“I’m only a Celestial Dolphin, ma’am.”

If the Discovery Channel can get 21 years out of “Shark Week,” it’s only fair that the gamers get some mileage for a similar concept. Starting Monday, September 15th, Berin Kinsman of UncleBear has declared it to be “Dire Shark Week.” During those five days, UncleBear will be posting shark-themed items on his site and has invited the gaming bloggers to join in on the fun.

As a long-time fan of UncleBear, I’m pleased to be chumming up the waters with my own contributions. During the coming week, each post here will also be featuring a shark theme. Scheduled right now is a shark-themed magic item for AD&D on Monday, a shark-related trap and new monster on Wednesday, and on Friday, which is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, a post combining the enticing flavors of pirate and shark will be featured.

Why Dire Shark Week, you might ask? Venture over to UncleBear for further information and shark-related goodness.

Resolving Challenges

There’s an axiom amongst the old school gaming crowd that goes: “Challenge the player, not the character.” While this has been applied to various aspects of the game, it mostly has to do with resolving challenges that the character might encounter during the course of his adventuring career that are not easily covered by D&D’s “class and level” style of character definition.

By this I mean that D&D in its original format provided no system for determining the success or failure of a character’s actions outside of what is laid out in the rules. Combat, spell-casting, hearing noise, climbing walls, assassination, detecting secret doors, etc. all had set rules for resolving the outcome of those actions. But what happens when a fighting-man from a pre-industrial fantasy world wants to say, design and construct a hot air balloon? Or mend his own armor? Or navigate dangerous rapids in a crude kayak?

As the rules originally stood, such decisions where entirely within the realm of the DM’s fiat. The referee could allow, restrict or assign a random chance of success based on what he felt was appropriate. There’s nothing wrong with this method, as it is part-and-parcel with the original spirit of the game. If those rules are established at the start of the game or campaign, then we have no problem. But as the game evolved in various editions and more and more rpgs were published with alternate task resolution rules, this was no longer good enough for many players.

These players were the first of the D&D rules lawyers and represented a shift in attitude away from the rules designed by wargamers for wargamers that OD&D was. As TSR sought to expand its market from a niche into a national phenomenon, it would have to address the “sketchy” nature of its original rule set to make it more friendly to those potential players who were used to having the rules detailed on the inside cover of a box.

If my memory serves me, the first attempt to rectify task resolution was the “roll under your ability” method. The taking of a d20 and hoping you roll low. I’m not sure when or where this rule “suggestion” as it probably first was offered appeared. It may have been in an issue of The Dragon or buried amongst the convoluted organization of the 1st edition DMG. It certainly had to be in effect by the time that Oriental Adventures saw publishing, since OA introduced the concept of using proficiencies for task resolution.

The proficiency-based model would be elaborated on in the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide and would eventually come to full bloom in the 2nd Edition of AD&D. I know more than my fair share of gamers who were convinced that the proficiency system “killed AD&D,” either for being the final nail in the coffin of the freewheeling earlier style of the game, or for adding yet another kink to character creation and thus prolonging the process, which of course subtracts from how much time you have to feed your latest creation to the slavering jaws of a dungeon beastie.

3rd edition saw the official introduction of skills to characters, although I understand it was available as an optional system under 2nd edition. It also, as far as I’m concerned, reached the apex of the flight from “challenging the player, not the character” way of thinking. Apparently, WotC seemed worried that people were still using Charisma as a dump stat. So to rectify this, they started loading a whole slew of abilities under the oversight of Charisma. From turning undead to sorcerer’s spell casting to gathering friggin’ information, they were determined to make sure that every attribute had a purpose. This, my friends, is challenging the character.

A “Gather Information” skill? Whatever happened to buying a few rounds in the tavern and keeping an ear open, or gods forbid, asking the NPCs intelligent questions? It seems determining the success of such tactics was still too vaguely defined for some people…

So with this in mind, I had to make a decision as to how I might approach such challenge resolutions. I was going to be using AD&D, but was I going to allow the optional proficiency system? (Even in 2nd edition it is optional and labeled as such right in the Player’s Handbook.) I waffled on the matter for a day or two before I made my decision. In the end, I would include the use of proficiencies in the game.

There were two reasons why I decided to. The first was because that I feel that proficiencies actually bring more to the game in regards to character back-story. There’s nothing to prevent a power-gamer from loading up on what he feels would be useful proficiencies like Blind-fighting, Mountaineering or Tracking. I can cope with that. It’s the character who takes proficiencies that may not seem particularly useful, but are very appropriate to the character he or she has in mind, that really add to the game and I reward such choices by making them useful.

The second reason is that I feel that using proficiencies and challenging the player are not in and of themselves opponents. I use proficiencies as gateways to provide the players information, not to solve problems themselves. What the players do with that information is entirely up to them.

While this continues to separate me from a true “grognard” in gaming style and design, it does reflect what I think of when I picture Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and when I hope to convey in my games and design. I’ve slashed the number of proficiencies available at character creations and rolled a few of them under a single heading, but they’re still there. I’ll modify the chance of success by anywhere from -10 to +10 to the roll based on probability of success, but I find that that is easier for me than concerning myself with DC #s and the like.

