Amazon Mutual: Day-Glo Ideas from the Typewriter Era

Digital cameras can't really handle Day-Glo. I tried.

The year: 1982.
The text: electric typewriter and Letraset titles.
The cover: fluorescent orange.
The art: strictly amateur.


"Amazon Mutual Wants You!" Volume One, from Dragon Tree Press, is the most interesting and creative of my three old-school pickups (previously, previously).

 High concepts.

The concept driving this anthology is very 1982. It's that era in which the first flush of playing D&D straight had faded out, and the kind of self-aware narratives seen in Dave Trampier's "Wormy" comic were taking hold. So, the party are meta-adventurers, having been hired by a guild (the titular Amazon Mutual) to carry out the corpse retrieval clause on other adventurers' insurance policies. The four adventures are four such missions, each with a different author and a markedly different style.

Some of the guild rules are typical AD&D fun-crusher magical fiats. Retrieval teams are geased ("absolutely no save!") not to steal the victims' possessions. Body bags of holding eliminate the problem of lugging corpses back. There are half a dozen better ways to approach the first problem, ways that open the slim possibility of hoodwinking the guild -- Amazon keeps a list of possessions and recovery teams are held liable for missing stuff; an annoying familiar chaperones the rescue effort; and so on. The body bags solve a problem that's nonexistent if the party eliminates all opposition before retrieving the corpses, and kill an element of challenge that should hang over the adventure if they don't.

The book's approach to what we would now call challenge ratings, though, is one of the dead-end gems of the Typewriter Era, up there with the Midkemia attack matrix.

• First off, each adventure has a manifest of all the experience points available in the form of monsters. (It would be most helpful if treasure was listed, too, though, but the need for a GM to manage advancement rate is one of the most underrated things in level-based gaming.)
• This manifest also includes suggested experience awards for outwitting monsters, dealing with traps, and finding clues and other plot goals. Given the slow advancement pace of by-the-book AD&D this is absolutely key.
• There's also a section where it's explicitly recognized that the character power level appropriate for each adventure depends on what approach the players and DM take. So, one adventure is suitable for level 7-9 if the DM plays it as a standard fighting room-crawl, 14-18 (!) if the DM treats it as an organized fortress where all the denizens can be warned in a short time, or much lower levels if the players choose to take on the adventure with sneaking, diplomacy, or infiltration.

Temple of the Four Gods. The first adventure takes you to retrieve four adventurer bodies from a temple with a prosaic layout, short on monsters and long on tricks and traps. There are a few clues explaining how the temple went over from the four gods to the service of Loki, but overall this is a funhouse mini-dungeon with a few random gleams of dark humor.  Two corpses can be had almost immediately without any fight, one comes after a four-goblin battle, and it's only the last body that forces the players past a meaningful number of tricks and traps. Would run: 3/10.

Stronghold of the Mer-Witch. An underwater cave mission to retrieve two adventurers. One is dead and can be found almost immediately after a nasty fight with a gigantic eel. The other is alive but a captive of the mer-witch deeper in, who commands a small army of mer-orcs and (not very tough) sea trolls, and can throw three death spells a day among other powers. A coral golem and an interestingly furnished underwater torture chamber liven up the otherwise unremarkable, "storehouse, barracks, kitchen" design. Would run: 6/10.

Mission to Danger. The gonzo spirit of early-days roleplaying lives here. The person to be rescued, captive but not yet dead, is a "Hobbit Fighter-Techno" with a pistol, a switchblade, and a deadman switch, for he has mined the dark elves' dungeon fortress to blow sky-high! The DM is asked to play out the ticking clock in four hours of real time. Some nice situations can happen: meeting an illusionist cat who might help with infiltration, a possible fight between an enemy red dragon and a captured rainbow dragon, finding out the hobbit is an ornery and contrary ally, and a treasure hoard that turns into a river of molten gold if the explosives blow. Would run: 8/10.

Grimethorp's Manor. This adventure plays around with the Amazon Mutual premise. The party has to retrieve a peacefully deceased retired adventurer from his mansion, following the letter of his policy, but his ghost doesn't want his body moved. It's a clever concept but the execution is lacking. Until the party finds the body, they will be walking through the mansion rooms with nothing interesting to do. When they try to take the body out, the ghost starts interfering, casting nuisance spells and animating the house's furnishings to attack, just to frighten and annoy but not cause harm. That's also not going to work. You frighten D&D players by taking huge chunks of hit points, and making them roll save-or-die, not by having a rug say "boooo".  Would not run as is, and the adventure needs a lot of editing to work; I'd start by having bandit squatters and other random ruin pests in the mansion to give the adventure a real first act, make the ghost's attacks really dangerous, and on top of that have the rest of the bandits coming home from a raid just as the party is making to leave.

Improving 52 Pages: Overkill and Monster Experience

So if we are going to be handing out experience for monsters, and the 100 xp per hit die rule is generally good in my experience, there is one situation where it appears to fall down: overkill, where a higher-level party gets an overly large amount of experience for an encounter with six giant rats that is trivially dealt with.

To put it formally, a group in control of tactics is going to have a much easier time dealing with 8 x 1 HD orcs than 1 x 8 HD giant, for any number of game mechanical reasons. The danger ... the bad player behavior that you don't want the rule to encourage ... is that players will seek out weak rather than challenging combats in order to advance. And even if they don't (because that is a rather dim view of what they want in the game), they will have a weak encounter and realize it gave them quite a chunk of experience and wonder why the system is not pushing them toward the more exciting kind of play.

AD&D, as I've mentioned before, solved this just by giving very low xp awards for low-level monsters, altogether. Combine this with exponentially increasing the amounts of xp needed to level, and you have a situation where a high-level character effectively gets peanuts even from single-handedly wiping out a company of 100 orcs. Allow me to demonstrate the special technique of statistics:

That is not a typo: a single AD&D fighter, forced to gain experience only by fighting, has to kill 138 typical 1 hit die monsters to reach second level, so I've scaled everything from there. Going up in level, this number drops to a "manageable" 53 2nd level monsters to reach 3rd, but after 7th level experience required out-climbs monster experience again. To reach 10th level, over 15,000 orcs have to bite the dust under your sword, making your share of wiping out a small orc platoon seem negligible anyway.

