Anomalous Subsurface Environment

Behold the awesomeness. Yes, it's kind of small.

I am using ASE1: City of Denethix and Dungeon Level 1 in my White Sandbox campaign because it is awesome. If you are playing in my game, please do not read it. This is the only permissible excuse for not doing so, and White Sandbox players are encouraged to pick up copies but not read them; putting them under your pillow may cause some of the awesomeness to seep in.

Here is a bit of the module in actual play, from the summary of session #50 by myself and Ookla’s player flyingace:

Inside they found an octagonal room with three doors marked “Barracks”, “Main Generator Core”, and “Colossus Research Facility”. They decided to explore the latter, but as they did they were followed by a number of automatons in the shape of dwarves, who insisted that they identify themselves and requested that they follow them to speak with the Sargent who would know what to do with them. Ookla asked whether the Sargent was expecting them, trying to ascertain whether they were in some sort of mystical/mechanical communication with the entity. They replied that he was not and inquired after Ookla’s identity. Yelling “My name is Jimminy Cricket and I’m here to make with the rescue!” the previously invisible Ookla became visible as he launched into an attack of one of the mechanoids. Ookla, Tobias, Rolzac, Nolgur and the tuxedo-bedecked gorilla who resembled Groucho Marx dispatched the automatons, but not without the loss of the gorilla. Thirster noted that he was unable to draw forth any souls from the mecha-dwarves.

I have seen ASE described as gonzo, but in a campaign where players (Jedo, to give credit where it is due) have researched spells to procedurally generate monkey butlers according to which species of great ape they are and what comedian they resemble it is actually a reasonably realistic backdrop for adventure.

When Players Frustrate Themselves in Sandbox Play

The promise of sandbox play is that players can choose to do whatever they’re going to enjoy doing in a wide-open environment. In practice, though, it often doesn’t work this way.

Some of the problems come at the beginning of the campaign, when a lack of information prevents players from translating “what is there for our characters to do” into “which things will be fun for me as a player.” This is a pretty well-discussed problem, with excellent suggestions from the classic sources including the West Marches and Rob Conley’s Bat in the Attic.

A problem I haven’t seen discussed as much develops in a sandbox campaign that’s well underway. The players have made a choice about what their characters want to pursue, and they’ve really gotten invested in it. The problem comes when that investment turns the sandbox into a tunnel of the player’s own making.

In the White Sandbox campaign, we saw that happen between the second and third level of Caverns of Thracia. The players had identified “killing the Beast Lord” as the thing that was going to be fun for them. But the intense opposition they faced as they drew near his domain was pushing them towards a style of play they really didn’t enjoy. Hiring a big force of mercenaries and pushing these disposable troops in front of them seemed like the only solution available to them. They wanted to kill the Beast Lord with the same madcap brio they’d dealt with previous encounters, but the way the dungeon was set up made this difficult to impossible. (Ray Weiss told me that this is an emergent property of dungeons stocked using the OD&D procedures; perhaps, as Oban was saying, “saturday night specials” are assumed to become important in this zone, so that the generated treasures no longer have to carry the load of character advancement.)

As the referee, it was really clear to me that the sandbox was full of other dungeons that would support that style of play – many of them also designed by Paul Jaquays.  As I watched the players becoming frustrated with Caverns of Thracia, I suggested in increasingly overt terms that they might want to try going on some side treks which I knew they would both enjoy more for themselves, and would also yield the gold and magic items that would allow them to become powerful enough to deal with the Beast Lord’s forces in their accustomed style. But there was a remarkably strong commitment to continuing to bang their heads against the same wall.

This seems to me to potentially give the lie to the sandbox promise: all the opportunities to choose what you’ll enjoy are for naught if you can’t unchoose a previous decision that is proving not to be enjoyable.

In the Adventurer Conqueror King demo we ran earlier, I refereed for characters who were about the same level as the Grey Company of old. The key difference was that the players had also previously played the characters who were the mentors and lieges of these “adventurer”-level characters. In this role, they chose which mission their low-level characters would be assigned to.

The intentional design feature was to highlight the ways that the different spheres of activity in ACKS come together. Over a long-term campaign this can become clear, but in a demo where each player might only participate for a few hours, we needed to highlight right away all the experiences that ACKS supports. Having players switch their viewpoint between three characters at different levels proved to be very successful in this regard. (I initially resisted the idea because I don’t love the troupe style of play in Ars Magica nearly as much as I love its noun-verb spellcasting. I think the difference is that in Ars Magica, a grog will never become a companion will never become a magus, so switching viewpoints feels like playing different games. In ACKS, the organic progression from adventurer to conqueror to king makes switching as natural as reading Conan stories outside the character’s internal chronology).

The unexpected design benefit of this is that it offers a way for players to switch out of the mindset that leads to frustration. In the Abandoned Monastery, the low-level party ran into bugbears tough enough that the characters had to retreat and rest after a single fight. Normally this is where the dogged “never surrender even if it becomes a bitter grind” approach sets in.

