Blue Book Brief Encounter

To join in the reminiscences over the work of Dr. J. Eric Holmes: I learned AD&D as my first system and ran a campaign from the DMG "as written" in high school, taking very seriously everything about the holy standard rules, drawing dungeons that filled up a whole sheet of graph paper, packed with a dazzling variety of monsters, and meticulously detailed with randomly rolled dungeon dressing.

Between that and my strict application of the punitive advancement rules, my campaign did not go down well with my players and I was deposed. Sometime after that, I found that the local library had acquired a copy of the Holmes rules, and I picked it up, curious about this "primitive" form of D&D.

What really opened my mind was the improvisational advice to DMs and the Tower of Zenopus adventure. It was spacious, not packed. It was stocked with focal puzzles, tricks, and features, not useless atmosphere. Its encounters put well-known critters in interesting situations, showing that a good adventure could be had without digging into the Fiend Folio (maybe another reason for the overthrow of my campaign). Most of all, it was described concisely so a large variety of possible situations could be shown.

Just that one example improved my DM craft, and indirectly led to my favoring more improvised scenarios and systems in college - and of course, my fascination with the spirit of original D&D now. So that's my toast to the good Professor.

Varlets & Vermin Supplemental: Sack Custodian

In the previous post I mentioned the M. R. James ghost story "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas." The protagonist, Somerton, follows a trail of cryptic clues to a treasure of ten thousand gold pieces from an old manuscript and stained glass window, ending up in a ruined abbey. Everything that happens next - the assembling of equipment, checking for traps, hidden compartment finding - is straight out of the adventurer's manual. What he finds there, though, is straight out of the adversarial dungeon master's menagerie...

This creature rounds out the other two M. R. James-inspired monsters in my Varlets & Vermin compilation. I can't help but think that even a level 1 adventurer would have been made of sterner stuff than Somerton; would have put the toad to the sword, or at least come back in the daytime better-prepared. But maybe the toad was made of sterner stuff, too?

SACK CUSTODIAN

Armor Class: 7 [12]

Hit Dice: 2

Attacks: 4 tentacles, 1d2 each

Saving Throw: 16

Special: Tracking, surprise, attachment

Move: 6

Challenge Level/XP: 2/30

Treasures owned or hidden away by priests and wizards of doubtful morality are infrequently guarded by the loathesome sack custodian; although the ritual used to summon it is not part of common knowledge. The rounded back of this toad-like creature blends chameleon-like with the other sacks that form the treasure. It will manage to be the topmost and foremost in the trove, and gains automatic surprise if picked up. The custodian's underside conceals a squashed, squinting face, four stumpy legs, and a mass of sharp, slimy tentacles exuding a strong smell of mold. 

Its first attack, ignoring armor, is merely to latch on to the victim. Each round after it succeeds in this, four of the tentacles attack, ignoring any dexterity bonuses. It requires a strength test similar to opening a stuck door to pull the custodian off. If fled from, the custodian is an unerring tracker, moving only by night. It will persecute the disturbers of its trove until everything is put back the way it was. Rumor has it that not even killing the custodian will stop its pursuit, but what - if anything - can finally put it to rest, other than the return of its treasure, is unknown.

Text to Tabletop 3: Breaking Context

One theme I treated in my old Crimes Against Mimesis essays (see previous posts) was the clash between the elements of a puzzle and its context. I urged game designers to integrate game objects and puzzle situations more fully into their fictional worlds. A chainsaw shouldn't just be sitting there on a table for no reason; why not link it to a lumberjack that you've heard about in another scene? A cryptogram shouldn't just be there as a puzzle on a wall; maybe it's a way that the Red Hood Monks communicated to each other privately without breaking their vows of silence.

In the gonzo context, the player of the game is self-aware, and we see all sorts of random objects and puzzles, frame-breaking references to pop culture, genre intrusions, and other elements of gonzo.  What I was setting up as a standard in my Mimesis essays, though, was closer to James Maliszewksi's label of "Gygaxian naturalism" in D&D (though you could just as easily tag gonzo with the "Gygaxian" label). Naturalism applied to monsters leads to developing other characteristics than combat stats - to flesh out their feeding, reproduction, social structure, anatomy, and other mundane details. Naturalism in puzzles, likewise, makes sure each puzzle or problem has some meaning outside of the experience of the players trying to solve it. Naturalism creates more immersion in the world and strengthens the fictional frame rather than breaking it.

