enough momentum to roll past a few sessions in which the players’ choice leads to boring events.) When running a sandbox for a newly-formed group, it’s a good idea to throw in some nudges – just a couple if the game is going to run for a single session, or six plus if it’s the start of a long campaign that will have time to try out and maybe reject several of them and explore the connections between each of the starting nudges.

How are these nudges different from a traditional adventure hook? For starters, an adventure hook usually combines motivation and direction. Here I assume a sandbox style of play in which everyone supplies their own motivation and  is on board with a player-driven approach, but may need some help deciding which way to drive.

More essentially, if you don’t take an adventure hook you miss out on the reward with which the hook is baited. (Players who are used to a strongly directed style of play may also suspect that not taking the hook will mean no adventure happens.) A good nudge suggests a course of action without imposing a penalty if you don’t take it, although some of the ones above meet that goal better than others. Nudges also leave open many courses of action: going through the doorway of the bloody footprints, or specifically avoiding it, or going through the next doorway over and trying to circle around are all good responses.

OK, now let’s get conceptual! When we talk about restriction and freedom, we should remember that in theory, any tabletop RPG offers unlimited freedom. Unlike a computer game, it’s possible to do anything that you can imagine, so it’s useful to think of restrictions as the costs of different choices. The cost of an absolute refusal to let your choices be limited by what other players want to do is that they’re likely to stop playing with you.

If you’re in the Straight Line Dungeon but don’t want to go A->B->C like it’s pushing you to do, you could always go back to town, hire and equip a team of dwarven engineers, and spend months tunneling to create your own path. However, the cost of doing this is high enough that most players won’t even consider it as a choice when it’s so much easier to go down the rails laid out by the dungeon designer.

The Hall of Identical Doorways gives you 10,000 choices, each with an equally low cost. But when there’s no way to tell what any of the doorways lead to, the cost of making a meaningful decision is high. By the time you’ve finished scouting out ten thousand different options, you may be wishing for the directedness of the Straight Line Dungeon!

The awesome thing about a nudge like a trail of bloody footprints is that it highlights one possible choice without raising the cost of making a different decision. It’s a lot easier to ignore the ominous clue and check out a doorway at the other end of the hall than it is to tunnel through solid rock, and it’s easier to interact with a choice-rich environment when you can make meaningful decisions about things like whether bloody footprints should be sought out or avoided.

This use of the term “nudge” comes from the book of the same name. Its authors, Thaler and Sunstein, advocate “libertarian paternalism” that focuses on understanding  choice architecture (of which dungeons are a great example!) to help people make good choices by their own criteria. I this is a great motto for reconciling the libertarian desire of a DM in a sandbox game to give players maximum freedom of choice and let their actions drive the game & the paternalistic goal of making sure everyone at the table has fun.

A dogmatically libertarian DM thinks the Hall of 10,000 Identical Doorways is the ultimate dungeon because “more choice is always better”, and so the DM has carefully avoided any details that might steer the players in one direction or another and thus reduce their freedom of choice. The problem here is that it’s hard to believe that each of those doorways lead to equally interesting places. (In fact, the sheer number of choices may make players suspect that the DM is about to pull a bit of illusionism, such that whatever one they choose will lead to the same location.)

A dogmatically paternalistic DM thinks the Straight Line Dungeon is the ultimate because “presenting sub-optimal choices is bad,” and the linear lack of alternatives saves the players from the mistake of going anywhere that doesn’t deliver the maximum fun the DM has planned. The problem here is that the DM may not know best what will be fun for the players. For many, the process of making choices on the way is more important than reaching the goal, and no amount of awesome pay-off will make up for the frustration of being forced to go there in the first place.

If you’re a libertarian paternalist DM, you acknowledge that you have much more information about what the sandbox contains than the players do, and this lets you predict some choices which are likely to lead to more fun than others.  You thus structure the choice architecture by using nudges to draw attention to the exits from the Hall of Doorways that you think lead in the most interesting direction.  But because you know that the players have the best information about what they enjoy, you avoid raising the cost of making a different decision. The other doorways aren’t filled in with rubble that needs to be tunneled through, they’re just not highlighted.