But because  I thought it might be a good switching point, I said “OK everybody, your lieges don’t want to see you get killed and they do want you to come back with information. Do you want to try to return through the wilderness and report – in which case we’ll play out what the kings do with this new data at the domain level, and you’ll get a pat on the back? Or do you want to go back in the dungeon and get something for yourselves, whether that’s treasure or revenge?”

Framing it this way turned around their initial beat-head-against-wall tendency. I think it’s because it offered a choice where both results would be fun. A choice between admitting defeat and going back for another beating is never fun. So introducing the option of switching to play the characters who had a different range of things to do, related to but possibly independent of the situation with the bughears, restored the wide-open possibility of doing lots of enjoyable things that is, to me, the essence of sandbox play.

One of the design posts of Adventures Great and Glorious mentions that players will play factions instead of characters, which I suspect is going to afford the same kind of anti-frustration switching of perspective as we’ve evolved through the ACKS demo and the playtesting thereof.

 

Caverns of Thracia: “Mwa Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha”

After the adventurers in the White Sandbox defeated the Beast Lord, I asked them to sign my copy of Caverns of Thracia in memory of all the great times we’d had within its pages. Tonight I collected the last signature in the set: Paul Jaquays relishing the hundred-plus hours of suffering his brilliant dungeon design inflicted on y’all, which made the final victory so sweet.

The Power of Saying No

The New York Red Box group has two ongoing old-school campaigns: Eric‘s Glantri and my White Sandbox. Just as the presence of two professional baseball teams in NYC gives rise to the enjoyable rivalry of the Subway Series, the different approaches of these two campaigns create one of the productive tensions within our group.

I’d estimate that about a third of us play regularly or semi-regularly in both campaigns, with the remaining two-thirds being players in only one or the other. This largely boils down to whether people are available on weeknights for Glantri, on weekends for White Sandbox, or enjoy the luxury of having time for both.

But even if the division within our player base is basically due to factors extrinsic to the game, all of us enjoy having two mirror-image campaigns so that we can better understand the way things go in this one by comparing it to the way they do it over there.  As Naked Samurai memorably expressed:

Most of the Glantri campaign believes the White Box campaign goes like this. The session starts in a magic item bazaar, where they pick up stray magic items with the metric assloads of gold they are carrying in bulldozers. After lapping up a few Staffs of Striking and a Long Sword of Sharpness +4 or two, they wander around a valley until they seduce a few werebears, who sire their children. Then they enslave, like, a few tribes of gnomes to take care of their griffon mounts and tiny giraffes. After threatening several giant kings, who aren’t worth their time, they bump into a couple demons from the depths of hell, who they vanquish within half a round. Then they discuss, philosophically, why death has no meaning, as they stroll back home.

Not bad for fourth level characters.

Is this just the grumblings of players who should be content that they survived an adventure in Glantri, and even came away with a single silver spoon as treasure? No, there are indeed measurable differences that underlie the distinction N.S. is making here.

As in chaos theory, many of the biggest separations  in how the campaigns have evolved come from their original conditions. The Glantri campaign has always started new PCs at first level, while characters enter the White Sandbox at third level (following my decision to use Gygax’s house rules). At that link Cyclopeatron notes that “Gygax’s house rules are interesting because most of them make characters stronger”, but even the pre-house-ruled systems Eric and I each use differ in this regard; spells like hold person are much more potent in OD&D than their counterparts in Moldvay/Cook B/X.

But other differences suggest a divergence in play styles. James’ analysis of XPs earned in each campaign suggests that the rate of advancement per session of adventure is eight times faster in the White Sandbox than in Glantri. The fact that the bulk of these experience points come from gold means that we do indeed have adventures structured around the logistical difficulties in moving metric ass-tons of coin – one of the few kinds of difficulty that Glantrian players are not regularly exposed to. Back when we were grinding through the upper levels of the Caverns of Thracia, I made a conscious decision to increase the treasure levels (to a rough guideline of 4 gp for every 1 combat XP, suggested by Alexander Macris in a comment here at the Mule way back when) and have been playing out the implications ever since.

I’ve been saying recently that the White Sandbox is an exploration of the improv principle “always say yes”, while Glantri is a demonstration of the power of saying no. You could perhaps map this onto the distinction between paidia, “the power of improvisation and joy,” and ludus, “the taste for gratuitous difficulty.”

Let me be clear that I’m not painting Eric as a joyless denier, or saying that the only reason to play in Glantri is a masochistic enjoyment of difficulty for its own sake. Experiences are fun because they balance both of these extremes; awesomeness is produced by the tension between them, and I can personally attest that the Glantri campaign is a reliable source of awesome fun. I’m interested in seeing Glantri as an example of the power of saying no because I need to harness that power for my own play, which has a tendency to go too far in the other direction.

