Skills in Old-School Gaming

              One of the most important things in any role-playing game is WHEN should a die be rolled. Controlling this is one of the DMs most coveted tools because it can set the tone for a game. In general rolls can be done in one of three places, before the fiction, during the fiction, and after the fiction. When a roll is called for and used determines a lot. If we are discussing D&D (and its clones) the older we go the less skills there tends to be. So, when should you roll a Find Traps roll with a PC? Does the PC have to say they are using the skill? Should the PC roll it or should the DM? How detailed should the PC be about what they are doing? These are some of the questions that DMs face when running a game. I am sure that some people will claim to have the “right” answer to this question. I personally feel there is no “right” answer, just the answer that works for me. This is how I use skills in my game and some of my rationale for why I use them that way.

                To ruin some of my “old-school credibility” I play in a semi-monthly 5e game with my friend who I started D&D with in 1990. One thing that I hated with the 5e system (that many, but not all people do) was the idea that if my character does something directly it triggers a roll, not a solution. Example: My dwarf examines a treasure chest, I specifically state that I am looking in the keyhole for a needle or device. I even stick a knife blade into it to spring a possible trap if one is there. I am told to roll a Perception check with advantage, I still roll poorly. My character decides to open the chest and I am stabbed with a poison needle. If I were running this in my games, the PC would have seen the trap without a roll, because they were looking in the right place. If the player does a thing and, in the fiction, it makes sense they would see a thing, then they do. I assume competency on the part of the PC characters. I see DMs report running this style of game all the time. One in which the PCs must be EXTREMELY specific in what they do to figure out traps and the like. You might believe this is abundantly correct, but then the issue comes up, what is the Find a Trap skill used for exactly? If I need to be specific about what I am doing, and I don’t specifically mention I look in that keyhole should I roll? Should I automatically get hit with the trap? How much detail does a PC need to go into to gain a benefit? More importantly, what is more fun?

                This is how I run it, I am not claiming this is the only or best way to do it, just how I run it for my games. First off, if the PC does an action, they do an action. If they state they are searching the throne for buttons that activate a pit and there is one, they find it. Second, I use the 1-in-6 type rolls often as a passive alert. If the PCs are moving at “Dungeon Speed” the idea is that they are mapping, trying to be quiet, and looking for things out of the ordinary. I will roll for them to find a trap even if they are not specifically looking for it. If they approach a door and they should be able to hear a ruckus party going on in the other side of the door, they hear it. If there is a possibility of hearing it, I will roll for them, many times without them even knowing. I allow these skills to be used as shorthand too, to speed up game play. If we went into EXTREME detail for every room the PCs come into with their searching, we would possibly clear three rooms a night. I allow them to say “We search the room for X.” I will then make the appropriate rolls. I will often telegraph in rooms with interesting things (secret doors, hidden treasure, etc) with details so they can zoom in on that. If they want to tell me specifically what they are searching, I will then decide accordingly. I do not think this was the intended way to handle these situations, but I think it is fair and efficient.

Demi-Humans often must pay a premium (in XP) to get bonuses to these skills, so let them be skilled in it. I often roll the player(s) with the highest in each skill first, to see if they notice, then everyone else. Once one player achieves the roll, I usually stop. I let that character shine. You will notice that the Elf in my game often hears things and finds hidden doors and no one else does. Because I tend to roll him first and he then gets to take his moment in the spotlight. Making sure that everyone feels their character adds something to the party is important. Even the filthy Demi-Humans.

I also tend to use Ability Checks which can be controversial in the Old-School community. I do not think I overuse them, because of assumed competency, but they are still used. I try to keep in mind that Magic-Users know magical stuff, Clerics know religious stuff, Dwarves know dwarven stuff, etc. I generally give them automatic information based on their realm of expertise. Ability checks come in to adjudicate things that fall outside the common in those realms, they fill in the gaps so to speak. I also admit that I do far more INT and CON Ability Checks then others because I think the stats are under used compared to the others. This means having a higher INT and CON has some more useful benefits. I generally see Ability Checks as the opposite of Saving Throws. Saving Throws happen when something is done to the PC, Ability Checks are when the PC does something to something else. I can see a game going on just fine without them and the DM just coming up with a X-in-6 chance of everything, but I enjoy them and will keep using them.