With the benefit of time and perspective, I would still recommend the designers of puzzles in role-playing scenarios to put them into context if they are going for a naturalistic feel. I think gonzo dungeons inflicted on a willing public are perfectly OK, the current belt-holder being Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage, a sprawling reconstruction/homage to Castle Greyhawk. At the same time, there is something very satisfying about a puzzle or dungeon trick put into naturalistic context, and you have to respect the art and craft required to reconcile an artificial obstacle with a realistic world.

I've also realized there is a third option for puzzle context in roleplaying games, or for that matter, interactive fiction. There can be a mythic resonance to puzzles, monsters, dungeons, and other elements of an RPG.

Text to Tabletop 2: Return to the Scene of the Crimes

Crimes Against Mimesis is a series of web articles I wrote in 1996 about the representation of reality in text adventure games, or "interactive fiction". It's gotten a certain amount of fame, even cited in Wikipedia, despite my leaving the IF community shortly thereafter without really having done anything other than writing those articles. Ironically, the text adventure I had been preparing and left half-finished was more a collection of puzzles than anything literary. Its first puzzle, "Cube and Key," was actually an adaptation of an RPG puzzle room I'd come up with earlier on. So it's only full circle to bring these observations about puzzles back to the RPG context.

In-game puzzles and problem solving are one big way to answer the call for more player skill involvement in what's come to be called the Old School Renaissance of Dungeons & Dragons. Even running a system neck-deep in character skills, I doubt if there was ever a DM so bold as to create a riddle and then make the players roll dice against their character's Intelligence to see if they solved it. For all the huffing and puffing about dimwit characters "cheating" by solving puzzles with their players' true IQ, this is one area where the players have always refused to abdicate responsibility.

The big difference between programming a computer and running a live game? Many of the unrealistic aspects of puzzles I objected to in Crimes are irrelevant. The DM understands all the command words the player can use, has a mental model of the world that can tell the players how their attempts are working out, and if any area of the mental model is hazy the DM can consult the oracular dice. The items available with which to manipulate the world do not have to be pre-set and scattered around, but can be bought in town, manufactured, or improvised.

One wide-open area of the tabletop RPG, too, is the possibility for player solutions that surprise the DM. It's an even more gutsy move to put a problem in the way of the players that you don't know the solution to yourself. But really, any interactive problem takes a certain combination of faith in the players to solve it, and faith in the robustness of the game to survive the consequences of their possible failure to solve it.

You will notice here I said "problem" instead of "puzzle." Problems, as I see it, are tasks like "get across this chasm inhabited by hungry bats" or "get through this bolted and barred iron door." Puzzles are more constrained - "Speak 'eggs' as the answer to this riddle" or "Put a spear in the empty right hand of the statue." Problems are more amenable to being solved more quickly and easily than their setter would have liked, but both problems and puzzles hold out the possibility of player failure, so the GM had better be prepared to route around the damage. (There was, in fact, one memorable late night in our hometown campaign where Dave the DM, after the better part of two hours, pretty much had to feed us the answer to the puzzle "SHOATMMSPEIRO" to keep the linear scenario going.)

In Crimes one of my main pleas (in part 4 of the essay) was for text adventure puzzles to become more like real-life problems - goals that can be reached by several different means, or by combining several different objects in a way that makes sense. Even if implemented with real-world objects, a lock-and-key puzzle is still a lock and key. You need the broom to frighten away the cat so you can reach in the mousehole and get the flashlight. You can't frighten away the cat with the crowbar - so says the computer program, but a good GM (or for that matter a good programmer) will increase the realism of the world simulation so that you can.

Even with all these possibilities, many old-edition D&D adventure designers didn't (and don't) take full advantage of them. The game has a good system for combat, and improvised actions and environment effects can be taken into account using it. But there's less of a vocabulary, less of a system, less of a precedent for handling non-combat problem solving. We all know a good puzzle or a tricky problem when we see it; but how do you get there in the first place?

I'd like to know your thoughts before I write on...