Here are the things I think saying no contributes to a RPG experience, especially in a long-form campaign:

• The satisfaction of overcoming opposition. Players in the White Sandbox really are worried about death losing its sting; even as raise dead becomes a more common event in the campaign, they want the possibility of the ultimate, character-sheet-shredding NO. (Spiritual mishaps are one way we’re hoping to balance these). The more often a character’s desires are denied, the more thrilling it becomes when they finally succeed. Heroes with a surplus of Staffs of Striking can be hard to challenge, whereas in Glantri, as Naked Samurai said earlier in the thread quoted above, “we need to actually be, you know, resourceful, to make it down the river.”
• Maintenance of a consistent reality. Gene Wolfe turned me on to Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries, many of which have a structure in which the priest-hero does things that seem really shocking and the mystery is why this is actually moral and necessary. There’s a great one where Father Brown sees this young man watching raindrops on a tavern window, and subsequently abducts him and ties him to a tree out in the rain. “I could see that you were on the verge of a grave theological error,” our hero explains. “I knew that you were thinking that the course the raindrops took was a product of your own mind, and took it upon myself to demonstrate that there is a reality upon which your desire not to be tied to a tree has no bearing.” Saying no to things that violate the fictional reality is necessary not only for believability and immersion, but also player agency. The world needs to work in predictable ways for people to be able to plan the likely consequences of their actions; we base our game-world expectations on our common experiences of the real one, in which stubbed toes reliably refute solipsism. The higher power level in the White Sandbox makes this harder because each magical effect the characters can produce gets us further away from the world in which we know what is and isn’t possible.
• Lines and veils. I realized how much I’ve internalized the New York Red Box’s coolness policy about what kind of things shouldn’t be brought into a game at all, and which other things should be alluded to instead of shown, when I recently participated in a game that wasn’t played in a public space. All of a sudden I was dropping f-bombs left and right, liberated from self-censorship and able to speak all the things I normally say no to.
• Maintaining the campaign’s tone. This is one Eric struggles with; having given up on a kind of saying no that looks like hard work means that my campaign automatically assumes the gonzo tone you get when nothing is forbidden. Wanting to do a different kind of game would mean having to say no to dissonances and mis-steps.

One thing I think is important is that saying no isn’t just something the DM does. That’s been the way it’s traditionally conceptualized, and in the above I’ve been focusing on Eric because as Glantri’s DM he’s the easiest way to personify that campaign. But in fact I’m the one who censors my own language when I play in Glantri, and I can’t think of any times I’ve needed to police the lines and veils policy in White Sandbox because respecting that is a communal effort.

This is crucial for me because I tend to get the power of saying no mixed up with having all the power and needing to be in control. When I’m DMing for kids and they come up with some totally unexpected idea, I often observe that my first impulse is to say no. On further reflection I realize that there’s no good reason to do so; in this context there’s no real game balance to be maintained, no consistent tone to be respected. I’m just reflexively saying no because I’m afraid that opening up to player input will cause things to spiral out of control and fall apart, with the implied fallacy that I’m the only important one who is capable of holding it together.

Saying no is one of the DM’s jobs, and in the afterschool class it’s a job I get paid for despite not doing it very well. Being disciplined about defining where the power of no holds sway is important, because it makes improvisation joyful by providing something to strive against. But doing this can be a collective part of playing, and sometimes relinquishing control to the players lets them enjoy the power of saying no.

In the White Sandbox, James gets a lot of enjoyment out of his character Arnold Littleworth, d/b/a Zolobachai of the Nine Visions, because he’s decided never to memorize any useful spells whatsoever. Even in a campaign where endless tiny giraffes could be his for the taking, he’s created his own gratuitous difficulty in order to make the one time that a useless spell saves the day a triumph over adversity. Sure, that adversity is imaginary and self-imposed, but what in D&D isn’t?

Funky Blank OD&D Character Sheet

Front page

Back page

As promised when I posted long ago about my 4E character sheets, here are my OD&D sheets. I made these at the very beginning of the White Sandbox campaign, when both my mastery of GIMP (lots of the sheet involved literal cutting and pasting) and understanding of what kind of things would be desirable to have on a sheet were in their infancy. If I were doing this again, I’d want to give more room for special powers, include a worksheet for detailing the attributes of custom classes (by listing those of the fighting man, magic-user, and cleric and having players circle which ones they chose or what they replaced them with), and also incorporate a “paper doll” for showing where equipment is carried and which of it might explode.

You are invited to download .jpg versions of the front page and back page from box.net, which hopefully are of sufficient quality for printing.

we killed the beast lord. you missed it.

The Beast Lord enjoys his last meal

Tavis’s White Sandbox campaign is largely centered around Paul Jaquays’s 1979 masterpiece, The Caverns of Thracia.  On Saturday night, we defeated its arch-villain, Stronghoen the Beast Lord.

Thirty-seven players and fifty-five characters have played in the sandbox over its twenty-two session lifespan, and they’ve all been gunning for this moment.