One important point that Thaler and Sunstein make is that all choice environments have to be structured, and within these structures human psychology is going to make some choices more likely than others. Reading Nudge is highly recommended for both a better discussion of choice architecture and examples of much more subtle architectural nudges than the ones I give here (some of which may not count by their definition at all). For example, if 99,999 doorways are on the sides of the Hall, and one is on the opposite wall, you’d do well to put the thing you think is most interesting beyond that one; likewise the doorway to the right of the entrance if the Hall is circular.

Note that nudges are closely related to signposts, and can be a tool for introducing the adversity James discusses as vital to a sandbox.

Rules Do Matter: Emergent Behaviors

Rules matter. As long as you rely upon them to generate results, they guide play in various directions by encouraging some choices and results while discouraging others. Vince Baker, one of the most insightful new-school game designers, likes to discuss this in terms of “emergent play“: results that emerge from unexpected interactions within—and with—the rules.

In old-school D&D, the most significant example would be the advancement rules. By the book, most experience points come from obtaining monetary treasure. This encourages to prioritize treasure-finding over other activities, and discourages adventures that yield no monetary profit. Defeating monsters serves as a secondary source of experience points. Low-level monsters give a lot more experience in White Box than in Red Box; in actual play, we’ve found that the players in Tavis’ White Box game are more prone to seek out fights without a guarantee of monetary reward than in my Red Box game, where the party generally eschews combat if financial profit seems unlikely.

As Philotomy has noted, a lot of old-school gamers stopped giving out experience points for monetary treasure because they felt it didn’t make sense in the context of the fiction. This alters the play of the game! Seeking out treasure in emulation of swords & sorcery heroes like Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser is an emergent behavior derived from the XP-for-gold rule; without that rule, play tends in other directions as players seek to gain experience and level up their characters. My own history as a player bears this out; in a favorite 3e D&D campaign where we gained no XP for treasure, we’ve actually turned down monetary rewards because that seemed appropriate to our characters.

The lesson to take away here is that, when designing or modifying rules, it’s important to consider how the rules guide behavior! As demonstrated above, putting verisimilitude above all other considerations can lead to unexpected—even undesirable—effects on play.

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When I fleshed out the Vancian magic system in my setting, I was concerned with encouraging certain elements of play and discouraging others. Defining the rules around these concerns was my primary goal; the flavor and color, however important, were subordinate to these considerations.

First, I wanted to strike a balance between allowing magic-user PCs to share useful spells and retaining their specialties. On the one hand, everyone wants access to powerful spells like sleep and fireball. On the other hand, a magic-user’s spell selection provides a colorful distinction from other PC magic-users, much as how fighters are often distinguished by their magic weapons, or how any character might be distinguished by a unique special ability. So I split the difference between making spell sharing free and denying it altogether; researching one’s own version of a fellow PC’s spell is not instanteous or free, but provides a discount over designing a spell from scratch. (This dovetails with our carousing rules for turning gold into XP; learning new spells, whether from fellow PCs or through original research, always generates experience points.)

Second, I wanted to give access to new spells in a controlled fashion. I wanted the ability to give access to new spells as part of a treasure hoard, but I didn’t want the PCs to immediately gain access to every spell in a defeated magic-user’s spellbook. So I engineered the system to allow me to control how many new spells the PCs received by defeating an enemy M-U. Ideally, this will give the magic-user PCs a nice benefit from captured spellbooks without encouraging them to spend all their time hunting down and killing their NPC counterparts to steal their power.

It’s only at this point in the process that color considerations come in. But even color considerations have emergent effects! For example, requiring initiations with expensive components to learn new spells has a number of effects on the game world. Wizards’ labs will generally be full of expensive components, and that’s treasure. Magic becomes more exclusive; since you need a lot of money to become initiated into the art, only the wealthy or the chosen apprentices of existing wizards can afford to practice magic.

On the other hand, one can base magical traditions around cheaply procuring components that are expensive for city-dwelling magic-users. Shamans would gather their own herbs and minerals, for example, while dark wizards would exploit the price that slavery places on human life by performing initiations around human sacrifices!