(As I recall from playing AD&D, we were able to level at a reasonable pace not from monsters or even monetary treasure, but thanks to the generous experience awards for magic items. And you wonder, why the obsession with taking treasure and magic items away from the party...)

Of course, AD&D being AD&D, Gygax also put in a completely unnecessary rule toward the same goal, further complicating experience awards by instructing DM's to add up the levels and HD equivalent on each side after a combat, and dock the party proportional experience if they outpowered the foe. This rule, besides being cumbersome to apply and hedged round in even vaguer clouds of subjectivity, seems to be more appropriate to the original 100 xp/hit die rule.

My concession to this logic, within the 100 xp/HD system, was to have characters gain only 10% of the usual experience from monsters they outclassed by 2 or more level equivalents, and 50% if outclassing by 1 (although I didn't really apply this last one). In practice, however, even the 10% rule created an awkward splitting of points between higher and lower level party members.

Here's my latest try, and we'll see how it does in actual play.

Rather than using division, it uses subtraction: higher level characters simply discount one or two creatures of a sufficiently lower level. Although this appears in the "basic" 52 Pages rules that only go up to third level, the intent is to increase geometrically, so that 4 monsters per character are discounted at 3 levels up, 8 at 4 levels,, and so on.

If this means that an 8th level party of 5 can plow through a regiment of 320 orcs without getting any experience ... well, after the first 80 orcs or so fall without any casualties in return, the DM is better off just calling a rout than gaming through the whole tedious sequence, hoping to overwhelm the party tanks with a slew of lucky hit and damage rolls... lest we forget the lesson of the 100 linear attacking kobolds.

Anatomy of an Unused Rule

What prompts a game writer to include rules that they don't even use in their game? It happened to Gary Gygax, writing the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, putting in all those rules about weapon vs. armor and contracting diseases on the random and grappling.

It happened to me - the decision to give experience for sites, not monsters, in the 52 Pages  rules never came about in my own games.  I kept on with a version of the 100xp/ hit die rule from the oldest version of the D&D, the one that has worked well and given a decent rate of advancement of the last four years of play (together with xp for treasure, carousing and occasional story awards for momentous acts that deliver none of these) .

You could argue that writing a rule you don't play reflects a failure of playtesting; in my case, more like a mistrust of playtesting. Why deviate from something that works? Experience, and a look at the AD&D DMG, gives two main reasons.

1. Misguided realism. The driving force of blogs and heartbreakers - the need to install a system that more accurately models some process. These fail for a number of reasons.

• The GM finds it hard to use the rule on the fly. See AD&D grappling and any number of "Rulemaster" procedures. 
• The rule makes the game more difficult and less transparent for the players. Many rules that give combat options have this fault. Tactics shift to knowing which attack option or power move to use at which time, rather than common-sense ideas based on movement and positioning.
• The rule takes away focus from the main action of the game. In 52 Pages I found that recording where on your body you kept each piece of equipment, although consequential for play, was not appropriate to an adventure game. Encumbrance is just fine as a list-based "you're carrying too much stuff" consideration.



There are other ways to save the peasants.

• The rule misunderstands the way the players want to interact with the setting. If you want nasty element like disease or sexism in the game, it's better to present examples in the game (plague-ridden towns to be avoided, female NPCs having a hard time) rather than mechanically restricting or punishing the players with random disease chances or gender limits.

2. Misguided control. This kind of rule tries to use carrots and sticks to motivate player behavior, but ...

• To encourage something that players do anyway (like giving benefit points for roleplaying).
• To discourage something that really isn't a problem (like players killing monsters "just for the experience points")
• To discourage something that really should be handled by better campaign management or interpersonal skills (like player misbehavior towards others, or characters gaining excesses of treasure from the system.)

My experience points rule fell into the latter category. It treated my players like cow-killing, rat-farming murderhobos when they really weren't --and when in any case there were easy fixes available, like awarding xp only for hostile attackers and awarding less xp for "overkill" of much weaker foes. More on that next time.

The advantage of having experience come from concrete achievements rather than abstract geographical goals? It's adaptable to using other people's adventures -- I don't have to go through Temple of the Iron God or Castle of the Mad Archmage putting little stars in key rooms. It also feels less arbitrary to give out experience through things that exist in their own right. The only feature I would consider adding would be to give some kind of reward for bypassing traps, and that is easily enough figured - say, 50 xp for each 4 points of average damage, with more for unavoidable or lethal designs.

So next time I'll explain the one innovation that I used in coming up with my new experience rule, to deal with a specific problem implementing it. Will it be destined for the dustheap? Let's see ...

Experience Points: Is This My Final Answer?

Okay, after all this discussion, here is the solution I can best live with, done up in One Page format.

The trick is to link XP to monsters, but then associate them not with killing the monster, but with reaching a certain location. This is similar to the technique of placing treasure with value relative to the monsters you might meet on the way, and has a lot of benefits.

Unlike XP-for-treasure-only, it rewards doing other things than finding treasure. Climbing a mighty mountain, clearing a fortress of ghouls, or riding with a caravan to a far-off city now can have their own rewards.

Unlike XP-for-monsters, it:

• Completely sidesteps the question of whether you should get XP for defeating the monster this way, or driving it off that way, or what you do if you drive it off but it comes back.
• Avoids the fiddly adjustment of XP relative to party level that sometimes is felt to be necessary. Instead, you make a general assessment of the toughness of the situation and adjust the monster XP accordingly. If you have 100 orcs but they're forced to come at you one at a time, you can drop the difficulty to 50% or even 25%.
• I'll say it again, the tactical situation comes into play. If you estimate a 50% chance of making the right choices and sneaking the party past a monster, you can reduce the XP award by 50%.
• Does not reward kill-farming or worse yet (hello 2nd edition D&D) kill-stealing.
• Calculating and dividing XP is easier - it happens less often and the DM can even fudge the numbers a little so they're evenly divisible for the party.
• Rewards avoiding random or irrelevant monsters.
• Has some consideration of traps, tricks and obstacles.

Unlike the straight XP-for-exploring idea, it:

• Clearly rewards seeking danger.
• Gives a benchmark for how many XP should be associated with a given goal.
• Allows for a variety of scenarios; if someone is willing to pay the party to kill a random monster, then the pay counts as XP.

The other ideas I've been using in my games, to generally good effect. Missing, yes, is carousing; but I have some room on my Settlements page I'm going to use to put forth a general money-for-xp+random effects procedure.