What was most impressive to me is that defeating the villain was a beautiful team effort, in which everyone at the table that night played a part.

The Cast

Ookla the Mok, Elvish Ranger
Theos, Dwarven Magic-User (played by JoeTheLawyer)
Lotur the Scurrying Cur, a Fighting-Human (played by Greengoat)
Thales, a Faun
Arnold Littleworth, a Human Magic-User (played by me)
John Fighter, a Fighting-Human
Merselon the Magnificent, a Fighting-Human
Lucky, a Fighting-Hobbit (played by Eric)
THE SPIRITS OF ALL RED BOX CHARACTERS EVERYWHERE

Snapshots of Awesome

Ookla the Mok

Fred the Talking Fish (billion years old, made out of wood, you wear it around your neck, it never shuts up–in short, don’t ask!) cast an illusion on Ookla so that he looks like an Ixchel wearing a sombrero. Ookla would spend the next several hours going “Boogita-boogita-boo!” to every NPC in the game. (Dave had another awesome moment below, but I’m not sure if it was OOC brainstorming or in character.)

Theos the Renegade Dwarven Magician

Armed with our wand of paralyzation, Theos – unafraid to scout ahead – immobilized half a dozen slime-monsters which exploded out of barrels dropped by an especially pesky group of vines.  (He later made a pretty strong bid to operate the wand of wonder while high, which given Tavis’s glee at the idea would have been disastrous but showed massive courage.)

Lotur the Scurrying Cur

After overcoming a swarm of slime-monsters, Lotur ran up the side of a cave wall, and jumped down in front of a female Minotaur so impressively that she decided to worship him.

Thales the Faun, a Faun

Being half-goat means you can haltingly communicate to half-cows. (Who knew?) Thales managed to interview the female Minotaur, discovering much about their lair.

Arnold “Zolobachai” Littleworth

Armed with this information, Arnold cast Zolobachai’s Impertinent Invitation and strolled into a Minotaur Sorority Party. When his attempt to poison everyone failed, he made friends with their Druid-Queen Raven Gargamel.

(It turns out Raven’s gang views the Beast Lord as a sell-out to the lich roaming the dungeon, and she agreed to help fight the Lich if we first neutralized the Beast Lord.  She gave us a straight line of access to the Beast Lord’s palace.  I am pretty sure she didn’t want us to kill him, cannibalize his body for trophies, and then cook what was left in Arnold’s trusty frying pan, but all good relationships are built on keeping some facts strictly to yourself.)

John Fighter, True King of Thracia

With the help of our scouts, John found a group of ten were-bears whom we sorta knew.  After getting the bears good and drunk on Lucky’s dwarven ale, he promised them half the Beast Lord’s treasure if they would help us fight. Were-Bears are 6 HD monsters who cannot be injured by normal weapons – in other words, far more bad-ass than we are.

(So, with 8 of John’s soldiers, and 10 were-bears, we stormed the Beast Lord’s citadel. Everyone did brave things. Kudos especially to Ookla’s player, who ingeniously suggested using illusionary Harpies to trick the victims of a real Harpy’s mind-control powers. I don’t know if this was suggested in-character, so maybe it’s not an Awesome Thing for Ookla, but it was still damn clever, and built on an idea Joe had.)

Merselon the Magnificent

After the gang demolished six Gnolls, five Harpies and a Hydra, Stronghoen the Beast Lord and his group of Gnolls charged out at us. Though Theos managed to paralyze most of the Gnolls, Stronghoen incinerated all eight of John’s soldiers (including like 3 George Foremans) with a fire ball, which also put 5 of 7 party members at death’s door. When Arnold blinded the Beast Lord with the wand of wonder, MERSELON THE MAGNIFICENT magnificently vaulted into melee combat alone, and was the first of the Grey Company to draw the Beast Lord’s blood. For a round or two, Merselon fought the Beast Lord alone … until the Beast Lord slew him with single stroke of his enormous battle axe. It was an epic death.

Lucky the Hobbit

With Merselon down and the Were-Bears running away in terror, things looked grim. As Arnold desperately tried to revive the others, Lucky kept nailing the Beast Lord with critical after critical. As John, Ookla, and Lotur – all with 1-2 hit points – swarmed into melee, Lotur’s preposterous fumble managed to distract the Beast Lord long enough for Lucky to nail him straight through the throat with one of his deadly arrows, and as the Beast Lord fell to his knees, King John ran Stronghoen through with his blade, Heart of the Mok. (Then Arnold hit him upside the head with the busted frying pan.)