Spellbooks Without Spells: A Vancian Variant

In a recent post, Tavis discusses Vancian magic, both in terms of Jack Vance’s original work and its translation into the familiar Vancian spellcasting found in D&D. I’ve done some tinkering with the magic system in my Red Box campaign. I hope that you, gentle reader, find something useful in this implementation that you can take away for your own game.

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I: A Magic-User’s Own Idiom

In this setting, magic is idiosyncratic. One’s spells must take into account all the elements of one’s magical nature: one’s true name, the astrological signs ascendant at one’s birth, the peculiar alchemical affinities of one’s own blood, the entities that one’s magical lineage has pacted with, etc. Thus, no two magic-users employ the same version of a given spell.

To use computer programming as a metaphor, view each spell as a program and each magic-user as an operating system. Unlike the real world, no two of these operating systems are identical! Whenever one magic-user wishes to learn a spell from another, he must revise the spell so that it works on his “operating system”—his personal magical idiom. Still, it’s easier than researching a new spell from scratch.

II: Initiations and Pacts

This magic-user is performing an initiatory rite to add a new spell to his repertoire.

The power for spells comes from extra-planar sources: gods, demons, elementals, fairies, timeless arcane intelligences, etc. It is not enough to know the words and gestures of a spell. One must also perform an initiation into the mysteries of the spell, forging a pact with an extra-planar entity to power the incantation.

Such initiations are complex rites. The magic-user must draw intricate diagrams with pastes made from crushed gems, burn exotic woods and incense, don ritual garments sewn with gold and silver thread, and so forth. Whereas most of the time involved in performing spell research goes to devising the spell itself, procuring the components for the initiatory rite takes up most of the money. (When one acquires a “free” spell upon leveling up, this may be justified by one’s mentor or another friendly magic-user supplying the components needed to perform the initiation.)

Sometimes these rites are unsuccessful. They might not be devised properly or executed correctly. Hence the possibility of failure—even catastrophic failure—in spell research.

III: The Spells Themselves

Unlike the magics used by Rhialto the Marvellous, Iucounu the Laughing Magician and their fellow thaumaturges in Vance’s work, these spells have no volition; one does not struggle with them lest they wriggle out of one’s mind and into the world. But they are not simply “memorized,” either.

A spell is a matrix of magical forces that exists within the magic-user’s mind. In a sense, it is a single-use magic item, and it obeys similar principles in play. An enterprising magic-user might even find ways to strip away an opponent’s prepared spells, although it will take something more impressive than a mere dispel magic to do so.

For a good example, look at how spells are “hung” by Merlin of Chaos in Roger Zelazny’s second Amber quintet. “Then I spoke the spell, slowly and clearly, leaving out the four key words I had chosen to omit. … The spell hung before me like a crippled butterfly of sound and color, trapped within the synesthetic web of my personal vision of the Logrus, to come again when I summoned it, to be released when I spoke the four omitted words.”

IV: Spell Scrolls

A magical scroll is not simply a bit of writing. It is essentially identical to a prepared spell, except that instead of keeping the spell matrix inside her own mind, the magic-user binds the matrix to a roll of parchment. Now, instead of reciting the trigger words from memory, the magic-user reads them off the scroll—or gives the scroll to another magic-user, who can do the same.

V: Spell Valences

One does not simply cram spells into one’s head willy-nilly. They must be fitted together into lattices. As magic-users grow more powerful, they can accommodate increasingly larger configurations of spells.

Much like electron shells in an atom, each lattice contains a fixed number of spells of each level. Thus, a conjurer may encompass no more than two first-level spells and a second-level spell; the first-level spells may not be replaced by a second-level spell nor vice versa. Scholarly magic-users may refer to the nodes of the lattice as “valences,” a term shamelessly stolen from Sepulchrave’s Tales of Wyre.

These spell valences are of a fixed order of power and complexity. Thus, there are no “third-and-a-half level” spells.

VI: Spellbooks

A page from a wizard's compendium.

