Running Bandits Across the Many Worlds

Well, I couldn't get much enthusiasm to blog during my trip in the latter half of January (especially when my computer's hard disk crashed) but did get in a fair amount of tabletop action. Stick with it, there's some more commentary on megadungeon design below ...

My first stop was the gaming in-laws (previously) where my wife rolled up her third first level magic-user with a Sleep spell to venture into the Castle of the Mad Archmage - promptly dubbed "Repetitia." Thus augmented, the usual family party set out to defeat the Skull Stacker bandits in the upper works, led by the green-armored terror, half-orc Grunya (or Grainne - medieval orthography being what it is). This would be the third time the Skull Stackers have appeared in my various parallel universes - the first time in the long-ago Trossley campaign, the second in the Saturday games I ran last year for the local game club.

Accompanying the party was a detachment of the local guard, pushing ahead of them three convicts from the rival bandit gang captured in the previous session. The convicts were chained to polearms and told that their way to mercy was to attack without regard for life.

There followed a tense battle across a curtain wall and tower with scaling of walls, dodging and not-dodging of arrows, opening of one door from within and another door using Repetitia's enlarge/reduce spell on the planks. Dad and daughter climbed a grappling rope to find Grunya and comrades atop the tower while son and the rest of the party battled up from within the tower, landing a critical hit on the leader at the best possible moment to knock her down the stairs. Soon she was dead and the young version of the rival bandit Fergus, who had appeared in Grunya's respawned band when the Castle reappeared, was in custody. Shades of Looper! The captive older version of Fergus offered his own life to hang for the crimes of both if younger Fergus could be indentured to the party as a man-at-arms - very different from how this dilemma played out in Trossley.

The next day, the party, now mostly second level, decided to return to the Castle's dungeons and head down the rightmost of three stairs to level 2. After disposing of a spider they found themselves in a hallway occupied by ... not bandits ... okay, brigands. A quick sleep spell disposed of most of the band and in short order they were negotiating surrender terms with the leader, Tov Encher. Tov convinced them that only he could pacify the neighboring troglodytes who had come to investigate the sounds they heard, and so got them out of the level, and set himself free at the price of the gang's treasure.

It's only after running the brigand episode that I realized this was another example of Joe Bloch's hidden depths beneath the Castle's terse descriptions. (I've previously noticed some subtle setups running the west end of the second level, where a seemingly unbeatable monster has the means to defeat at hand, and a fear trap combines with branching corridors behind it, to effectively split the party.)

The group of about 12 brigands lives in a series of 20x20 foot rooms off a straight hallway behind a door, close to the stairway down. To quote:

BLACK SPEAR GANG (#35 – 40). A group of brigands has taken up residence with the idea of ambushing adventurers after they are weakened. They have not been very successful of late, and will often send out patrols to look for likely targets, setting up ambushes, etc.

This is where it pays to read ahead of time and embellish the dungeon. My one idea was that they would try to dissuade adventurers from entering their area, instead shunting them to the nearby troglodyte-controlled corridor, which would easily yield a weakened party for the ambush idea. Therefore, I had the brigands put the delver's rune for "Treasure" on their own door, which obviously (?) would make parties suspicious and choose the other door. However, nobody in the party managed to decipher the rune, so in they went.

The fallback plan for the brigands, in hindsight, would be to put bars or blockades on the inside of the doors, hope the party would bypass the unmovable doors to venture deeper within, and then ambush on return. But DMs, like players, have to live and learn.

Personally, I think working with the design of the dungeon to bring out strategies like this is a fun challenge. But I can see how a product for less experienced session runners might gain value by going beyond the minimal descriptions, and spelling out some of the more interesting possibilities that might not be immediately obvious.

Boring Combat 2: Low Levels, Intelligent Foes

As I mentioned last time, first level in an old-school game is the baptism through fire of excitement in combat, when your hit die is not too many numbers ahead of the damage die. The situation also creates excitement through other means, if you engage with it, mostly schemes of low cunning in an attempt to not get your character killed.

(Of course, that kind of excitement can be sustained almost indefinitely playing with a system where characters aren't protected from death at high levels, or hacking D&D to be such a system. Along with a lot of frustration and gravestones, of course.)

It's low levels after first where you see boring, line-em-up D&D combats begin. As an example may I present the incident from the high school campaign I played in, where we found a room with about 100 kobolds in it. Our fighter - 2nd or 3rd level as I recall, plate mail and shield - simply stood behind the doorway and took care of them as they came on, in what must have been about 15 minutes of steady dice rolling.

With the wisdom of experience I realize that this kind of play was copied from the computer games we played and had nothing to do with how real authentic kobolds (or even experienced skirmish gamers) would approach the situation. See, I've come to know several kobolds personally and they tell me that instead of the suicide rush, they would fade back, harry with slings and arrows, provoke a charge, and then come at you from all sides. They would choose or make living spaces where they could loop around in that situation and sneak up from behind. This is even before I mention all the Viet Cong-style traps and hazards used by the legendary Tucker's Kobolds. I shudder to think what poor preparation my high school D&D experience would have given me for being jumped by kobolds.

The basic insight is to think of your low level intelligent monsters as possessing the same survival instinct and strategy as a set of good, experienced 1st level characters, rather than being dumb numbers in a computer game. The way to use that insight, without even resorting to traps, tricks, burning oil, or features of the environment - though each of these certainly have their place - is to recognize that combat has more than one dimension.

In the case of kobolds and other intelligent humanoids, that dimension is mainly horizontal. First of all, maneuvering around horizontally allows the foe to bring superior numbers to bear. Also, think of the party as a long worm with an armored head and a soft tail. Horizontal maneuvering puts that tail in jeopardy. Finally, most systems have a mechanical advantage for those who attack from the rear or otherwise outflank their foe.

One of the most exciting dungeon combats I ever ran was in Tomb of the Iron God, where there's a room with an array of about eighty skeleton warriors. Skeletons are mindless, but Matt Finch's module had them programmed by smarter minds, so two detachments of them were seen leaving by side passages. The party figured out what was coming, and the fight quickly turned into a nail-biting, moving retreat that just barely managed to avoid being outflanked.

Positioning and range - where you're moving on the map - is the main tactical decision I ask of my players. I've studiously avoided the kind of "combat options" found in later editions simply because positioning will always be an element, an important one at that, and combining optional attack modes or once-per-whatever effects with that tends to bog combat down. I use critical hits and fumbles with effects like knock down or stun, and feats that automatically trigger when a certain number is rolled.

Make no mistake, fighting this kind of positional warfare to advantage is part of player skill. Some kind of graphic display is absolutely necessary, whether figures or whiteboard, to keep options visible and awareness high. If players don't want to exert tactical skill this way, they're probably better off playing in a more abstract system, where the place of positioning is taken by flashy moves and options - kind of like in the old 2D fighting arcade games.

Well, all this is very good for low-level intelligent foes, but aren't things like wolves and spiders just bound to come straight at you and stay boring? That question will be answered in the next installment, wherein I talk about the vertical dimension.