Overall, the thing I like about older systems is that they do not have a robust skill system. To me this was something that kind of spoiled AD&D and D&D beyond that. Second Edition’s proficiency system was too limiting in that they had TONS of skills, but you got so few you felt your character was inept. Third Edition you could do any skill and skills stacked with skills and had bonuses from class and feats and synchronicity and what phase the moon was in and the list goes on. It was too much. I like the way that OSE/BX keeps things simple, and it is a big reason I continue to use it.

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Two Days, Two Games, Two Systems

               This week I had the pleasure to run two days of D&D with different people and different systems. My long time group that I play with semi-monthly just finished Tomb of Annihilation, and it is my turn at bat. I was initially going to run Dragon Heist, but after reading through it I found it a bit too linear for our group’s taste, so I went with Storm King’s Thunder. Saturday was Gary Gygax Day, and I decided to run B/X D&D at a local store The Strange Realms. I had to go with a module created by Gary, so I went with B2 Keep on the Borderlands. It was a fun couple of days, though between work and D&D my voice is shot. This article is intended to reflect on the differences between running the two systems with less than a 24 hour gap between them.

Image take from here.

                Starting with 5e and Storm King’s Thunder (SKT) and the first thing I noticed that the prep time it took for SKT was much more intense. SKT is sold as the marriage of a narrative story with a sandbox, in reality it is a narrative story with some sandbox elements stapled onto the plot. I remember seeing Chris Perkins interviewed about the writing of SKT, and he had just got done with the release of the well-received Curse of Strahd (CoS). Reports were coming in that people loved the complete sandbox experience of CoS, so he went back to SKT and added in some sandbox elements. That shows in the module. There are certainly choices that can be made, but at times they feel superficial. I will say for a narrative plot I find it superbly interesting. I will not go into excessive detail, but the King Lear-like plot drew me in, and was a big decision in wanting to play it. Also…..Giants. They are just a cool enemy to use. They are powerful, versatile, and have interesting culture. They can be negotiated with, bargained with, pleaded with, etc. Also, their reasoning in the plot makes sense.

The art for SKT is stylish.

               I’ve been playing 5e for some time now, basically since it came out. I was in on the open beta test and saw the system evolve over time. Funny enough, I can’t remember if I have run 5e before? I know I have never run it in a long term format. I might have run some mini-campaigns (2-3 sessions) a few years ago, but I might have just used Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP). I honestly cannot remember. This was a different experience. My GM chops are still there, but I kept muddling old systems into my vocabulary. An example was that I wanted a player to make a check to see if they fell off their horse and I said, “Um…make a Riding check…like is that a thing anymore…no that’s 3^rd…how about Athletics? Or maybe Animal Handling? I don’t know, pick one.” Terminology aside, I also am not a big fan of initiative, I fell into my old school mentality of asking for declared actions, then just using side initiative. I believe that is an optional rule in the DMG, but not sure? The players did not seem to mind and the combats flowed nicely. The game mechanics overall flowed smoothly, and it made my job as a GM easier. I will do a full session write-up on SKT in another post and will link it here.

                Saturday was B/X and venturing into the Caves of Chaos in B2: Keep on the Borderlands (KotB). As in comparison with SKT, this took very little time to prep. Players made two characters each, and everyone was done in about 20 minutes, and I glanced over the module in prep. There is no real plot in KotB, the assumption is that you are people that want money, and the Caves have money. Your job is to get that money. It pitched it, as many do, “You all could be farmers, but you do not want to shovel shit forever, so you think it is worth the risk to steal from monsters.” I like the idea from LotFP that ALL adventures must be a tad “off” in order to go into caves with literal monsters for profit. For those that do not know in many older editions of D&D experience was HEAVILY tied to money. You received 1 XP per gold piece you retrieved from the wild. XP for monsters is drastically reduced. This leads to a system that rewards getting money without combat. This comes even more into play, because combat is extremely lethal.

Possibly the most played module in history.