Magic-users don’t generally have “spellbooks” in the sense we think of in D&D, with each page filled in with the specifics of a given spell. Instead, they have compendiums of magic: occult encyclopedias full of information, diagrams and formulae regarding alchemy, astrology, necromancy, theurgy, and all of the other recognized schools of sorcery. When preparing a spell, one pores through one’s compendium for the specific elements of the spell—the appropriate diagrams and formulae—and impresses the magical matrix of the spell upon one’s mind.

Some magic-users do take the time (one day per spell level) to transcribe the exact formulae involved in their spells, thus creating a “spellbook” much like the typical AD&D spellbook. Such spellbooks are often used by magic-users when traveling or adventuring, or to loan out when trading spells. Not every wizard the party defeats will have one, however, and if a PC magic-user steals or borrows one from an NPC, he must still research the spell to translate it into his own magical idiom and perform the necessary initiation.

A spellbook that only contains a few spells is much smaller than a full occult compendium, as it contains only a few specific formulae. Beyond a certain point, however, a spellbook becomes larger than a compendium, as a given occult chart or diagram may be repeated a dozen times for use in a dozen different spells. Thus, magic-users with large repertoires may not wish to rely on spellbooks!

One may attempt to prepare a spell from memory if one has neither compendium nor spellbook at hand. This is very dangerous! If one constructs the spell matrix with even one incorrect glyph or syllable, the spell will go awry. If one is lucky, it will simply fizzle when cast; worse, it may come out warped, backfire on the caster, or even provide an opening for an extra-planar entity to enter the world.

New “Red Box” in the Works

Looks familiar?

Wizards of the Coast has announced a new introductory boxed set for 4E. As you can see from the picture, the boxed set is red. And according to WotC’s twitter feed, they’re calling it the “Red Box.” (You may have to scroll down a bit to find it.)

What does this mean for old-school players? Possibly some confusion over the term “Red Box” in the context of Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe even a lot of confusion. What happens when you advertise a Red Box D&D game, expecting people of an old-school persuasion to show up, and you get players who’re expecting to play Fourth Edition? (Or vice versa?)

Making Vancian Spellcasting Concrete

Over at the Eiglophian Press, G. Benedicto has a noteworthy series of posts about Vancian crunch, which is being discussed over at Finarvyn’s OD&D boards. I fully agree that the way that Vance describes spellcasting is much more evocative and inspirational than its presentation in any old-school ruleset. This, and later quotations in italics, is from his short story “Mazirian the Magician,” published as part of The Dying Earth (1950) – not the sole Vancian source for the concept of prepared spells, but a good and convenient one:

Later, when black night lay across the forest, he would seek through his books for spells to guard him through the unpredictable glades. They would be poignant corrosive spells, of such a nature that one would daunt the brain of an ordinary man and two render him mad. Mazirian, by dint of stringent exercise, could encompass four of the most formidable, or six of the lesser spells…. Mazirian made a selection from his books and with great effort forced five spells upon his brain: Phandaal’s Gyrator, Felojun’s Second Hypnotic Spell, The Excellent Prismatic Spray, The Charm of Untiring Nourishment, and the Spell of the Omnipotent Sphere.

I think that G. Benedicto’s impulse to “clarify what’s happening in the wizard’s study” is an excellent one, and that it can usefully begin with looking to Vance to help imagine what a magic-user is doing when he or she memorizes spells. However, I take issue with two of his assertions.

Here we see Jack Vance contemplating whether to release one of the many spells filling his brain to capacity, which would cause many-colored stabbing lines to split your blundering body in a thousand places.

First, I disagree that the number of spells a magic-user is able to prepare is one and the same as the number of spells in their spellbook from which they can choose when deciding which to memorize. The OD&D thread shows there are folks who play this way, and not without textual justification. Like any holy text worth its salt, you can find support in the Three Little Brown Books for just about any position you want to take! However, Vance seems clear that magic-users may know many more spells than they can fit in their brain at any one time:

…at this dim time, with the sun dark, wilderness obscuring Ascolais, and the white city Kaiin half in ruins, only a few more than a hundred spells remained to the knowledge of man. Of these, Mazirian had access to seventy-three, and gradually, by stratagem and negotiation, was securing the others.