Lucky is more of a bad-ass than I'd previously assumed

Aftermath

We pretty much stopped right there: six survivors, each with one foot in the grave, gathered around the Beast Lord’s corpse in the depths of the Lost City. Though a Dog Brother was gathering reinforcements deeper in the palace and casting nefarious spells, the Slayers of the Beast Lord bowed their heads to honor all the brave souls who have soldiered at their side:

Merselon the Magnificent (Acrobat)
Christos, Assassin
Maldoor the M-U
Obscura the Illusionist
Lydio the Spider-Dwarf, M-U
Thisilyn, Cleric
Fostra, Archer
Caswin of Aeschlepius, Cleric
Emurak the multi-classed
Bartholomew Honeytongue, Cleric
Brother Gao, Cleric
Into the Mystic, Cleric
23, Robot Cleric
Myggle the Priest
Mallo Beer-bane, Cleric
Thorsten Skullsplitter (Fighting Man)
Garrett Nailo, (Cleric)
David Carradine, Monk
Colin, F-M
Tommy, M-U
Argus the Rat Knight, F-M
Narcissus, M-U
Elston, Elf
Sir Hendrik the Halfling
Garrock, Alchemist
Obamabiden the Druid
Fark the Dwarf
Dirk
Orb the M-U (and his spider)
Fletcher the Fighting Man
Janape
Bluto, F-M
Morena, F-W
Chance, Cleric
Billy the Rat
Nicholas, Cleric
Axum Maldoran (Axum)
Dr. Meridian Kaine the Cleric
Doghead the M-U
Tiburo, F-M
Wolfrey, F-M
Rebmik the Cleric
Balint, Sapper
Goo the baby Elf
Mariano the Fighting Man
Renaldo the Cleric
Florin the Dwarf
Oban the Cleric
B’Var the Fighting Man
Wallace the Caged (Fighting Man)
Mungar the Fighting Man
Tusk the Fighting Man

We could not have slain Stronghoen without their bravery, creativity, and fellowship.

The Spirit of the Staircase

Here are two things the title of this post does not mean:

1. A celebration of the  stairs, as well as the pits, ramps, and chutes, plus elevator rooms and often teleporters, that give old-school dungeons their awesome verticality. If this was that post, I’d note that many ways to go up and down is as much an essential element of a great dungeon’s  interesting-to-explore and meaningful-decision-generating spatial complexity as branching loops and hidden areas (and often creates vertical loops and searches to find a point of entry to something you know is above or below but presents no obvious way to get there). I’d trace the early history of verticality, which very rapidly goes from the organically evolved (1970-71’s Blackmoor Dungeon, where the connections between levels are many and complex but were likely created by Arneson superimposing the sheet of graph paper for each new level he was designing on top of the previous one and deciding which staircases would or wouldn’t exit on this level) to the highly designed (1976’s Dungeoneer adventures, where the rise and fall of elevations nestle on the same sheet of graph paper like origami before it’s folded, and were likely created by merging one’s consciousness with that of a being from a higher-dimensional space). And I’d theorize that this spirit of the staircase evolved from actual play as an immediate consequence of  the mythic underground idea that the treasure and danger increase the further away from the surface you get.
2. A new kind of incorporeal monster which can perceive you only when you’re changing elevation, presumably because it comes from another plane where either horizontalness does not exist or its projection into our realm is strongly tied to the Z axis.

No, this post is about the French phrase l’esprit du escalier, which means the clever things you only think of saying after it’s too late to run back upstairs and deliver them. (This post will also not be about the many awesome things that implies about French culture and trying to invent similar phrases to express the essence of fantasy cultures).

In last night’s game, our heroes caught G’ruk the Fishfinder, shaman of the lizardmen tribe in the Caverns of Thracia, alone and whacked him. (I’d say with extreme prejudice except that Chrystos, who speaks Lizardman, went to such great lengths to protest any possible anti-reptile discrimination.) One of the many grace notes in Jaquay’s creation is a wonderfully evocative list of the things Gruk is carrying, from the mundane (18 gold pieces, a human jawbone) to the appropriate (sacred rocks, divination sticks) and straight through to the mysterious (a bag of alum?).

That pouch is the focus of my esprit du escalier. So there are four little bags within G’ruk’s big belt pouch, right? The text says one of them has alum. Two are unspecified – I said bone dust and dried river mud, but in a minor instance of e. du e. I wish I’d made one of them the ochre he’d used to draw his stick-figure of the Lizard God. And one is a virulent poison in the form of an airborne powder that G’ruk would have thrown at his attackers to create a deadly 10′ by 10′ cloud if he had survived long enough to get a single action.

Well, remember what happened last time the party found four mysterious bags within a bigger container and reached into one of them? The party sure does! (Hint: Fight Bag.) So John Fighter cautiously drags G’ruk’s corpse into another room where it won’t be discovered by his fellow lizardmen; cautiously loots his body; and, one by one, cautiously shakes out the content of the four little pouches…

Often, when I know some horrible fate is about to be sprung on the party, I go around and ask everyone what they’re doing. And usually, my emphasis on where exactly they’re doing it causes a mad rush to declare that, as James put it, “I’m further away than the person who’s furthest away.”