                The players in my game were confident and ventured into the caves. The first room they explored was the Ogre lair, and dispatched the Ogre with some reasonable tactics and a bit of luck. They managed to trick the goblins, steal some of their loot, negotiate with Hobgoblins, and get back to the fort. They rested for a week, stocked up on some supplies, the looked over some retrieved items, and headed back to the Caves. By this time the Goblins had betrayed the Hobgoblins to the Orcs and Orcs were raiding Hobgoblin territory. They agree to kill the Orcs for the Hobgoblin chief for money. The plan went well, till it didn’t. One player early in the adventure tasted a potion and discovered it was an invisibility potion. He found a second potion and tasted it, and died due to the poison. They pressed on and fought four Orcs, with the help of six Hobgoblins. A single Orc with 1 HP left managed to take out half the party in a few lucky rounds. There was only one PC left and they took the money and retired. We could have gone one, but our time for the game had ended, and this seemed appropriate.

                Now to my favorite part, the compare and contrast. 5e has a lot more to hang your hat on as far as mechanics go, and that has its pluses and minuses. It is nice as a GM when a rule already exists and is reasonable to use. 5e is full of these types of rules. This requires little thought on my part, and it allows me to focus on bring the plot points to the front. The issue is when you run into a situation not covered by the rules because two things tend to happen. One, someone always remembers that there was a rule for it “somewhere” then the search begins, books are opened, Googles are checked. This all takes time, and bust the flow of the game. Two, if you have to make a ruling there are plenty of moving parts in 5e to try and take account of and trying to make a decision. Is it a skill check? A stat check? A saving throw? What about special abilities? Etc. This can also slow things down, and as Dune says, “Slow is the game killer.”

                B/X in general asks the DM to make a lot of calls because the rules do not cover as many situations. There was an expectation that each game would house rule a lot and figure out how to run it in that particular game. Because the game does not have all the moving parts, making a call is generally easier. There are just less factors to take into account. DMs end up making more of these calls over the course of a game, but they take far less time to resolve generally. The DM becomes mostly a rules arbiter in the game as opposed to a storyteller. I think in 5e those roles are reversed with the story taking precedent and rules arbiter falling in at second place.
              Lastly, it cannot go without mention that the lethal nature of the B/X edition comes into decision making all the time. The party in the KotB scenario did not use bad tactics, but things can go south very fast in B/X. Life is cheap in B/X, and you have to learn to roll with the punches. When players play tactically in 5e, there is absolutely nothing that can stop them. I will go more into detail in my full SKT write-up which should come out tomorrow.

Get'em boys!

                Both of the games are excellent, and generally lend themselves to a certain style of play. I think both can also be used to recreate any style of play, but you might just have to work a bit harder to do one over another. One thing that I was considering was doing KotB in every edition of D&D and write-up how they feel. I believe KotB has been done for every edition. If this is a thing, maybe I can try this in the near future.

I went ahead and created a Facebook group for the blog, if you are interested the link is here.

D&D Without Combat Rebuttal

               I recently read an article on Master the Dungeon called D&D Without Combat and I had a few thoughts on that idea. Can D&D be done without combat? Yes, but why would you? D&D does roughly three things each progressively worse, Combat, Exploration, and Roleplay. The rules support the first portion, Combat, quite explicitly. The rules are decent for Exploration as well, though you have to dig into the most DMGs to get the main thrust of that. D&D, regardless of edition, has either none or very few rules in support of Roleplaying.

This is the blog in question.

               Often I will be on the Facebook groups and a question will come up like this, “I want to run a game where my players are trying to solve a mystery and I don’t want to have any combat. How should I do it?” My standard answer is, “Don’t use D&D.” Why would you try and fit a square peg into a round hole? To be fair, the article admits, “Other systems might be more convenient for this, but we play DnD(sic)”. I find this to be a very silly conceit, “We play D&D therefore”. You don’t have to play D&D, there are other games out there that do not do combat well, but do mysteries very well. The Gumshoe System springs to mind, but there are plenty of other. 
               

Trying to cram D&D into every paradigm of gaming.