Second, I think that the use of the term “crunch” is ill-advised, and not only because some old-schoolers don’t know that this new-school term of art refers to game mechanics that quantify the narrative fluff. However, it’s possible for both crunch and fluff to be completely divorced from gameplay, and in fact it’s a rational economic activity for freelancers who are paid by the word to spend lots of time fluffily describing and crunchily quantifying things that the PCs will never actually interact with during the game.

What I find really inspirational about the Eiglophian post is is the idea that Vancian spellcasting can be made more vivid and compelling by providing more ways for it have a concrete impact on play. In the comments, Booberry suggests two great examples – first the suggestion that, by  increasing magic-users’ focus and mental discipline, potions and elixirs might increase the limit on the spells that they could cram into their brain, and second that the death of a magic-user might cause these spells to come shooting out again! (Some honest-to-goodness crunch is provided for the latter – at 0 HP, the M-U must save vs. spells to avoid all remaining memorized spells firing off at random. There’s no attempt at a pre-ordained blanket quantification of what this would mean ahead of time, which I think is wise.) G. Benedicto also suggests the awesome idea of memory-stealing substances.

Before I suggest some additional ways to give Vancian spellcasting a more concrete presence in play, let’s look at the existing game consequences of the idea.

1. Memorizing spells takes time, concentration, and access to books. Of Mazirian, Vance tells us that “Midnight found him in his study, poring through leather-bound tomes and untidy portfolios“. Events in the game that disturb the magic-users’ study or deprive him or her to access to books will thus demonstrate the practical limits of Vancian spellcasting.
2. Because preparation is lengthy and effortful, not every magic-user will have taken the effort to memorize spells on any given day. When Vance’s protagonist tells a Deodand “Answer my questions, and I undertake to feed you much flesh,” it sizes him up and replies “You may in any event, Mazirian. Are you with powerful spells today?” The fact that magic-users and knights both must gird themselves for battle, such that catching them unprepared gives an enormous advantage,  is highly significant to gameplay. (Note that by this analogy the 3E sorcerer, who never uses memorized spells, is as much a missed dramatic opportunity as a martial artist who fights only with his fists; the most awesome moment in many kung-fu movies is the point where the hero’s sword breaks and he continues to kick ass despite what would be a crippling disadvantage for a normal fighter.)
3. The details of Vancian spellcasting determine when a magic-user is potent. “For all Mazirian’s magic he was helpless. The mesmeric spell had been expended, and he had none other in his brain. In any event he could not have uttered the space-twisting syllables with that mindless clutch at his throat.” Being able to shut down a spellcaster with a silence spell demonstrates an aspect of the way magic works.

OK, now I will (finally) suggest some more ways that PCs could interact concretely with the concept of Vancian spellcasting during play. Many of these take their cue from the sense of spells as possessed of independent vitality and agency that comes from another story in The Dying Earth, “Turjan of Miir”:

Turjan found a musty portfolio, turned the heavy pages to the spell the Sage had shown him, the Call to the Violet Cloud. He stared down at the characters and they burned with an urgent power, pressing off the page as if frantic to leave the solitude of the book. Turjan closed the book, forcing the spell back into oblivion.