But in this case, the fact that John Fighter was about to cut short his own noble future and that of whichever PCs happened to be closest was an entirely unexpected treat. So my reflex was not to laboriously and tellingly establish locations, but rather to get right to making adventurers die.  Everyone was spread out and doing the kinds of wipe-off-my-sword-and-consult-the-map activities that traditionally follow lizardman slaughter, so I decided there was a flat 2 in 6 chance that any given PC was within the cloud of powdered save-or-die. The dice said Obscura, Lotur, and Arnold.

Sadly, James pointed out that he’d specified that the magic user formerly known as Zolobachai was doing something with the altar, and as this was more specific than the usual “didn’t I say I was visiting relatives on another plane?” I was happy to let him avoid the cloud. Fortunately, John, Obscura, and Lotur all rolled such crap that not even the +2 bonus to saving throws decreed by the merciful Mr. Jaquays could save them. “Okay,” I said, “you’ve all been killed.”

However, late last night I realized a better way I could have pinned down the PCs’ location. Asking people where they are is a give-away, but people are used to me saying “It sounds like there are lots of things people want to do; let’s go around the table to make sure everyone gets a turn.” (The earlier parts of the session, which often kept the spotlight on one or two players, would have benefited from this approach, but I felt it wasn’t feasible when only one person spoke Lizardman or when traveling en masse through the unknown made it advantageous for one caller to direct the group’s movement).

In hindsight I wished I’d used a clever bit of misdirection: “OK, John Fighter is shaking out the bags; what’s everyone else up to?” The reason I wish I’d done this is not that James felt guilty about talking his way out of being in the cloud, when previous statements implied that Lotur had also been over by the altar. Using the dice to determine who might be affected kept me from worrying about being out to get anyone in particular, and I knew I wasn’t favoring James; if Greengoat himself had reminded me about Lotur’s stated actions at the altar, I would have let him off the hook. (I suspect Greengoat didn’t speak up because accidental poison inhalation during looting is entirely fitting for a PC named Lotur the Scurrilous Cur, and much as I love the character of Lotur I respected his desire to go out with a whimper).

No, I wish I’d slyly duped the party into telling me where they were standing because:

1) starting the go-round with a description of  what John was doing might have caused more PCs to gravitate over to him on the suspicion that he was about to find something particularly awesome, increasing the number of potential targets for G’ruk’s unplanned but effective post-mortem revenge. (This would have worked better if John wasn’t so unimpeachably righteous and unlikely to snarf treasure for himself).

2) when the poison killed them, the fact that they had just heard me point out in a casual way that John is shaking out the bag, what are you doing would have driven home their own culpability in their death and given them their own midnight regrets: of course, I should have known that dumping out a bag is as lethal as reaching into one!

P.S. As it turned out, one of the things Ookla’s character sheet brought into the campaign from another era of creation was three doses of anti-venom. Everyone revived by these made their “will survive adversity” rolls, so no casualties were lasting. Still, we’ve had a long a phase of expansion in which the party got lots of cool things (or, in Ookla’s case, was allowed to re-activate them as everyone else caught up to his level of bling), and I am now delighted to be whittling away these resources, one platinum liger at a time. (Newly acquired levitating 30′ long battle-drinker worm, I’m coming for you!)

arnold and the allosaur

I’ve been bad about blogging – I’ve got little to say these days – but let me tell you about my character… (And solicit your own tales of bravery!)

Last night, while exploring the Caverns of Thracia, my 4th level Magic-User Arnold Littleworth stared down an allosaurus which had just devoured our platinum robotic liger.

Rest In Peace, Loki

(Yes, we have had a platinum robotic liger.  This is not the focus of the story.)

Two things are noteworthy about this encounter:

1. The rest of the party all ran away in terror.  I won’t kid you, I wanted to run as well.  But to the true hero, glory matters more than life itself.
2. I cast a spell I researched: Zolobachai’s Impertinent Invitation basically allows you to mingle with monsters until the boss shows up.  Thanks to some sloppy drafting on my part, it worked perfectly in this situation.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time in the OSR that a Magic-User has researched a brand-new spell and cast it in play. (Though I’d be happy to be proven wrong.)

Not only has Arnold, also known as Zolobachai of the Nine Visions, traveled between two different campaigns, and been immortalized in print (entirely due to Tavis’s greatness) – but he is also Using Magic like a fiend.

What crazy, foolhardy tales of derring-do has your character been up to?  For me, this is the third or fourth time Arnold has risked crazy death:

• Arnold – no weapons, no “good” spells – brained a Lizard Man with his frying pan in his first adventure, purely to save Colin Tree-Slayer’s life.
• Arnold – again, no weapons or “good” spells – toppled a mind-controlling statue in order to save the party
• Arnold swindled an 11th level Wizard into eating Giant Eagle dung, in order to lift a curse on his comrade, Sir Argus the Rat-Knight
• The whole thing with the allosaur, yadda yadda old news

So although Maldoor is smarter, and Forager is more ingenious, and John is more noble, and Ookla is more sensible, and Chrystos is funnier–I think Arnold is hands-down the bravest and most gutsy.