               I have literally played over 200 different RPG in my day, and for the past several years I was very into the Indie RPG scene. The games people produce can be ultra-specific to the exact thing you want to do. Why are you trying to shoehorn D&D into a one size fits all model? Do you want to play a game about the stresses of war and the bonds it can create, play Night Witches? Do you want a game about inexperience, young adults having to make life and death decisions about others, play Dogs in the Vineyard? Want to play a game about supernatural creatures and the torrid relationships they can get into, play, Monsterhearts? These games all have small premises, but do that one thing really well. 
               I do not want to get too hyperbolic, but this was the issue that brought about the “Dark Days” of D&D when 3.5 was out, and the entire RPG industry was making 3.5 products. The creativity in the market was stripped bare, because everything had to be “3.5 compatible” or it was not wanted and could not sell. This created a glut of product on the market, and the entire industry suffered, not just WotC. I think the people at WotC are being smart these days and not trying to make D&D an “everything” system, and focusing it on its strengths; Combat, Exploration, and some light Roleplaying.
            I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with playing a non-combat D&D game. The author of the articles does have some good ideas if you choose to do it. I just think you might be better served to try and find a game that does what you want in a better fashion. We are not living in the 1970s anymore, and only have a few games to choose from. There are thousands of choices out there, you just have to open to it. 

Does edition in D&D dictate tone?

I am not the first, or best to comment on this subject, but these are some of my ideas on the topic. I have been thinking about this a lot lately and wanted to write a little bit about it. I currently run a 2e weekly game, with my students at a local community college, and I am a player in a semimonthly 5e game with friends I have known for 30+ years. There seems to be a trend online, or at least on the pages I visit, that any system of D&D can run games in any manner that is chosen. I believe that this is correct, but I also think that the tone is easier to set with certain rulesets.

When I was getting ready to start my campaign last August, my group at school was 5e players, who I had run several games for in the past. I mostly ran 5e for them, but on occasion, I would bust out a B/X clone and run them through a quick one-shot for that week. The dichotomy of the two systems was very stark, and easily noticeable. The level of “heroics” was different in both games, 5e characters were much more capable, and even able to venture off on their own with less risk. The lines between character classes was blurred, because often a “fighter” character would have some abilities from another class, and vice versa. This created a tone that lead to some very interesting, but often silly results. It was very harder to get a serious tone in a game where their lives generally are not at risk, without total overkill.

In 5e you can create a Batman like character, that can do it all.

I wanted to get a different reaction, and I did by having a campaign that is set in an OSR ruleset. The group quickly learned a few lessons while dungeon delving, doing “silly” actions like trying to ride the giant worm ends badly, splitting the party is bad, protect the magic users, etc. A group of goblins or kobolds were dangerous opponents, not fodder. Players generally “stayed in their lane” as far as the classes went, and were forced to work as a team. Fighters do not have magic, thieves must try and counter traps, and clerics need to rescue people. Everyone had a specific role in the machine, and the machine broke down if they all did not play their parts. This lead to some other interesting changes that I noticed with the players, they took the game more seriously overall, because they knew death could happen, and they felt attachment to the characters, because they had earned things. Each XP was hard fought, and when a character earned a level, it had a bit of weight.

This lone dude is in trouble, never go alone in OSR.

There is one of my players that floats between my game, and the 5e game that is concurrently running in my club. It is funny to watch the change in her style between the two games. Overall, she plays bombastic characters, but she has to give some pause when playing the older style, because leaping before looking can cause major issues for the party as a whole. This is a change that I like, because in general I do not like the frivolity of decisions that 5e can sometimes generate, in my experience.

In talking out the other side of my mouth, something I like about 5e is that it is harder for one goofball to spoil the bunch. I had issues with a rogue player in my games. (Rogue as in, didn’t work with the party, not a thief. He was actually a wizard) He would cast spells, just to cast them, not caring if they hurt the party or other players. This really hamstrung the group, I think a 5e game could handle one misfit player better than an OSR type game, where everyone needs to be on the same page.

No Edition War

This is not meant to start an editions wars type conversation, and say one edition is better than the others. This is just to say that one edition might be better at evoking a certain style/tone then the other. The newest edition is great for heroic fantasy, where people dive into danger without a second thought. OSR games can add a certain gravity to the games, where you must plan your actions and use teamwork to overcome an obstacle. I enjoy both for different reasons, and I play both with different goals. I am glad we have so many options these days.