1. Memorizing the same spell more than once may cause the copies to fight in your brain. In the White Sandbox thus far I’ve discouraged this without further explanation, but on reflection I think it’s coolest to give players a choice between the reward of being able to end multiple fights with sleep and the risk of horrible Vancian consequences that are known but unlikely. At first glance it makes sense to have these arise while the spell is being memorized, but that tends to happen outside the focus of play. Players will be unhappy if dire consequences mean Blastum is found dead over his spellbooks before the day’s adventure even begins, while DMs will be dissatisfied if milder effects mean the adventurers just spend another day drinking in the tavern while their magic-user gets her mind untangled. I think it’s better if the ill effects come about at the time that one of the duplicate spells is cast. Perhaps there’s a chance that they have become stuck together and all come out at once when you utter the syllables hoping to release one of them, with unintended and likely adverse effects.
2. Upon reading a magic scroll, the spell it contains floods into your brain and fills up all available space. If you have multiple empty spell slots, you inadvertently run the risks of memorizing duplicate spells. A lesser version would target only a single spell level, while a more versatile spell could put versions of itself into whatever level slots are open. An especially virulent version would replace the spells already memorized, either by causing you to forget them or by firing them all off randomly! This is a good way for DMs to have fun watching magic-users find creative applications for a spell too dangerous or whimsical for them to ever consider memorizing under other circumstances.
3. A cursed scroll contains a previously undiscovered spell, the effects of which are tempting enough to entice magic-users to copy it into their own spellbook. This spell is unusually eager to flood into the magic-user’s brain, taking a tenth the normal time to memorize. It does indeed perform as promised when it is cast, but it becomes voraciously jealous when it is passed over in favor of other spells. Each time the magic-user prepares spells from that book and does not memorize the spell from the cursed scroll, over the course of the following day it copies its own runes over those of one other randomly selected spell in the book. Most likely, this is not discovered until the magic-user attempts to prepare one of the over-written spells.
4. An arrow toxin causes magic-users to lose the discipline necessary to resist the pressure of the spells stuffed into their brain. For the next 1d4 rounds, they must  speak the syllables to cast one of their spells (of their choice or randomly determined, depending on the horribleness of the toxin), groaning with relief as each one is released from its confinement.
5. Entering certain anti-magic fields causes some or all of a magic-user’s spells to escape from their confinement in his or her brain. This is not immediately apparent due to the suppression of the anti-magic field. When the effects of the field are removed, the result may be as if all the spells had been cast at once, or the spells may gain some independent existence of their own, such as the excellent concept of the living spell Keith Baker created for the Eberron campaign setting in D&D 3.5.
6. A magical substrate such as an enchanted blank is so receptive a home for spells that on each round a magic-user views the page, he or she must make a saving throw to avoid having a randomly chosen memorized spell escape and take up residence in the new substrate. This could be a useful item for a magic-user who wished to simultaneously disable enemy spellcasters and enrich his or her own spellbook.
7. A symbol or creature is so abhorrent to arcane principles that a magic-user in the presence of this provocation must make a saving throw each round to resist the demands of his or her memorized spells to be hurled at the offender. A magic-resistant character might want to paint such a symbol on a shield and draw fire away from more vulnerable members of the party (aka aggro, as K. Bailey’s comment here leads me to believe they’re calling it in these new-fangled graphical MUDs).

Alignment and Misalignment

D&D’s alignment system has been causing problems for DMs since its inception. This is, in part, because no one can seem to agree on how it works.

If you’re playing by the book, arguments and confusion over alignment is an issue because even at low levels, one’s alignment has measurable impact on game play. There are alignment languages, the effects of the protection from evil spell, and—perhaps most importantly—the significance of alignment when dealing with intelligent magic swords. So unless you want your session to devolve into an argument over whether a PC can wield that +3 sword without taking 1d6 damage per round, it’s important to get these things straightened out before play begins.

Are alignments descriptive or prescriptive? If a player writes “Chaotic” on his character sheet, is that an acknowledgement of the character’s leanings or a statement of intent that will drive the character’s actions? The Moldvay Basic rules suggest both; one’s alignment is a “way of life,” but it merely provides “guidelines for characters to live by.” If the DM thinks a character isn’t being played in accordance with her alignment, he may either suggest that the player change the alignment or impose a “punishment or penalty,” but he cannot actually declare that the character’s alignment has changed.

Whether it’s prescriptive, descriptive or both, alignment can lead to problems:

1) “I’m just playing my alignment.” Many players mark their characters as Chaotic, Evil or Neutral as an excuse for antisocial behavior. Then they murder your PC, steal all of your gold or simply abandon you to die at the bottom of a pit. On the flip side, players who denote their characters as Lawful or Good may then go on to play the Morality Police and shut down the rest of the party’s efforts at muddling through the morally gray areas of the adventuring world. This behavior is justified—after a fashion—by a prescriptive reading of alignment. Sadly, even good-natured players can succumb to this error; choosing an alignment that seems interesting, they follow its prescriptions only to find that this spoils the fun of other people at the table.

