AD&D Thoughtful Comments

If you don't know Benoist Poire, you should really check out some of his writings and work. He is probably best known for his work with Ernie Gygax Jr. on The Hobby Shop Dungeon under the G.P. Adventures company name. He has also become quite an AD&D advocate and has shared some very insightful comments about the theory behind AD&D, some of which I wanted to highlight today. The first was in a note he posted about AD&D level limits and how they structure the entire philosophy of the game.

Some of the insights he shared here, I had never thought of before. The idea that levels for instance were indicative of the number of men your character represented, from the old Chainmail days. How did I miss that? I mean, I'm currently going through a little project where I am rewriting the entire corpus o the little brown books and supplements to get a better grasp on the nature of the game. Somehow I totally missed that.

Conan, 6th level i.e. the equivalent of 6 Fighters

Something I was aware of was how Chaos and Law worked and how men differed from the demi-human races. I always knew D&D was always intended to be Human-o-centric because of this difference between Law and Chaos. Although I didn't read Poul Anderson's Three Hearts & Three Lions until last year, it really opened my eyes once I did. It also made me agree when Benoist so confidently says AD&D is not based on LotR. AD&D draws so much more from Vance and Anderson and others in Appendix N than it ever did from LotR.

The thing was, I never really knew this stuff back in the day. Am I biased to say it makes a difference now?

Well, I can say that when I read Benoist's note and other such insights he has offered up say, here




What I realize is that Benoist is capturing something that feels very familiar to me. This is the beauty of writing about games. Sometimes commentators are able to capture something that we didn't even realize ourselves. AD&D is what it is because of its rules and assumptions. And when we play that game those assumptions, mechanics and spirit come out in our play, define it, and give shape to the experience. That is what I'm talking about when I say I prefer this game. Yes its mechanics can be stilted and appear somewhat baroque or even "baroken" :-) but they are not. The mechanics are there to give spirit and feel to the game. AD&D is what it is and you have to appreciate it for what it is.

I play 5e currently, and the fact is, as Scott Anderson pointed out to me a couple of posts ago, 5e confounds me because it presents itself as something it is not. It is a very different game, with a very different feel. You have to accept it on its terms, not another's. The facts also speak clearly now, that 5e will never be what I want it to be. No matter how much Mike Mearls or  I try and AD&D-ify 5e it will never be AD&D. If you want the AD&D feel you have to play AD&D.

And Mr. Poire is doing an awfully good job of explaining what that feel is about and from whence it comes. Thank you sir.

"The Story's the Thing, Wherein We'll Catch the Conscience of" ...

I will admit that I am not the most savvy Facebook user, and don't even have an Instagram account. Recently my daughter tech-shamed me because I didn't know that my IPhone (I still have a 5) had a default flashlight function. I thought I needed a separate app for that. But, I would like it known I do _own_ an IPhone, I keep my computer up to date and protected. I am reasonably tech-wise, though I used to be much more so, I have begun to rely on my 18 year old for some things.

In gaming terms I am a decidedly old school guy in a new school world. I have been drug along with the new wave of gaming design and innovative mechanics all the while lamenting the good old days when we did everything with pencil and graph paper. But, I've come today to talk less about particulars and more about story.

The idea of story in roleplaying is not new or innovative. In fact most of us came to roleplaying for the chance to live out such stories we only read about in fantasy fiction or popular mythologies.  The chance to be the hero in shining armor, or swirling black cape, or with sizzling magical wand and facing the thrill of mortal combat with mighty dragons was what we all wanted. We wanted to be a part of that story. However, the idea that story was king in the game is a relatively new concept.

In old school D&D generally speaking we ran dungeons, sometimes hexcrawls, and dared our players to get through them alive. The few that did, and believe me it was few, grew into legends. Not only in the game world, but in our own minds as we replayed their triumphs and defeats again and again in our post game conversations. I still remember such heroes from my early gaming days. They were all the greater, it seems, in large part because it was so damn hard to survive in those early days. If you earned bragging rights in those days it really meant something!

The interesting thing is, that post Gygaxian gaming began to take a decidedly different turn storywise. If you take a look at product of the 2e period you see a much more story oriented focus in the game and the gaming products. Paradoxically this is, I believe, a result of Gygaxian Naturalism. People in the world have motives, purposes, schemes and plots. They don't always work out like we think, but they do. Combined with the obvious corollary that D&D was designed on the medium of literature, story became an increasingly expected part of the game.

