Gelatinous Icosahedron

 D&D combat is weird when it come to animals (and animal-like fantastic creatures like griffons and owlbears.) Actually, it's weird in several ways. First is the breaking of combat abstraction in creatures with multiple attacks. It's pretty well established by now that, for a character, one attack roll does not equal one swing of a sword. It represents the cumulative effects of ten seconds (or a full minute, in the case of AD&D) of thrusts, jabs, feints, parries, and such. Even the damage rolled need not come from a single wound; it could be several small wounds. For a while I struggled with the idea of a single creature making multiple attack rolls per round, but I've come to the conclusion that multiple attack rolls, in and of themselves, don't violate abstraction. It's just a particular mathematical relationship between offense and defense and damage, which need not imply a particular number of specific strikes any more than a single roll would. So a bear...

 A couple days ago, I read an interesting post  on the excellent Monsters and Manuals blog expounding on the notion of adventure for adventure's sake - that is, not primarily to gain rewards in the form of treasure and experience points, nor for story-related goals like saving the world, the village, or the princess, but simply to experience what the setting itself has to offer. In real life, after all, nobody travels to an exotic foreign country, takes a walking tour of a historic city, or hikes a windswept beach or mountain trail with the expectation of saving the world or returning richer and more powerful. Even participating in an event like a marathon or mountain climb is at least as much about testing one's mettle purely for the sake of it as it is about gaining greater skill. Is it possible to consistently recreate that real world spirit of "because it's there" in a tabletop game like D&D? My initial thoughts, as a comment on the original post: I think ...

 Another installment in My Old School Manifesto. There seems to be a lot of disagreement among tabletop gamers about the appropriateness of "fudging" dice rolls. I'm pleased to observe, though, that the practice is much more frowned-upon by folks identifying as OSR or old school, and I agree very much with the principle of NEVER fudging dice rolls. During actual play*, don't roll -- don't even TOUCH the dice -- unless you mean to abide by the result. *It is absolutely acceptable to roll dice during game prep activities, such as creating a dungeon, for the purpose of inspiration or a sort of writing prompt, and then to disregard or modify the results. We're talking actual play here. By not rolling the dice unless you mean it, you preserve their objectivity. Players know you're not going to bail them out or screw them over because of any biases or preconceptions about what "should" happen. If you believe strongly that a particular outcome should oc...

 The second topic I want to explore in my Old School Manifesto series is the DM's role in creating "stories" in the game.  The idea of an overarching narrative to an adventure or an entire campaign has been around a long time, as evidenced by quite a few classic-era modules. I'm no TSR historian, but it seems to me it really started creeping in (at least in basic D&D) after the first few published modules in the B and X series, and took hold hard with the C and M series. At some point, modules became freighted with scripted encounters proceeding in linear fashion to an expected conclusion. To be fair, some of these modules did, if I recall correctly, provide a few possible paths to reach the ending, and allowed for the possibility that the PCs would fail, but they were still expected to proceed more or less within a set of predetermined parameters toward a preordained climactic scene.  So, I suppose a case could be made that plotted adventures are a part of, or at...