2) “I’m not evil, I’m just misunderstood.” Conversely, some players perceive their PCs’ alignments very differently from the DM and/or their fellow players. Typically this involves a Neutral (OD&D / BD&D) or Chaotic Neutral (AD&D) character consistently demonstrating selfish, deceitful and cruel behavior. More dramatically, I still remember how the first session of one failed D&D game I ran several years ago devolved into a twenty-minute argument with the player of a paladin over whether it was appropriate Lawful Good behavior for her character to use poison or torture.

Common solutions to these problems involve either removing all mechanical support for the alignment rules, so that they’re simply descriptors that the rest of the group can ignore, or by cutting alignment out of the game altogether. But this isn’t wholly in the spirit of our exploration of old school play—and more to the point, it doesn’t help us play around with Moorcockean tropes involving sentient magical artifacts swaying our characters towards Chaos, Law or Neutrality!

My current take on alignment in the Glantri Red Box game is that most people are Neutral; they’re concerned with their own personal interest and that of their loved ones, and are not prone to grand gestures of altruism or treachery. On the whole, they prefer Law to Chaos because an orderly society benefits them more than it stifles them. The Lawful and Chaotic alignments are generally the province of ideologues, priests, madmen and the champions of supernatural forces.

When the alignment of a PC actually has an impact on play—such as through the acquisition of an intelligent magic sword—I’ll use the alignment on the character’s sheet as an indicator of the player’s intent, but if the written alignment is a serious mismatch for how the character has been played, I’m ready to declare that the written alignment is, in fact, incorrect. This is a tricky approach! I believe that it requires the DM to give the player every benefit of the doubt. To do otherwise would be terribly unfair; there’s an enormous amount of subjectivity here, and it can be arrogant and offensive to elevate one’s own opinions about a character over the opinions of that character’s creator.

(And when it comes to magic swords, I’m perfectly happy to allow a sudden alignment change to match the sword if the wielder is willing to swear allegiance to Law or Chaos. And that’s where those punishments and penalties come in…)

Recent Events in the White Sandbox, Explained: Ontussa the Sphinx

Like a proud father at his son’s elementary school graduation, James recently shed a tear of pride over the fact that the New York Red Box campaigns have matured to the point where our online discussion is so ingrown and byzantine that after missing a bunch of sessions it no longer makes a lick of sense to him, despite Zolobachai’s status as one of our original pioneers of the Caverns of Thracia (and James’ as founder of the Red Box).

Ontussa: Take a picture, it'll last longer.

Is it really as hard to understand recent events as it is to assemble IKEA furniture using the original Swedish documentation? No, not at all; everything makes perfect sense and is crystal clear when seen in the proper light! I have merely been remiss in my duties as explainer of the campaign, and will seek to remedy this lapse in a series of posts. To start with:

EVENT: The sphinx Ontussa has developed a powerful erotic fascination for certain members of our party. Khrystos seeks a herb reputed to be a feline aphrodisiac in the hills near the Stronghold of the First Principles, and while Lotur is too troubled by his temporarily fatal immersion in a water elemental to bathe in the ordinary sense, he has been observed using spirits of wine to perform daily ablutions that are not at all usual for him.

EXPLANATION: Ontussa revealed herself recently to be not merely a coin-operated dispenser of information, but a tragic victim of the necromancer Ashur Ram. What a cruelly ironic fate for a sphinx, forced to answer questions instead of posing riddles! (The parts about hanging out waiting for people to come by and eating them if they make the wrong move are immutable.) Of all the ways a NPC could take independent action to endear themselves to the party, giving back a jewel they’d just handed over in payment is high on the list. Perhaps it is this glimpse of her hitherto unsuspected personality that has won the hearts of our PCs.

More likely, it is the more-than-a-glimpse of the feminine attributes of her human half which have been on display all along. True, the campaign features other, non-bestial female NPCs like the charming Philomena and the provocatively-named Maxsielle the Evil High Priestess, and even actual female players like Emurak, White Rose, and thistlyn. But did any of them appear topless in the AD&D Monster Manual?

You might say “no, but neither do they have the hindquarters of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and a reputation as a merciless man-eater.” (That last might not be true of Maxsielle.)  Still, the eagerness with which I would embrace lobster-headed Blibdoolpoolp argues that having your image burned into adolescent retinas will overcome a great many obstacles to love.