Stacking Up XP Systems

Juggling more thoughts about experience systems, I realized I see problems with pretty much every single-source solution. Yes, I'm intentionally leaving out "xp for just showing up" because just showing up is not what I want to reward, at least among adults.

XP for treasure found and retrieved, only
Rewards: Treasure seeking by any means; avoiding combat; the players as adventurers, not plot monkeys.
DM judgment calls: Defining what is treasure; should bounties and rewards count? The loot from a plundered town?
Hidden sticky points: Sticking with standard, classic 1000-2500 xp to reach first level, that's a lot of treasure running through your hands - enough to max out a fighter's standard equipment. Hard to make players stay hungry.

XP for treasure spent on "useless" goods and activity, only (carousing, etc.)
Rewards: Demand-side rather than supply-side behavior; your party can get rich running a caravan or looting a town and level up, because the experience comes from money spent.
DM judgment calls: Minimal; you do have to decide when something is useless, but this can be strictly defined in a list of allowed activities.
Hidden sticky points: As above regarding amount of treasure. You may have to choose between spending on useful equipment and getting levels, which is a temptation to overcalculate things.

XP for monsters slain
Rewards: Facing monsters; heroic combat; unless adjusted for imbalance, pointless hunting expeditions.
DM judgment calls: When NPC's count; when the players are farming instead of adventuring.
Hidden sticky points: Adjusting XP for balance ratios can be fiddly and mechanical.

XP for exploration and defined missions
Rewards: Other forms of adventuring than treasure hunting, and other forms of overcoming than monster slaying
DM judgment calls: What a particular exploration goal or mission is worth. No real good guidelines I can see out there. Also, how to deal with somewhat subverted missions.
Hidden sticky points: Lots of DM subjectivity as to where to seed your Easter egg baskets of goodies.

Perhaps I currently run a mix of all four - monsters and treasure, plus carousing, plus occasional set rewards for challenges and adventures with neither monsters nor treasure - because I see drawbacks in each of them. If I had to drop one, it would be monster XP - replacing it with goal awards. Rewarding the process of treasure finding is important, but treasure spending, carousing and the like, also adds great color to a game. Training should be an option for leveling up; but so should drunken revelry, ostentatious charity, or arcane scholarship.

Experience for Ends, not Means

The other day noisms expressed some nostalgia for the 2nd Edition D&D experience rules, where characters got experience for doing things related to their class - fighters for killing monsters, thieves for getting treasure, magic-users for casting spells relevant to the adventure and so on. There were also some awards for playing well, in terms of role-playing, being a good party citizen, achieving story goals, and becoming a better tactician, although these were quite vaguely defined.

I remember greeting these changes with satisfaction back in the day - finally, an experience system that was more "realistic"! Plus, it rewarded playing in-class, and isn't that what 1st Edition aimed at doing but in a more clunky, ornery and punitive way, punishing magic-users who got into combat or fighters who shrank from it?

Nowadays, though, I have a different evaluation. I've realized that the 2nd Edition approach mostly rewards player skill directly, rather than allowing players to use their skill as they wish and rewarding the outcome of that.

In other words, it rewards the means rather than the end. I don't think this is a good thing. Let's look at each application of this.

* Rewarding class-consistent behavior. I have never really understood this. If your fighter is collecting magic wands and your magic-user is wading into combat, and that's not a good thing, surely a) this is the fault of the system for not emphasizing each class' strengths and weaknesses and b) this is a point of individuality of the character, rather than an affront against the divine order. If the party followed their bliss individually, surely the only time they would ever agree on a joint venture would be to kill a monster (fighter) guarding treasure (thief) whom the gods have decreed unholy (cleric) and can be hurt by spells (magic-user). The whole point of D&D is that diverse means are combined toward the same end, but if the means are rewarded, this splits the party's desires.

* Rewarding role-playing and good behavior at table. I already am on record that role-playing is and should be its own reward, end of story. And I recently wrote about good behavior at table, to which I'll add that in-game penalties and rewards for that are a wrongheaded, frame-breaking, and socially impotent approach.

* Rewarding "good play." Again, shouldn't good play lead to success, and success be its own reward? I suspect that what's lurking behind this is a disavowal of certain means that lead to in-game success. "Wait no you can't take a barrel of creosote and 1000 nails and ... Argh no you must slay in man-ennobling combat! No points for you!" Forget plot railroading - this is play railroading. Or maybe you like the barrel trick. The point is that the DM gets to approve of the means, not the end, and this takes something away from the players.

* Story goals. Rewarding the achievement of some goal derived from the story, finally, is the only end-reward in this whole scheme. It's a decent enough end to reward, as long as you keep an open mind about what counts as a satisfying end of the story. Players should feel like they can change allegiances and priorities without any penalty other than those in the setting. Anything else is puppeteering.

Treating the party as a bunch of venal mercenaries who only get involved in intrigue if there's a reward - that's another "end," one more in line with the traditional approach. Rewarding progress in the social structure of the campaign, so treasure is mostly useful to buy yourself rank and friends, which you can also get by going on quests and missions ... that's a third "end" for a system. I'm still torn about which kind of ends to reward with the final version of my experience system. But more on that, later.

Considerations of a Con Game

A little more aftermath from Dragonmeet:

1. The players felt the lethal fury as I made all rolls in the open (except for sensing rolls) and fudged nothing dangerous about the adventure. However, as I had stocked it there was one puzzle-trick involving a massive sliding block intervening between them and the climactic encounter. With less than 30 minutes to go in the session I decided to remove the block trick and show a straight path to the climax. I strongly believe that at a con game, fun takes precedent. Challenge is part of that fun - so no fudging combat - but having a memorable and dangerous climax is also part of that fun.

The trick was not super-dangerous, although the previous lot of players had found it quite anxiety-provoking. Look at area 9 on Dyson's map. Now imagine a 10' stone cube that starts in the north-east niche. It moves at the equivalent of a 30' /round move according to these rules:

* If no living thing is in any square of room 9 it makes its way back to its niche.
* If a living thing is in room 9 it focuses on the northernmost of these, then the westernmost of these if there is a tie. It will try to move immediately to the north of its focus first, stopped only by a wall. If it cannot move any further to the north, it will try to move to the west of its focus. This means, for example, that it will appear to "chase" a character in the top two squares of the room, and will crush anyone who stays there. If he or she darts by and stands by the south door, it will move down but stop just short of crushing.
* Being crushed against a wall is not pleasant; it does 2d6 damage a round with no saving throw.
* If you are particularly cruel, all doors to the room open inwards.
* Behind the cube is a niche with a small purple worm tooth inside, worth 250 $ to the right buyer.