And I do not decry this shift. I mean, one can choose or prefer one style over the other but I do not consider one better or worse than the other. And in fact many of us had already begun shifting in this way if we did any DMing for lengthy time periods. By that I mean running more than a couple of sessions and adventures connected by the same characters. We inevitably began to weave thew story around the PCs actions. Campaigns took on a decidedly epic feel as grand story arcs played out as players interacted with the world and the events therein.

Even if our story focus was no more than stringing together the relationships and happenings into one coherent weave or necklace to be appreciated for the narrative that it was. Our game style may be very un-driven by any story we wished to tell or "saw" happening as we DMed and our players reacted, but nonetheless a sort of organic story developed. Our job became the "seeing" of the story that had happened and beginning to make synchronicites and events occur in harmony with the story to give a greater sense of overall satisfaction.

The danger that arose about this same time was the anathema of the railroaded campaign where players began to feel they had no choice in the narrative at all, but were simply along for the ride while they DM told her own story and the PCs were given nominal choice if any at all. This kind of campaign arose for several reasons, but came about largely from the two play styles that ruled back in the day.

Sandbox play was quite common, especially once hexcrawls and topside adventures were more common. Essentially players had total freedom to spread about and investigate whatever they found interesting or appealing. Some DMs were literally blank slates, giving very little to their players in terms of hooks or hints as to where they might go, placing huge emphasis on the players to drive the action. And other DMS had planned out certain things and, not wanting to be caught unprepared, developed the quantum ogre to satisfy their need for the party to go to what they had planned regardless of what they thought they wanted to do.

The railroad story was very similar, in that the things the DM had prepped for the players revolved around an awesome story they so much wanted their players to participate in. So the railroad becomes plot points and clues and NPC interactions that simply have to occur if the players are to reach the next milestone in the story arc. When players frustrate their DM by not playing along or tugging against the direction of the story tracks, the DM gets frustrated and the railroading becomes stronger and stronger.

Of course, a lot of this can be resolved by the social contract at the start of the game and refined as the group grows in cohesion. The agreement we all sort of make when we sit down is that we are going to play together. We have to work together. But we also have to be at least in the same chapter if not on the same page. What do your players want and what do you want out of the game we are agreeing to play together? A consensus on such things helps avoids a lot of heartache later on. But I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

Storytelling is something I think later editions of D&D have gotten right. Just comparing the recent Lost Mines of Phandelver to something like the Keep on the Borderlands is a great case in point. I love Keep, and it was certainly sandboxy. However, what was not so clear was how to get the PCs there, keep them there, and get them involved in the rest of the adventures set about the region. Lost Mines, spends as much time on the village and the NPCs there as they do on the mines themselves. That's because what you need for story to unfold is context, meaning and connection. Sure, a story can unfold in Keep, and many did in my early gaming days. And there are, admittedly, little hints about how to weave reason into the campaign. But Mines does a much better job of giving the context for such things to happen. I would even make the same claim for Keep on the Shadowfell, another somewhat sandboxy campaign from 4e that was much easier to weave a story around the Keep on the Borderlands ever thought of doing.

I would even say that these adventures Shadowfell and Mines were part of what allows me to be somewhat okay with the edition I am playing, since the stories flow so easily out of these adventures. Now, maybe my own creativity was lacking. Maybe I was also a very young and inexperienced GM who barely knew how the play the game, let alone make it story-rich--all of which is very true. However, I can't help but think that if I had Mines of Shadowfell back in the day our games would have been that much more fun.

One last parting shot to make my point and out of which this line of thought has grown. My players are just cresting 5th level in our current 5e campaign. I had planned for a long time to run them through the Slaver series, A1 to A4. The current campaign is cooking along rather nicely, and I was planning on having them make a run at the Slavers in Highport soon. However, perusing through the old adventures, I came across 2e's Scourge of the Slave Lords and the presentation of the slightly more challenging series of modules as an overarching campaign was much more of what I was looking for. I have been able to set up the transition from one phase of the campaign to the next with the help of this edition and am looking forward to how the story unfolds.

All of this may make me a more story driven GM than some of my other old school counterparts. Or maybe not, as I've made lots of assumptions--as always. Either way if you have an opinion feel free to weigh in. Where do you land on the story as old school vs story as new school spectrum?

5e and Feeling Confounded

I have played 5e now for the past couple of years. In fact, I have not played any other game but 5e in all that time. I have written about my struggles with this edition and I have written about the things I think it does rather well. What I have not written about is how confused it makes me feel.

Well, confusion is not really the word, it's confounded. That's the word, confounded.

Confound: cause surprise or confusion in (someone), especially by acting against their expectations.