That’s the plan as it stands, but as we known, plans rarely survive contact with the enemy. I’m leaving myself open to change.

I Must Be Doing Something Right

It seems that I've managed to restart both my brain and my creative output in the manner that I was hoping for. A few weeks back, Grognardia had a contest to design something of a "Gygaxian" nature, be it spell, item, mosters, etc. At the last minute, I pulled something from the dungeon and submitted it.

It ended up taking the prize.

This was the boost that I was looking for and it helped motivate me to get this blog up and running. I've submitted an entry for Grogard's Challenge #4, which win or lose I'll post here in the next few days.

In dungeon news, the long Labor Day weekend allowed me to finish up most of upper works of the dungeon. I'll get into details on that in the near furture, along will a quick review of an Metzer era Basic D&D solo module I picked up cheap.

Everything Old is New Again

In addition to purusing the blogs and forums dedicated to the earlier versions of the game while trying to shift my mind back into an old school creative design mode, I’ve started looking through some of my old notes left over from games of yore. Amongst them I found the first D&D world that I ever created. This is half of the original world map. The right-hand half of it has been lost to time.

Looking at it, I can certainly see that the influences of the Known World setting from the Moldvay B/X versions of D&D are very apparent. Not necessarily a bad thing, considering. There are a lot of pulp sword & sorcery influences to it. That patch of green all the way to the left is a jungle surrounded by a forbidding wall. Shades of “King Kong” via “The Isle of Dread.” The “Spider Forest” seems to be Mirkwood’s poor cousin. The city on the oasis in the middle of the Dust Desert I believe is a straight lift from the Known World map included in the Expert set.

There are several pages of city maps bound up with the campaign notes. They’re all very orderly street maps laid out on graphs paper, looking exactly like they were created by a 12 year old boy rather than any sort of city planning. I also notice that there seems to be a lot of brothels and taverns…

I’m interested to see how much, if anything is salvageable from those notes. Most likely anything I pulled would need a good polish and a “reimagining” if I was to include it in my current project. It might be an interesting little series of posts to do. Produce the notes verbatim from what I originally wrote and then follow it up with what I did with my own work some quarter of a century later.

A Reasonable Facsimile of Reality

I certainly didn’t shy away from a challenge when I decided to return to the game. By setting the goal of creating a megadungeon with an old-school charm, there was no edging back into the pool from the shallow end. It’s a sink-or-swim project.

I’ve mentioned my “bad habits” in a previous post or two and I believe now is the time to elaborate on what I consider to be “bad habits.” The use of the parenthesis is indicative of the fact that I don’t actually consider these habits of mine to be detrimental to running role-playing games. I’m just not sure how conducive they might be painting with old-school colors, so to speak. Role-playing has evolved from the “loot and scoot” dungeon crawl, where dragons dwelled in 20’ x 20’ rooms and a hundred flavors of monsters lived under one roof like contestants in a reality series. There’s an emphasis now a days on realistic dungeon ecologies, inter-tribal politics, and a general need to find a thin shred of plausibility to suspend your disbelief from. On one hand, this is obviously a good thing. We’ve gotten older and more sophisticated, so we hope that our hobby reflects that. On the other, however, this need to justify every last critter you stock a dungeon with can tie your hands on a project.

I’m trying to find the thin line between the gonzo dungeons of yore and the post-modern role-playing mindset that has crept into the referee section of my brain. It’s not always easy. Sometimes I’m forced to tackle the problem by thinking, “what would Dave or Gary do?” More time than not, that allows me to loosen things up a bit and I’m often pleased with the end result.

So the problem facing me from the beginning was how was I going to justify the existence of a massive underground structure filled with monsters and loot and still maintain a shred of credibility? The answer, like it often is if you look hard enough, rests in a real place.

From a very young age, I was fascinated with “real” monsters like Bigfoot and Nessie, ghosts, weird places, etc. Amongst the various books that I read regarding those subjects, I learned of the Winchester Mystery House. The quick synopsis of the Mystery House is that Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune, was told that she was haunted by the spirits of those killed by the “gun that tamed the Wild West.” To confuse and/or appease those specters, she was advised to construct a house and never stop building. Construction occurred until her death, with the end result being a bizarre residence with a convoluted floor plan.

I’m stealing the Winchester Mystery House. Not whole cloth, mind you, but enough to use as a frame work to build the dungeon around. This random construction idea also throw open the doors to allow the entrance of another tool that I had hoped to use in the design of the dungeon, namely the “Random Dungeon Generation” tables from the back of the 1st Edition DMG.

I’ve mapped out the first two levels so far using this process and I’m pleased with the way things are turning out. But that’s for another post.

Links Part 2

Two more new links have been added.

Greyhawk Grognard – Joseph’s blog turns the grognard gaze on the home of the original Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. Which is only fitting. In addition to some keen insight on the classic Descent to the Depths of the Earth, he also has a few homebrewed OD&D goodies available for public consumption.