Yes, I Defeated You (by just barely surviving)

I’d be happy to read tales of courage in the comments!

Don’t Make Me Remember that You Have Magic Armor

Another house rule we’ve recently adopted in the White Sandbox is that instead of affecting your armor class and thus your chance to be hit, each +1 worth of magical protection gives you a 1 in 10 saving throw against the effects of the hit.

Let’s say that Caswyn of Apollo is wearing one of the Gray Company’s namesake +1 cloaks of protection when he is struck by a medusa’s dagger. Caswyn’s player Eric calls out two numbers on a d20 and rolls it. If either of Eric’s lucky numbers come up, Caswyn’s cloak of protection has stopped the blow; he takes no damage and doesn’t have to save vs. the poison on the dagger. If Caswyn also has a +1 shield and +1 platemail in addition to his cloak, Eric gets to roll three d20s; of his lucky numbers come up on any of them, his gear saves him from harm.

The idea behind this house rule isn’t to change the statistical benefit of magical protection. Some rough analysis suggests that a 1-in-10 armor save helps you slightly more than a +1 to AC when you’re facing a high hit dice creature, and slightly less against a weaker enemy whose base chance to hit you is small. I see this as a nice side benefit, but the point is to change the way that magic protection feels. (For example, even if both are statistically equivalent, I think there is a very different feel in older editions when the target of a charm spell makes a saving throw and avoids its effects, versus in 4E when you make an attack roll for the spell and miss.)

A guiding principle for this house rule and the one about not rolling your hit points until you’re hurt is to take aspects of the game that normally get resolved off-screen beforehand and instead make them happen at the table as the spotlighted consequence of a dramatic event.

As the DM I roll to hit the PCs many times in an average session. When one of those blows would have landed if not for the protection of Fred the talking magic amulet, it’s obvious only to me. Even if I use this fact to narrate the monster’s miss, it doesn’t seem as real to the player as if I say “The minotaur’s axe slices you for six points of damage” and they get to respond “Not so fast, let’s see if Fred can save the day!” Owning a magic item, and being able to survive a lethal blow, should be remarkable. Highlighting these with a separate resolution step in play makes sure they get remarked upon.

It’s also extra work for me to have to figure out why a roll misses someone due to magic items. The armor save house rule unloads some work onto the players. One of the things I like about “three little books” OD&D is that AC can be directly translated into armor type. When we don’t use modifiers to AC from Dexterity or magic items, I simply track whether PCs are wearing leather, chain, or plate and then figure out AC from there. If AC is instead a complex composite of factors I have to remember both what a character’s AC is and also what armor they’re wearing, with all the other things that implies.

Another great thing about OD&D is that there’s a narrow range of AC. Even in magical plate and shield, a fighting man needs to worry about being hit by a lowly man-at-arms 20% of the time. I like this because even if a PC’s magical protection will stop a blow most of the time, I want to make the players sweat in the interval between when I announce the hit and when their magic save comes through for them! Also, when I have dozens of men-at-arms in the combat it’s much easier if I can just roll a handful of dice and count all the 17s or above, knowing that such rolls always have a chance of hitting any target.

Two final notes to put this house rule in the context of the original rules and in actual play. The text about magic armor and shields in Monsters and Treasure says that “Armor proper subtracts its bonus from the hit dice of the opponents of its wearer. If the shield’s bonus is greater than that of the armor there is a one-third chance that the blow will be caught by the shield, thus giving the additional subtraction.” Rather than try to reconcile the Arnesonian, Chainmail-based proto-D&D implications of that with the alternate-combat-system under which we normally roll, I’ll simply appropriate the idea of the probabilistic protection of a magic shield as support for the spirit of this house rule.

The need for these house rules came from a newfound prevalence of protective items  in the White Sandbox campaign. This emerged because, until last session’s return to the Caverns of Thracia, we’d been looting nearby destinations in Jaquaysland, like the Fabled Garlin of Merlin (The Dungeoneer #2, editor) and Borshak’s Lair (The Dungeoneer #3, author), as well as one unique to the campaign, the workshop of the lich Patariki Van in the Nameless City. The consequent increase in bling was purposeful; I love the Caverns, but their distribution of loot doesn’t leave adventurers well prepared to face the stiff opposition in its deeper levels. (At EN World, Bullgrit has raised similar complaints about B1: In Search of the Unknown. Evidence of an anti-“Monty Haul” backlash taking place between 1976’s rich hauls and the spartan offerings of TSR and Judges’ Guild in 1978-9?)

EDIT: Maldoor’s comment below reminds me of another rationale behind these rules: players like to search for anything that’ll save their bacon when a PC’s life is on the line. In more rules-heavy games, the party goes modifier hunting: “Did you remember your temporary hit points? Did the monster hit even with its -2 to hit from bane?” Having a rule that kicks in at this tense moment will hopefully replace the urge to rules-lawyer and find ways to retcon it didn’t happen. Also, a game in which a character is never in danger because of their unhittable AC is boring; one in which that same character is quickly brought to the edge of death because they don’t remember to make their armor saves until it really counts is exciting!