2. I was considering a reward system for the con that would add a competitive element without tedious and gamesmanlike point-scoring. I didn't implement it, but offer it here for your consideration.

Arranged below from lowest to highest, like poker hands, is a series of individual outcome goals for your character. Each player secretly selects a goal before the game begins. After the game, see who achieved their goal. The one(s) who achieved the highest ranking goal win(s).

* Survive, with a share of loot worth at least 250$.
* Survive with a share of loot worth at least 250$ without being incapacitated at the end (having gone to 0 or fewer hp but not dead).
* Gaze on the Heart of the Sunrise (the gem in area 11).
* Survive, having gazed on the Heart of the Sunrise.
* Survive, having gazed on the Heart of the Sunrise without being incapacitated at the end.
* Alive or dead, ensure that the party eventually carries forth the Heart of the Sunrise from the dungeon successfully.
* Survive, as part of a party that carries forth the Heart of the Sunrise from the dungeon successfully.
* Survive without being incapacitated at the end, as part of a party that carries forth the Heart of the Sunrise from the dungeon successfully.
* Be the surviving, non-incapacitated, hero who personally carries forth the Heart from the dungeon!

Having written this all out I now keenly want to put this kind of goal setting in action for the next one-shot I run.

3. For the information of the players: The haul of xp from monster killing is 608, and from sale of treasure brought in on the back of Bill the Mountain Camel, who had fled and was only located after an arduous search (dwarven mail shirts and mirror frame) is 458; total then is 1066. If you are not a spellcaster and have INT or WIS > 12, add 10%, so you get 1173. The gnome and rogue also get 300 xp each for cooperating to get the gem out of the dungeon. It would have been more if you had been able to sell it, but ...

Gnarro the Gnome knew that he had only one hour until the pixie dust ran out, and guessed that the elemental could only track the giant gem if he touched the ground. He put the gem in a waterskin, tied it to the rock and float it in a nearby mountain stream. Unfortunately, the elemental was capable of following the tenuous scent  from the rock, through the rope, through the leather, to the gem.  When Gnarro returned to the scene he found only a large, hemispherical hole in the river bed....

Luxury Shopping

Who says leather armor has to be cheap?

If the standard ratio of experience from monsters and treasures in most early versions of D&D tends to oversupply the characters with treasure, what can they spend it on that's satisfying?

Let's leave out the advice of Gygax in the DMG to soak the players with taxes and training fees - which turns the game into an unsatisfying caricature of bureaucratic capitalism, denying the players the freedom of a robber-baron frontier. What remains are two economic phases. In the first phase, players complete their character's acquisition of the best equipment available for adventuring. In the second phase, they get more ambitious and spend on things that establish them in the game world, ultimately leading up to a stronghold.

The problem in many rule sets is that phase 1 is very short, with an excess of treasure and a shortage of expensive things to buy.  We saw previously that in some rulesets, the amouint of coinage amassed getting to level 2 alone can buy several suits of plate armor. In my current games I've succumbed to the temptation to have a bigger and better equipment list. Potions of healing ("vitality" because they only restore the metaphysical character hit points rather than actual physical injury) can be had, reducing the absolute need to bring a "healer" along. Armor and weapons for a steep multiplier can be had in dwarven or elven steel, which  give limited bonuses, less than the magical versions of those things. Spellcasters need to spend money to inscribe new spells in their books. Eventually mounts, camping supplies, boats and ships may be bought.

All this time the players are supposed to be saving up for their stronghold. A second problem arises - the road to settled status tends to be a dull process, with a long mid-level haul before the ultimate payoff. I'm looking to the next generation of old-school games to make this progression a little more interesting, with more subsidiary goals along the way. If anyone knows whether Adventurer Conqueror King makes good on this, I'd like to know. I have a few ideas toward this goal, and also see an inherent problem in the stronghold goal, but that's a whole separate post.

My estimate is that after 3rd or 4th level or so, adventurers should have enough cash to buy all the equipment they can reasonably buy on the market, and around then should start adventuring for items of power and increased respect in society. The game system should then be designed around this, with an intricate balancing of experience, cash, levels of equipment. I guess as people level up in my game it'll remain to be seen whether my house-rules are doing the job. Anyway, those are now getting into good shape so I'll post some of them up as One Pagers throughout this week, with commentary.

The Orc-Studded Economics of Experience

I'm trying to assess the experience and advancement system for my game.  I'm making the following assumptions:

1. Given that the modern rate of play is weekly or every other week, it really should not take more than 10 sessions to reach 2nd level, and I'm ok with it even being twice as fast as that.

2. I like giving xp both for killing monsters and gaining treasure. Not so much for gaining magic items.

3. I know the arguments for balancing in favor of treasure but find in practice that leads to unwieldy amounts of treasure, quickly overwhelming the options for equipment purchase.

4. I reject many of the classic solutions for cash glut like magical items for sale, PCs creating minor magic items, venal miracle-mongers charging four-figure resurrections, exorbitant training fees.

5. I think about 5th level is when players should think about starting to build a name-level legacy and throw money around for influence and ultimately stronghold privileges.

6. I'm OK with levels taking more sessions to obtain the more the players play.

With these criteria in mind let's build a dungeon rich in exploration and non-combat problems, where the combat is with squads of 5 orcs at a time. And send a party of 5 in. The assumption here is that our heroes are going to run into and beat about the equivalent of two such squads before the session ends (and this has nothing to do with the 15 minute adventuring day - it's usual for parties in my exploration-heavy dungeons to split one expedition over two game sessions). The question then becomes, assuming we want them to level up in about 6 sessions, how much treasure should we have them take away on average each time?