"Acting against expectations." Yep, that would be it, right there. I just can't quite seem to get my head around this game. I think it may be the basic assumptions have changed a bit with 5e when compared with all other editions. I'll be honest, I disliked 4e more than 5e, but I was able to grok 4e better than 5e so far--and I've played 5e for longer. Why is this?

I'd like to point a finger at bounded accuracy, though to be fair I'm not sure that's the real issue. Bounded Accuracy (BA) was one of the basic assumptions that shifted with this edition. It gives the game play of 5e a different feel. Essentially, BA requires a balance related to number of opponents, not level of opponents. But, frankly it's not that simple.

I've read far and wide that the encounter building guidelines are broken for 5e, and have certainly found that to be the case in my experience. In a way this makes me feel better, since even the designers seemed to struggle with the sweet spot. Not to mention that the death save rules, and healing available makes risk even harder to manage. I constantly feel as if I am dancing between extremes. In one session characters seem to cake walk through encounters I thought would be tough, and in others sessions I feel like I'm constantly having to pull punches and adjust encounter builds or else they'll be wiped out.

I know specifics would be more helpful, but as I mentioned last time I'm not the best at record keeping, so giving you an example seems to lack the necessary details to really make an informed assessment. For instance, I'm currently running The Haunt, a brilliant little haunted house number as an add on to the current campaign. In one part there is a Beholder Zombie in a slime infested pool. I've got six characters of just past 5th level. Though the disintegration ray the beholder got off was a close call, the PC made his save. Next the fear ray, and again a save was made. And the beholder didn't get off a third shot. Druid used call lightning, and wizard was using fire based spells and one lightning bolt. ZB had 93 hp to start, the recommended amount in the MM. It was a cake walk and they got a flame tongue as a result.

Second encounter: 1 Cloaker hidden on a coat rack. Took a bit but eventually the cloaker hit the party cleric and within two rounds the cleric was dead.  Admittedly I rolled a 20, double damage, but still ... The Barbarian was paralyzed by fear from the Cloaker's moan, and only the Druid was left. In this scenario the party had become separated by the House, and so they were split in two, the Druid was going to bit the dust too, when the Bard found them. They managed to do enough damage to the cloaker that it chose to flee and hide.

Now, by encounter builder stats, my party should have had an easy time with the beholder zombie, and a hard time with the cloaker--because we were down to 4 PCs since the party got split. This seems about right, since the BZ was down in three rounds, and the cloaker about wiped out three of them. But you see, that's just it.  It doesn't seem right to me. I think the problem is that I am still adjusting from an old school frame of reference. You see, a cloaker was always a dangerous monster. But in 1e it had 6HD. It was nasty even then, but the 5e cloaker--holy snit you do not want to run into one of those. The beholder zombie? Well, they weren't around until 3e, and frankly I had never used them. Looking around the web, several people question if a beholder zombie is even suitable as a CR 5 monster. Let me assure you, it is.

The problem is us old guys are always used to thinking of a beholder as a massively dangerous critter. Well, the beholder zombie is considerably nerfed when compared with the true beholder. It's a problem of perspective. See in this case, the encounter building worked quite well, but I had come to not trust it, and it came back to bite me.

Which brings me to the dawning realization that maybe the encounter building system isn't broken, as much as it is built for a different system, a different game. The more I actually _play_ 5e the more I find there are times when it works amazingly well and seems to fade into the background like a good system should. What usually gets in the way is my preconceptions and prejudices that come from years and years of playing other editions. Which makes me feel confounded. I often step back from a satisfying game and say quietly to myself, "Holy hell, we were just playing 5e, and that went awesome!"

I feel confounded perhaps not because of 5e "not working" or "working differently" but because my experience predisposes me to feel differently. I've also noticed something else. As I transition away from 4e, and the over reliance on minis that game sort of left me with, I use minis less and less for every move, and more just for combat scenarios. And even then only when we need to make strategic decisions. As the party recently fought a ghost that had possessed a party member, there was no need for minis, nor strategic play on the mat, in was largely a psychic battle occurring inside the characters heads and wholly in the theater of the mind. And the effect was to make the encounter much more frightening because they were playing it all out in their head, without the distraction of the mat or the minis to take away from the horror of the moment. Classic moment had all in 5e.

I just came away feeling good about things, and about the game we were playing. This was confounding for me, because I had just felt really frustrated with the edition less than 2 weeks prior. So, yeah. Me and 5e, we are learning about each other. I've played almost every week, sometimes twice a week for two years now, and I continue to grow and develop as a gamer in this the most recent edition of the game.