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.

Beast World

The series is back!

Roll d20 once (whole row), twice (column 1, column 3, choose the most appropriate column 2 verb from the two rolls), or three times (each column separately) for increasing degrees of craziness.

And check out Jason's The Dungeon Dozen ... in a similar vein, but more focused, and a different d12 table every day.

Some day I'm going to collect a whole bunch of them and make a huge roll-a-thon of 144x12 weird things you can find in the dungeon.

He Speaks!

FOR SO IT IS ORDAINED

EVERY DUNGEON MASTER

MUST TALK IN A SILLY

 

ANGLO-AMERICAN*

DINNER THEATER ACCENT

* or Anglo-Australian

Three Improvisations

Took the Castle of the Mad Archmage to the mini-convention at the uni Saturday, two new players and one veteran adventurer braving the upper works.

Of course they mostly ignored the thin trail of plot crumbs that would have sent them to keyed areas, and went exploring around the upper works of the castle, treading into decidedly unkeyed territory.

What to do? Push them with the railroad tender's stick back onto the yellow brick road? Hell no!

This is ... OLDSCHOOL!
 

After this game I realized that my system preparing content for an adventure on the fly takes about as much time during play as does preparing it in downtime, and is almost as quick as looking it up in notes. The downside is that you can't really join things up sensibly ... or can't you? It's kind of amazing what emerges after the fact as you connect the dots.

Spoilers follow!

Back in My Day We Didn't Have These Fancy Megadungeons

The sight of the recently released 300 room Barrowmaze being docked points on Grognardia for not being big enough to be a true megadungeon - I guess that makes it more of a what? Macrodungeon? Kilodungeon? - reminds me that we didn't even know what the hell a megadungeon was in 1982. There were no commercially available examples of the art, and only a few oblique references to Castle Greyhawk in the Dungeon Master's Guide.

To us, megadungeons were boring. In the absence of any guidance from TSR, our DM started us off with three levels of what, in hindsight, was inspired by the only available megadungeon examples at the time: PC dungeon games such as Wizardry or Bard's Tale, which we also played avidly. In other words, a monster motel punctuated by traps.

By the time we reached third level of this dungeon, we were clamoring for a more "mature" experience, more similar to the published modules we were starting to read. Adventures with a plot and a climax and in different parts of the world map. Nobody we knew was running a megadungeon, and even less so through the story-obsessed 80's and 90's. When Undermountain came out, it seemed more of a curio than a model for emulation. Impressive, certainly, but would you actually want to nail your campaign down in one place for years at a time?

Really, what we're doing under the banner of the Old School Renaissance is much cooler than 99% of our actual old school experiences with D&D. Essentially, we are finally appreciating and spreading the practices of the close Gygax/Arneson circle that never made it out to the masses in any published product. Megadungeons are part of that, and the only pity is that the necessary catalyst seemed to be the passing of the founders of the game.

AGS Con Saturday

For people in southeast England, I will be running a session at the University of Kent at Canterbury's adventure games society con (AGS Game Con) Saturday 10:00-12:30 (NOTE TIME CHANGE), Woolf College at the University, room 1. Location and schedule info are in the link, it's a very informal one-day con with all kinds of gaming and fandom.

System: Homebrew old school (TSR Basic D&D meets 3rd ed*.)
Characters: Pregenerated, or use yours from previous games I ran this year.

Now that the bandits have been ousted from the upper works, the entrance to the Cellars of the Castle of the Mad Archmage lies open. A mysterious collector wants you to bring back a bottle of Cuvee du Sorcier Fou, preferably the tart MY 1321 vintage. Will you succeed in your quest, or just blunder around the Cellars aimlessly, getting into trouble? The choice is yours!

* Blog readers will know this as the 52 Pages System. I'll be using my own version of the Cellar level for castle of the Mad Archmage, but am prepared to go as deep as level 3 if people find the stairs ...

AD&D Gender Differences: Not Big Enough for Realism

If you defend gender limits on Strength in a game because of "the basic facts of anatomy," are you going far enough?

Most research studies put men on average at about twice the physical upper-body strength of women, whether measured by lifting or throwing (even this meta-analysis challenging the importance of psychological sex differences has to acknowledge the strong physical sex differences on this score.) To put it statistically, effect size differences on things related to the Strength stat in roleplaying games range from 1.5 to 3 standard deviation units (d). The distribution overlap for a d of 2 looks like this:

What this would mean is that 2.5% of women are physically stronger than the average man, and 2.5% of men are less strong than the average woman. If you assume that the male is the norm for the D&D character (and given the premises of this discussion, hey, why not?), this translates to a -6 penalty to female Strength, so that the top 2.5th percentile cutoff of the female distribution (3d6 roll of 17+) matches the top 50th percentile cutoff of the male one (3d6 roll of 11+).

Nothing this size exists for psychological differences, so unless you're positing some very bizarre cultural constraints, balancing out male strength  by giving women characters a +6 to "wisdom" or "charisma" or what have you is just as unrealistic.

And people are arguing about AD&D capping human females at 18/50 strength? It's clear that neither realism nor equality are served by the classic  rule, which can only be defended on the grounds of tradition.

My own game's rationale for not having gender modify strength: Along with the wizard, the dwarf, the elf, the barbarian - each of which rests to some extent on a suspension of disbelief - there is another fantasy archetype, the "warrior maid" or "kick-ass woman." Whether her name is Penthesilia, Bradamante, Wonder Woman, or Xena, both men and women love to watch her, and sometimes to play in her role. Anything the system does to make this character possible, and attractive to play, is allowable.

Long story short: why the hell are people so concerned about female anatomical realism when half the female fighters in D&D art look like this:

And if so, why can't they equally "unrealistically" look like this?