Labyrinth Lord

Orcs are 10 XP and although classes vary, the fighter is a good benchmark and will level at 2,035 xp (I wonder what intensive playtesting led to such a precise figure ...) Thus, 10 x 10 / 5 = 20 xp from monsters will be gained by each member on each expedition. After 6 expeditions our fighter has 120 xp from monsters; fair enough; it's an explicitly treasure-weighted system. But the fighter will have to end up with 1915 gold pieces if and when he makes second level - enough to buy a suit of plate mail for himself and two henchmen!

Other Old School Clones

OSRIC and Swards & Wizardry are a little more generous, clocking in at 15 XP (on average, in the case of OSRIC) per orc, but this doesn't make an appreciable dent in the huge sums to be had. Lamentations' orcs and fighters are much the same as LL's.

My House Rules

In the current incarnation of my house rules I give xp at the rate of:

• 100 per adjusted hit die (adjusted for special attacks and the like) of monsters that are equal to or higher than the average party level, 
• half that if one lower, 
• and 1/10 that if two or more. 

The level-appropriate orcs here would yield 10x as much experience as in Labyrinth Lord, requiring a haul of only 800 coins to make 2000 xp; it's touch and go whether you can get plate mail by 2nd level with all other expenses and payments you may be required to make. The treasure can be even sparser if you make allowances, as I do, for carousing rules which let money be spent on experience. In fact, the ratio of exploration to combat and treasure is such that my players are pleased with (3rd ed. style) a level 2 jump at 1000 xp.


Now, this system is tailored to my preferences, which skip a lot of the familiar tropes of D&D and aim for a lean, hungry kind of game. I've seen a lot of these preferences expressed by bloggers, but not always with an appreciation of how monsters, experience and treasure exist in a delicate balance. I'm just wondering how this balance works in other games with the wealth of house rules out there.

Next I'll consider the question of what there is to spend money on, under a game aesthetics that avoids the computer-game staple of the well-stocked magic equipment store.

Gluttony, Wrath and Petty Avarice

Trossley Rule: To precede reports of Actual Play with something everyone can use, related to the run.

In this case, a random table to determine just what it is your gourmand is munching on when gourmandising in ye olde North European fantasy land.

Click, and click again, to enlarge.

Roll d4 according to the intricacy of the dish, from 2 dice for a simple one, to 7 for a true extravagance. Consult the column for each die roll. Any "1" result requires determining the meat as well as cut on subtables 1A and 1B; real foppish gourmands may modify a column 2 result with 1B as well, possibly leading to "larks' tongues in aspic" and other delights. Finally, roll on column 0 to determine the method of cooking, for each 1, 2, and 3 result. I presume you know how to get a d40 and d50 result ...

"Farcing" is the practice of filling the roast animal with its own ground meat. "Jugged" is a means of preserving in jelly. Laver is an edible seaweed. Yes, they ate beaver in the Middle Ages. It was an acceptable non-meat for Fridays and Lent. You there in the back row, would you mind sharing what's so funny with the class?

***

Our heroes started off the run by making the first moves toward furnishing their abandoned house in the village, mortgaged to them on generous terms for a tithe of treasure. Crude logs worked by a woodsman's wife would have to serve as chairs and table, for now.

An expedition was then mounted to the Castle of the Mad Archmage - that nexus of adventure, menagerie of deadly creatures, level upon level of mystery and danger unparalleled in human history - for the sole and express purpose of retrieving two canvas tents from the stockpile discovered in the stirges' lair. This haul prompted much mirth from the gate guard Fergus, and Motley Tom the magical wares merchant. Undaunted, the party converted the canvas into bedding pallets for their house, and returned to the dungeon the next day to seek richer treasures.

The actual dungeon session only cleared two rooms - explored a long time ago in an alternate reality by the first delvers into the Castle Cellars. This party did not set the oil-soaked scarecrow in fire, saved like fiends against its fear effect, and found the treasure the other party missed. Smart! Then they went in the room with hooks on chains dangling from the ceiling, and just had to pull the one chain that went up through a hole in the ceiling. Not so smart! The hooks started flailing around and poor Balm got hit in the neck by two of them like a doubly unfortunate trout, causing a terrible wound that he's still recovering from.

That DF map is useful.

With a stretch of in-game downtime looming, the party decided to march to Utherton, and sell some of the loot that had been accumulating ever since the days of the millhouse adventure. Part of this involved carousing. Jessera rolled a hangover mishap, and her meeting with mentor Joya was thereby delayed for a day. The dwarf Grumpka rolled a fight mishap ... consulting Dramatic Personae, I found it was a priest, and indeed a militant of the same order, nay, the same training class as our Boniface. This one wasn't very kindly, and after some racial insults flew, each sprang to action with hand weapons concealed on their person. Grumpka had the better weapon with the handax, but this Fretanax fellow rolled better, after fumbling and falling down the first round, and scored two shallow hits with his dagger. Fortunately, Grumpka had completely won over the crowd by refusing to take advantage of the fallen man, and subjecting him to a rousing harangue (12 on reaction roll). The onlookers were able to cover her as she walked away, Fretanax crowing in triumph - but crowing alone.

The only uneventful "carouse" was henchman Cordoon's 68 silver piece meal under the limited but safer "gourmandising" option. Here I improvised on the spot a five-course medieval food porn epic, complete with "a loaf of bread stuffed with dormice" and "an eel in grape jelly and it turns out to be a marzipan eel." Cordoon was able to say, at the end, that he was more a man of the world for his experience, and he gained the second level.

So, um, yeah, I basically took about as twice as long to make the food porn table as to write that report.

Session-based Experience

Now that I have spilled a ton of pixels on an elaborate and arcane experience point system, it's time to wonder if we shouldn't just throw the whole idea in the trash.

I see turtlenecks in her future.

From quarters too numerous to mention has come the idea that experience in a level-based adventure game should not involve accounting for hundreds or thousands of points based on specific exploits. Instead, it should simply be given for playing, session to session. Five or ten or twenty sessions and you reach the next level. In the true random spirit of the Old School, Clovis's Red Planet game offers a chance for level advancement as a die roll at the end of every session, but the idea is essentially the same.