The Brothers Grim Games and Collectables – A free plug to the place that I’ve been finding most of my old school books. If you’re in the Suffolk County area of New York, it might behoove you to take a trip out to the Brothers. Just keep your hands off the boxes on the bottom shelves. Those puppies are mine!

Labor Day Rerun: War Story

The following originaly appeared on my other personal blog. In light of it being Labor Day, I'm taking the day off to work on the dungeon and spend time with friends. Here's the story of my favorite gaming memory:

Every hobbyist, no matter what their particular flavor of recreational activity, possesses a collection of anecdotes, recollections, funny tales, and non-sequiturs related to their preferred form of “non-work.” Without exception, these stories are usually only interesting to other hobbyists of the same pedigree. Individuals who don’t indulge in these activities, when forced to endure retellings of these stories, tend to drift off, roll their eyes, or politely redirect the conversation on to more broad topics (“Shut your pie-hole before I’m forced to clear leather on you, nerd-boy!”). For this reason, such tales are often referred to as “war stories.”

I’m no exception to this. I have my own treasure trove of stories that are usually safely hidden away until my dinner guests, dates, potential employers, or heads of state are in a position where escape is impossible. Only then will I start regaling them about the time Pootak MacDin MacCool managed to snatch an evil squirrel straight out of the air, hurl it back into a cave to be shish-ka-bobbed on an Elven arrow, and STILL catch the edge of the cliff before plummeting to his death below.

I’m going to tell one of those stories now. Since you supposedly reading this of your own free will, you may graciously escape before I start.


Still here? Okay then…

When it comes down to it, I’ve done a lot, and seen a lot, of great things through the eyes of imaginary people that exist solely as a collection of words on a piece of paper. I’ve done the usual heroic tasks of saving the world, defeating the grand beastie, leading armies to victory, breaking eldritch curses, etc. Despite the pleasure that I found in those game events, not one of those is my favorite moment that I ever experienced in a role-playing game. In fact, my favorite moment is most likely unrepeatable, no matter how much time, effort, creativity and planning was attempted to recreate it.

My favorite moment (and moment it was, since it lasted no more than a minute or three in real time) occurred during a campaign I played in during one of my many college years. We had a rather large party (6-7 if I remember correctly) and the players were all friends of various closeness in real life. I was playing Erik of Cullenport, a pretty standard 1st edition Fighter, who due to his high Charisma, was leader of this particular band.

The party had just finished a quest to secure a place of sanctuary for a newborn child. The boy might, or might not have been, the last legitimate heir to a usurped throne. A throne that the party all had reasons to see returned to its rightful bloodline. After experiencing the rigors to obtaining provisions for a newborn without a lactating woman of any sort in the party (“O.K. we’re taking the goat with us. Brother Hank can cast Purify Food and Water on the milk. That’s just like formula, right?”), discovering that babies put a crimp in adventuring opportunities (“Come on! Babies love caves. Let’s go in!”), and losing a party member to a ferocious stump (“It’s just a rabbit.”), we’d finally entrusted the prince to Brother Hank’s religious order and were headed south along the Western Sea to meet with the Elvish Court , for reasons that escape me. We knew peril lay ahead once we reached the forest, and having just barely escaped with our skins in the previous adventure, tensions were running a little high in the group.

Then, we had a beach party.

The DM said nothing more than we camp for the night on the beach. Immediately after saying that, the party (by which I mean the players) decided that a little R&R was needed. Our wizard announced she was looking for sharks, the ranger built a big bonfire with the wood that the thief gathered, I kept watch, and everyone else engaged in light role-playing for a minute before the wandering monster rolls turned up nothing for the night and we moved the game along.

That was my favorite game moment out of some twenty-something years of playing.

In those few minutes, using nothing more than a few casual descriptions, my mind painted the most vivid picture I’ve ever experienced during a role-playing game. I still have bits of it. I still see Gillian standing on the shoreline, eyes scanning the black waves as she holds the bottom of her robe up to avoid the surf. Her dog, Duncan, is splashing at the water’s edge, barking at the low rollers. Mirk the Fodder and Thea are throwing driftwood onto a roaring blaze, their silhouettes black against the fire. Erik is sitting on a low dune, watching the scene below. His armor is stowed safely by the fire, but his sword still lies close at hand. His mind is relaxing for the first time in many days. His friends are safe and can let their guard down, if only for a night. Erik doesn’t quite have that option, for the responsibility of leading this band still weighs on him. A weight that, much like his sword, can be put down for a little while, but never fully abandoned.

Fifteen years later, I swear I can still dimly smell the salt air and hear the waves break. I can feel the strands of beach grass blow against my bare arms as the breeze blows off the sea. I can still feel a little bit of that peace, the one that Erik must have felt that night, in my heart.Something was just right during that moment of that game. I’ll never quite know what it was. That’s why I’m sure it can never be recreated.

But I still try. One day, if everything is just perfect, I might experience something like that in a game again. In the meantime, I’m content to experience the good times that happen around a gaming table, and look forward to tomorrow night’s game.