Don’t Roll Your Hit Points Until You’re Hurt

One of the notable house rules in the White Sandbox campaign is that hit points are rolled only as necessary to absorb a PC’s wounds, making it hard to gauge how much damage a character can or can’t take until their luck is put to the test. I find it easier to show how this works than to explain it. At the table I talk people through each step the first time they’re hit, like so:

Lotur the Scurrilous Cur is 3rd level, so he has three hit dice. We imagine each of these as representing a different aspect of his ability to stave off death: mental, spiritual, and physical. Because he was fully healed since his last adventure, we don’t know how many hit points he gets from each dice.

Not five feet into the dungeon, Lotur is hit by a gnoll’s arrow and takes six points of damage. The player notes on Lotur’s sheet that he has taken 6 points of wounds, and starts rolling his hit dice to see if he can absorb the blow.

If Lotur rolls a 6 on his first (mental) hit dice, it absorbs the wound fully. He crosses out that hit dice – we imagine that he’s run out of plans for dealing with gnoll ambush – and leaves the other two untouched and unknown. Unfortunately, he only rolls a 2. He crosses out his mental hit dice, and has four points of incoming damage left to absorb. He rolls a 1 with his second (spiritual) hit dice: he crosses it out. We imagine that he is demoralized, and still has three points of incoming damage.

For his last (physical) hit dice, Lotur rolls a six! He subtracts the three points of incoming damage, and notes that he has three hit points left on this dice. However, at this point we imagine that he is actually bleeding and has an arrow sticking out of him.

Oops, here comes another arrow! This one rolls a 2 for damage. We already know that Lotur has three physical hit points left, so he doesn’t need to roll any hit dice. His player crosses off two of the hit points remaining on Lotur’s physical hit dice, and increases his total wounds taken from 6 to 8.

Salvation arrives in the form of a cleric. Each point of healing delivered by the cure spell will subtract one from Lotur’s wound total. If the cleric rolls eight or more points of healing, all Lotur’s wounds are erased and all three of his hit dice are reset. However, the cleric only rolls a 3, so Lotur increases the hit points remaining on his physical hit dice from 1 to 4, and decreases his total wounds from 8 to 5.

Note that poisoned arrows have to get through to the physical hit dice to be effective, so there’s a benefit of having that dice untouched; and some kinds of healing will add to your spiritual or physical hit dice, but won’t work if those dice have been crossed off.

To answer some questions that tend to come up:

– When a character has more or fewer levels than they do physical/spiritual/mental hit dice, we assign extra or missing hit dice to one of the three categories depending on class. A fighter gets an extra physical at L4, a cleric an extra spiritual, etc. Then spread out until at L6 all classes have two of each.

– Once a character’s hit points have all been rolled, these rolls are kept only as long as they have wounds. When all wounds are removed, hit dice reset to unknown.

– High constitution provides a buffer after you run out of hit dice. Characters that are tough get 1 HP per hit die of buffer; exceptionally tough characters get 2 per die. So if a 3rd level PC rolled 12 for their HP, a tough one could actually take 15, and an exceptionally tough one 18, before collapsing.

This idea was inspired by Zulgyan’s method of rolling monster HD, and realizing that most of the d6’s I have are either red, green, or white, which I assigned to physical, spiritual, and mental.

I like this approach because it makes taking damage an exciting dice-roll contest between player and monster. As per Gary’s house rules we’ve started with third level characters, so when a PC is hit by a lizardman spear for 6 damage, there’s a dramatic sequence of rolls: does their knowledge of fencing techniques cover this? No, they roll a 2 for their mental hit dice, so there’s 4 points of damage remaining, and their plan for survival is in shambles. Is their esprit de corps sufficient for them to simply knock the spear aside? No, they roll a 2 for their spiritual hit dice, so there’s still 2 points of incoming damage and they’re demoralized. OK, are they hale enough for them to survive this thrust? No, they roll a 2 for their physical hit dice and die!

I also like the way that doing this helps imagine what different states of being wounded are; it helps systematize the idea that hit points represent divine favor and luck as well as sheer toughness.

In play it does take a little longer to resolve PCs taking damage than if players were just subtracting a number from the HP written on their sheet. It did mean that the math involved was a lot easier – take the # of damage dealt, subtract from 1 to 6, repeat. Plus, I feel like the risk of a player dying is worth spending extra spotlight time attending to, and I like how not knowing what your hit points are before they’re tested means that every wound carries the possibility of death. If a 3rd level character rolled a string of 1’s for their hit dice and was going to be stuck with that forever, I’d certainly let them re-roll, but this approach means that although such bad luck might mean your character gets sent to the graveyard, it doesn’t mean that you might as well roll up a new one even before they start adventuring.