The advantages of this system are many:

• Bookkeeping is ridiculously simple
• Sessions where the action departs from traditional experience-granting activities - investigation, traps and tricks, negotiation - can be rewarded without the tricky job of awarding ad-hoc xp
• The incentive is just to play, rather than grub every coin and kill every kobold toddler
• The DM can accurately assess the long-term trajectory of the campaign, and adjust the advancement rate precisely to suit the amount of time available for playing and the needs of the player

My current game, though, is using traditional experience points. Maybe with a different campaign I would experiment with session-based experience, but I see a few advantages in keeping experience more precisely reckoned:

• The advantage of taking risks and facing powerful foes becomes clear when going after the ogres is worth much more than going after the orcs. While detailed xp is vulnerable to grinding and grubbing, session xp more subtly rewards conservative play.

• As feedback, too, the varying experience haul from a tough combat where you were nearly wiped out, versus dealing with a few goblins in a cave you missed the first pass through the dungeon, clearly tells players that risk has a reward. 

• Experience points keep adventurer characters focused on their main goal - to get rich or die trying - especially when experience is strongly tied to treasure.

This last point was the decider for me. I think I'd be more into session-based experience if the campaign had more political intrigue to it. In my current Trossley run, the characters are fortune-seekers, bound by an oath to the valiant and acquisitive St. Hermas. Gold and monster guts is their bread and butter. The experience point system reflects this.

Any other observations about the relative merits of these systems, especially if you have used both, are welcome!

Experience: Carousing, Inc.

It began with  "Orgies, Inc." (we'll never see the days of R-rated Max Fleischer-style cartoons in mainstream gaming material again, I'll wager). Or perhaps it began as Dave Arneson's house rules which involved spending on, um, "pleasure slaves."  Anyway, the concept of carousing away treasure to earn extra experience has gained a foothold in Old School house rules, such as here, here and here.

The original idea was to substitute carousing for xp from treasure, but I also think the two work fine side by side. This way they can spice up the characters' life and gain 2 xp on each coin, or gain 1 xp and spend the coin for goods. This helps keep treasure in line with reasonably "hungry" amounts while letting characters level at a decent rate.

Below is the main table, showing maximum sp (or gp if that is your base currency) that can be spent in a week while doing that activity, receiving experience points on a one for one basis. The size of the settlement matters, and in particular philanthropy depends on the size of your faith's or race's community within the settlement, not the whole place. Time that must be spent during the week in that activity is also shown, and the bigger places give you more risk on the side effects tables, which is where you roll the dice shown. Click to enlarge...

 

And what would it be without the side effect tables: 

 Comments welcome as usual!

Experience: Treasure and Items

I'm of the belief that magic items should be rare. Fighting equipment with low "pluses" in my campaign is made out of one of the following special but non-magical materials:

what fell sorcery is this

Virtuous steel (+1 to hit, damage, armor): Carbonized iron treated with special craft, as in the historical workshops of Toledo or Damascus. The metal is flexible, and cuts or pierces as well as it resists when forged as plate or chain.

Azagyan (+1 to damage, armor): A dense and lustrous green-tinged metal, mined by goblin-kind and worn both by them and those who take it as trophy.

Silver-steel (+1 to hit, -3 to armor move penalty): This rarity was forged by dwarves for elves at a time of greater friendship between the two races. Chain and plate of this metal preserve freedom of movement, and the light strength of the metal makes for an agile blade or swift point. As well, the silver in the alloy is capable of damaging certain baneful creatures otherwise immune to arms.

Adamantite (+2 to hit, damage, armor): A powerful blackish-purple metal from the deep earth that cleaves all others decisively and seems to thirst for flesh when forged into a weapon.

These metals, of course, can be enchanted - or cursed - with magic, and are often favored for such applications.

With these and various other alchemical substances floating around it's hard to keep the distinction between "magic items" and "valuable treasure items" though the common denominator is my intention to keep both things fairly, meaningfully scarce. Thus the following protocol for converting all sorts of valuables to xp:

* All xp from an adventuring session are divided among those who were alive and conscious at the end of the session, regardless of who killed what or ended up with what.

* Coinage translates to experience when taken to safety, on a 1sp (campaign's base currency) to 1 xp basis.

* Valuable and magic items that are priced in my notes or campaign materials, but not tested or used in a way that would reasonably expose the character to any maleficent effects, do not earn xp.

* When brought to safety and tested or used, the party (those members at the time the object was brought to safety) gets half the xp from the item's value. Experience points should not be a clue; if testing revealed only a lesser power, while a greater one goes unguessed at, adjust the award accordingly.

* When sold on, the remaining half of the xp is distributed among the party at the time of the sale, or full xp if the item was never tested and the party manages to sell it.

Experience Rules: Monsters

Killing, defeating, or otherwise overcoming monsters and hostile NPCs:
 

100 xp/ hit die, plus bonuses detailed below. If the party’s defeat of the foe does not permanently remove it as a threat, half experience is gained now, and the other half cannot be gained until the monster is permanently defeated.

·         Bonuses for minor powers: (such as Armor Class less than or equal to 3, non-combat spells, ranged attack): +50 xp

·         Bonuses for major powers (poison, regeneration, breath weapon, Armor Class less than or equal to 0): +100xp

·         Experience is not gained for killing beings that were not hostile, such as livestock or townsfolk. The DM should also withhold experience from attempts to “farm” experience points by seeking out much weaker opponents outside the context of a planned adventure. Such activities are a waste of time in a face-to-face adventure game, where the fun comes from facing novel challenges.

Comes with a 200 xp Stupid Monster Bounty.

Yes, these rules are generous compared to, say, Labyrinth Lord or AD&D. Do they encourage combat? They don't discourage it. The threat of dying should be enough to spur them to find clever ways around combat, and I already have an anti-farming proviso in there. If your players are not scared enough of dying throw tougher monsters and situations at them.

Let's face it, if you are going old school hardcore and saying "The game is about sneaking around a dungeon and getting treasure and avoiding monsters unless you can help it!" and also saying "XP shouldn't come from magic items because they are their own reward!" and finally saying "I will respect the sacred experience tables as if they were graven in undying brass!" then you are committed to doling out 1250-2500 gp (or silver if that's your base unit), per player, just to make first level.

That's plate mail for me and my henchman and my torchbearer, thank you very much. I don't even know what you're supposed to buy at 4th level: Boats? Real estate? Politicians? Sure, you can take it away from them with taxes, fees, or what-not but then it just feels like a treadmill. I feel like Gygax was at that player-hating point in his campaign when he issued the ridiculous training fees in the DMG, whereby a thief could make 1st level entirely through stealing treasure and still not have enough gold to level up, rather than rework the treasure rules or heaven forfend, the experience tables.