Visual Break: Text Maps

If you love the Grand City of Londra, or are just curious, do yourself a favo(u)r and check out this obsessively detailed handwritten satirical map by Stephen Walter, chock-a-block with dense historical and social allusions ...

The Island

Now ask yourself- how would this style work for an improvisational city map in adventure gaming? Where the streets, blocks and buildings are represented by evocative and ambiguous tags, representing not the past but the future history of the city as lived by your protagonists ... A palimpsest of White-out and black fine-line marker, as old challenges are wiped out and new ones scribbled in.

Text to Tabletop 1: Return to the Colossal Cave

The next few posts - with inevitable digressions - are going to be about links between old-school-style D&D and text adventure games.

It's been at least 10 years since I played a computer text adventure. I got into them big-time in the last few years of grad school and first year of my postdoc.  At the time I was pretty much as far from gaming mentally as any time I've been in my life. Yes, text adventures were gaming, but a lot of people were taking them as some form of postmodernist enterprise, and being literature, it was cool, so OK. (This is what living in Manhattan will do to a soul.)

Apparently text adventures were an early branching off from pre-1975 Dungeons and Dragons. Add puzzles, creatures and treasures from D&D to some real-world experience of spelunking, and a hit is born. You can read the whole story here on Rick Adams' excellent site about the very first text game, Colossal Cave Adventure. Or read this even more excellent article on spelunking the source code and source cave.

Adventure, Zork and their text adventure kin have a lot in common with the old-school approach to tabletop gaming. For example, both text adventures have a fair amount of humor and mild surrealism in their dungeon settings, mixed with scenes of horror and wonder. This matches well with the gonzo atmosphere from Castle Greyhawk that so many are trying to recapture these days.

What's really important, though, is the path of divergence in problem-solving these games took. Adventure and Zork could very well have taken up the wargame roots of D&D, incorporating hit points, damage, combat, and saving rolls. For various reasons this was left for other games to do - most memorably the seminal Wizardry.

Instead, text adventures were about verbal manipulation of the environment. You tried different things with the dungeon features and the items you picked up along the way - "pull rope," "cut rope with sword," "burn rope with torch." There wasn't a live DM, so you didn't always get an answer. Sometimes the program knew what you were doing didn't work. Sometimes it did work, and you could move on to the next part of the adventure.

If this sounds familiar to someone steeped in the old school renaissance, it should ...

John the Roguish: “I search the room.”
GM: “What are you checking?”
John the Roguish: “I eyeball the table and chairs to see if there’s anything unusual, then I run my hands over them to see if there’s anything weird.”
GM: “Nope.”
John the Roguish: “Are the moose’s eyes following me or anything?”
GM: “No.”
John the Roguish: “I check the moose head.”
GM: “How?”
John the Roguish: “I twist the horns, look in the mouth, see if it tips sideways …”
GM: “When you check to see if it tips sideways, it slides a little to the side.”
John the Roguish: “I slide it more.”
GM: “There’s a secret compartment behind it.”

The above example of diceless resolution from Matt Finch's Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming translates to this kind of text-adventure play - although the referee and the programmer have very different ways of interacting with the player:

> look table
You see nothing special.

> look chairs
You see nothing special.

> look moose
A stuffed moose head is on the wall. You might think its eyes are following you, but they're not.

> twist horns
I don't understand.

> look moose in mouth
A stuffed moose head is on the wall. You might think its eyes are following you, but they're not.

> push moose
You slide the moose head to the side, at first hesitantly. There is a secret compartment in the wall behind it.

The next few posts are going to explore some implications of the text adventure mentality for refereeing and playing old school games, leading to the next pdf download - something I've been working on called The Bottomless Bag of Tricks.

Anyone else feel like reminiscing on the old text adventure games? Drop a comment!

Varlets and Vermin 1.0

I've always felt the lack of lower level monsters in any setting; but especially the old school with its stripped-down lists.

Dungeon referees who want something a little spicier than rats, skeletons and kobolds should therefore consider my new pdf supplement, available to download here absolutely gratis: Varlets and Vermin. It's a collection of monsters and related ideas for challenge levels 1 and 2, written for Swords & Wizardry but easily adaptable to other systems.

Please let me know what you think and if you find it useful. Thanks!