My motto is "Players stay hungry" when it comes to treasure. First level characters should go for even a 300gp stash like it was Fort Knox, not a week's allowance from Dad. Also, the flat rather than exponential growth of monster xp in my system should mean that relatively more of it comes from treasure and items at later levels. But at level 1, a hair's breadth away from death, even defeating a bunch of orcs should be a pile of experience.

As always, let me know if any of this seems far fetched or out of sync with your experience.

Experience and Levels

This is the advancement chart for all character classes in my house-rules, for levels 1-5. It's fairly easy to extrapolate beyond, as well.
 

Level 1: 0-1499 xp (+1500)

Level 2: 1500-3999 (+2500)

Level 3: 4000-7999 (+4000)

Level 4: 8000-14999 (+7000)

Level 5: 15000-24999 (+10000)

One Chart: This is my personal preference. I like to try for my character classes to be balanced choices from the start, not artificially balanced by factors that come into play weeks or years after you've made your pick. Balance is of course secondary to making sure the party has a good selection of abilities to call on, but I'm not blind to the ways of players who may be checking out where other players are going with their character choices.

The classic example in D&D-like games is the 1250 xp needed for a thief to reach 2nd level versus the 2500 for a magic-user. Even more odd is the mere 1500 xp for the cleric, who enjoys the second best fighting stats and a unique and necessary skill set. The 1500 figure made more sense in OD&D when the cleric was a hybrid fighting / magic class who had to wait until 2nd level for spells. In fact, I get the feeling, reading old rule sets and retroclones, that experience rules - the most important aspect of strategic game pacing - suffer from a lot of received ideas, and not a lot of thought about what actually works. ("Oh my god! They had an all-class experience chart in The Edition That Shall Not Be Televised! We must purge it with fire!")

If a rogue is a weaker choice than a wizard I'd rather make the rogue stronger than make the wizard lag behind in levels. This is what I've tried to do in my house-rules, by making the rogue better at attacking, eventually good at defending (through level-based AC dodge bonuses) and able to score extra damage through sniping as well as backstabbing. I've also restricted the wizard a good deal with the only one of each spell rule.


1500 xp to 2nd Level: In my campaign, which meets weekly at best and until recently had quite short sessions, this was a decent pacing. A good session would net each character 200-300 xp and there were enough brushes with death and dismemberment to really drive home the exquisite joys of old school 1st level. 2000 would not be unreasonable, either, given the large sums I'm granting for monsters.


Progression: Each level takes about 1.6 times as many XP to reach as the previous. Not sure how this will go, naturally, but it seems in keeping with tried and true principles. The implication, in case I ever get around to cooking up random encounter and treasure tables, is that the XP of monsters and wealth of treasures should follow a similar progression.

The purpose of a sharper progression is to reduce grinding and reward taking on risky challenges. For example, if the XP to advance doubles every level (as in Labyrinth Lord, once past the 2nd level), and the XP  from monsters and treasures available also doubles every level, then a 5th level party killing orcs rather than 5th level fare will only net 1/32 of the advancement. But this system kind of breaks down when it comes to treasure. Having 32 times the treasure at level 5 as at level 1 is great but leaves very little room to go upwards in any meaningful way. Still, trying to reduce experience from fighting overly low-level monsters through specific XP reduction rules turns out to be unwieldy in practice, as you get into calculations of average party level and the like. Doing it naturally, through a level table where you need more and more to advance, seems better.

Well, those are the basics. Three categories to follow: XP from monsters; XP from treasure; and XP from ... other activities. Thoughts welcome, as always.

New Life, New Levels

In Utherton the survivors of our band tried to forget the death of their comrade, each in his or her own way. Boniface the holy militant, suffering from a slow-healing cut in his left arm, gave over a large sum of treasure to the maintenance of a goodly hospice of healing, thereby feeling exalted in piety. For her part, Grumpka the dwarf resolved to teach her maimed man-at-arms Balm henceforth the more subtle arts of fighting [1]. 

Postponing lessons for the nonce, his initiation was celebrated through a six-hour bender during which various publicans struggled to satisfy the dwarf’s free spending with mugs and bottles distributed to all patrons. Balm passed out too early to suffer any serious damage. Grumpka woke with a headache, which was quickly dispelled, and racial memories stirred within her; her carousing had earned her the second level.

Presently Joya arrived at the inn to convey a young acolyte of sorcery, classmate and friend of the late Ephemera. Merry and boisterous where Ephemera had been serious of purpose, this Jessera had resolved nonetheless to take up the vacant place in the adventuring band, having already had some experience of that sort in the northern hills and returning with a craving for more. The rumors of dark cults and the formidable Castle ruins only whetted her interest. Taking possession of Ephemera’s spell parchments, crossbow, and dagger of virtuous steel, Jessera set off with her new comrades back to Trossley.

There, the oath to St. Hermas was sworn again with the new associate; or rather, an oath, for the wording on the altar had changed betimes, with words about leaving no party member to die a lonely death that were much remarked and interpreted. Even with arm in a sling, Boniface and the others decided to try the stairs leading down into the depths of the Temple.

The challenges and treasures lurking in that basement were slight indeed. The wire attached to a swinging hammer was spotted through the crack of a door and disarmed; several waves of rats the size of cats, issuing through holes, were dealt with in good order, though not without some tension; a sack of coins was upended and the magically rolling silver pieces chased throughout the brick-lined passages, where their behaviour hinted at a secret door. A scratched graffito elsewhere in the tiny dungeon, after the better part of an hour’s puzzling, yielded the secret of the door’s opening, and the band beheld an offertory chamber, the resting place of coins dedicated to St. Hermas.

And not just coins; for in the heap of meagre treasure Boniface spied his severed ear, which he had thrust through the slot several days back on the advice of a prophetic dream, and now appeared cast in finest silver. It attached itself to the lacking spot and, in premeditated compensation for a miserable initial roll, Boniface was granted an additional hit point. Moreover, the whole adventure had advanced him even more in understanding of sword and cross and he, too, was elevated to second level. A booming voice that had offered stingy advice and sardonic laughter during the exploration now revealed itself. Rather than St. Hermas, it was a wee ventriloquist, Guilfoyle the guardian of the Temple, a former associate of the Most Magnificent Band of Explorers. After inquiring after the mysterious disappearance of the Mad Archmage’s face from the temple’s stained-glass window and several silver coins of his mint – a mystery our adventurers had not yet compassed in their explorations - Guilfoyle bid adieu.

[1] This and several other features of this session make reference to my experience rules, which I'll be sharing over the next several posts.

D&D Is Not A Role-Playing Game

Well, at least the original edition was not a game about role-playing - any more than Clue is.

In both games you get a character to pilot. It's up to you whether you are going to speak in character, allow the character's identity to influence your play choices. You can get all professorial as Professor Plum and make a bee line to the library, or you can just plod along as a competent problem-solver with a purple pawn.

On the other hand, we have all known people at the D&D table who just didn't go in for theatrics, accents, or back story. They played their characters as well-balanced, flexible, unremarkable protagonists. I have no doubt that they enjoyed the danger, exploration, problem solving and treasure finding of the game as much as the others. They may have even been playing closer to the pulp-adventure model than the more characterized players. More often than not, the hero of a 1930's adventure or sci-fi tale was a rough block of a character with an Anglo-Saxon name and few personal characteristics. It's a technique whose visual equivalent has been described in comics by Scott McCloud: through the abstracted narrator or protagonist, the reader gains a greater personal immersion in the fictional world.

There are few if any rules in the original D&D game that direct, enforce or reward role-playing. A Lawful alignment was the player's to lose, giving only social benefits. It's anyone's guess, for example, whether a Lawful cleric who acted evilly would lose their powers or just turn into a Chaotic one. Otherwise, characterization was left up to the players and, of course, the referee as master NPC roleplayer.

It's AD&D that started holding mechanical game benefits hostage to role-playing. The most notorious case was the paladin, but also rangers and druids, assassins, and clerics (with the authority given to the DM to skimp or change spells for bad alignment playing) had to watch how they acted. The vaguely defined moral universe of the alignment system created a culture of pettifogging casuistry, where "do baby orcs have souls" and other choice questions were debated throughout the rec-room seminaries of the land.

While everyone accepts this as part of the AD&D games and smirks nostalgically at alignment shenanigans, I'd argue that this is not the most shining moment of the system. A paladin bound by twelve clearly defined behavioral commandments similar to the one about accumulating treasure, for example, would work a lot better in play. Cut loose from the alignment system, that class would have the additional interest value of varying just how far you can get from Lawful Good and still play within the rules.

Of course, there is a side branch of development toward games with true role-playing mechanics, whether built into the system as with Pendragon, or included as options, as with the personality flaws in GURPS. Other systems on the indie/experimental side pump the importance of role-playing even more. And many DMs in D&D, too, have had the practice of rewarding in-character play with experience points.

I personally don't see XP for role-playing as necessary to the D&D game. Role-playing is something that should be its own reward because it's fun. Many players take to it even if only on a basic level (grunting fighter, flighty elf). If done well, the whole table benefits as the audience. But what I don't want is having to hand out XP that encourage players to do bad roleplaying (although even that can be entertaining in its own way); that pay off on prima-donna character motivations that work against the party in a game best played cooperatively; or that make people who aren't really cut out for play-acting feel left out. Nor do I want the spontaneity of the role-playing to fall victim to the overjustification effect. "Woops, session's closing soon, better get in my stock catch phrase so I can cash my XP check."

Now, I'm aware the "controversial" D&D != RPG statement has been made many times before. What I want to do here is make it a positive, instead of a slam on a game seen as too combat oriented. As with the other player-skill aspects of old school gaming, just because there aren't rules for roleplaying in D&D doesn't mean it won't happen. The good thing about D&D, done right, is that there's always a safe place at the table for the person who would rather just play an adventure game.

Session Wrapup: Storage Cellars of the Castle Ruins 3B

The final session of the family expedition was a mellow exploration of the tavern area with a lot of character interaction and mystery solving. Chests of coin, evidently within reach but guarded by mysterious forces, were not gone after - perhaps wisely, but  I'm entirely open to letting players surprise me with a clever caper. "Don't put anything into play you can't bear to see in their hands" is a good maxim here.

Any more would be a spoiler but a couple of interesting issues came up when reflecting on the whole campaign.

• One of the NPC's was originally written in a "blue" mode (he wrote and collected pornography) but out of deference to the tender years of one of the players I made him instead a connoisseur of puns from the days of the Archmage. This actually improved the character. It made him more interesting in conversation and provided a lot more opportunities throughout the dungeon to bring him what he wanted, for a few of the puzzles, tricks, and one-offs in my level depend on some rather outrageous puns. I found myself thinking of this song, a favorite of mine in the 90's, whose lyrics were forced to get more creative in its clean version (linked to). There might be a lesson here.
• 100xp/hit die of monsters defeated or otherwise dealt with, plus 1 xp/gp of treasure recovered, plus a 1:1 gp/xp ratio for carousing, charity or other class-appropriate activities, plus an ad hoc 200 xp award for that session where exploration and interaction stood at the forefront ... these rules got the party about 1/3 of the way to 2nd level over about 9 hours of play. (Level 2 is standardized in my system at 2000 xp for all classes; c'mon, does anyone think the different advancement curves in 0-2e are anything but a wild stab in the dark at balance?) This seems a decent pace. The higher weighting of monsters relative to treasure at lower levels meant the party seemed rather more hungry than well-fed when it came to treasure, a good way to stretch out those fun, money-grubbing early days. This group was refreshingly free of crackhead looter syndrome, but I'll also rule that salvage of objects not intended as treasure - normal monster weapons, furniture, basically anything without a stated monetary value in my notes - gives only gp but not xp.
• The observation on ars ludi about bad traps really holds true, and that goes double for hidden compartments in dungeon flagstones and so forth. Dangers can still be dangerous even if they're put in attention-grabbing features, or visible to the careful inspection of forward area I'm presuming characters to be making. A party that isn't always announcing that they are checking and tapping every square foot of bland space is a party that is having more fun. 

I once again want to thank my upstate family hosts collectively for putting me up in the middle of unpacking from their move and various summer illnesses, for excellent help playtesting some of my card game ideas, and of course for this fantastic mini-campaign.

And now back to the world of theory and design for a while. Certainly a lot to chew on, most importantly a few germs of ideas on how I can present my rule set as more than just another retro-clone.