Gelatinous Icosahedron

 Being able to assess the risk of adventure locations is a vitally important aspect of old school play, especially the sandbox style. In dungeons, this is a relatively simple matter: the danger increases as you descend deeper into the dungeon. Dungeon levels are typically numbered, starting with 1 for the first level, typically the most easily accessible, and progression to higher numbers with each level farther from the main entrance. Monsters found on a given level will tend to have the same number of Hit Dice as th e dungeon level (e.g. on the third level of the dungeon, 3 HD monsters are most common) and more loosely, traps and other hazards become more deadly. The amount and value of treasure also tends to increase with dungeon level. There are some twists on this formula; some dungeons may have additional entrances that lead directly to deeper levels, and some dungeons may be "layered" horizontally rather than vertically, but the overall principle is that players will b...

 In fantasy role-playing games, particularly those which link character advancement to recovery of treasure (of which practice, for the record, I am a fan and proponent), characters are going to accumulate a lot of silver, gold, and jewels over the course of an adventuring career. There is, unfortunately, a dearth of things on which to spend it in the rule books. At character creation and shortly thereafter, the focus is on the acquisition of basic adventuring gear. A newly-created PC may have to economize, especially on armor and weapons,but by second level, most of those concerns have been settled: a fighter who's accumulated enough treasure to gain his first level advancement has more than enough to purchase a suit of plate armor and his weapons of choice (if he hasn't already found magical versions) and probably a warhorse to boot. Mid-level characters may take interest in the "vehicles" section of the equipment roster, contemplating the purchase of ships or wagon...

 I imagine every D&D player is familiar with certain types of NPCs, especially those who accompany a party on adventures (retainers and hirelings) and those who serve as primary opposition during adventures (villains and their henchmen and lackeys.) Today, I'd like to take a look at other categories of NPCs, especially those who populate the "safe" areas of the campaign where the PCs rest between adventures, acquire supplies, pick up rumors and adventure hooks, gather information, and generally live their lives when they're not fighting for their lives. These are the NPCs that bring towns and villages to life, that give context and continuity to a campaign beyond the dungeon, with whom player characters can build working and personal relationships, which in turn provide motivation and emotional stakes to adventurers beyond the base desire for wealth and XP.  This list, I suspect, is not exhaustive; there are almost certainly categories and sub-categories I've ...

 Maybe it's a knock-on effect of coming pretty close to death recently, or maybe it's just normal reminiscence, but I've been feeling a bit nostalgic lately for my very earliest days of acquaintance with D&D, back when I was first poring over the Moldvay Basic rulebook and taking in all the oddities and nuances of the game. For some reason, the scrolls of protection from the Magic Items chapter popped into my head. There was a scroll of protection from lycanthropes, and one of protection from undead. I think my players only ever acquired a couple of those in the entirety of our first campaigns, but if I recall correctly, they did get used. Anyway, this gets me thinking about the differences between magic items as tools for skillful play, as they were no doubt originally intended, and magic items as plot coupons .  A plot coupon is a thing a character or party must obtain to advance in a particular storyline, to pass some obstacle that would be either impossible or extre...

 While D&D combat has a pretty clear order of operations and economy of actions, outside of combat I've tended to play things fast-and-loose regarding sequence, timing, and number of actions. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many other DMs handle things similarly. There's nothing inherently wrong flying by the seat of your pants, if that works for you, but if timekeeping becomes a tangled mess and/or you have some very assertive players who tend to monopolize the game between combats while passive ones barely get a chance to participate, a more structured exploration sequence may help. The editions I've played (B/X and BECMI, mostly) do give some guidelines, but for most of my DMing career I've struggled with how to apply them. Below is a more detailed, but still hopefully simple, step-by-step procedure for dungeon crawling. 1. Party moves, either until its exploration movement rate is exhausted or a keyed location or other point of interest is reached.  2. Des...

 Traps have always been a staple of dungeon-delving adventures. There's more than one way to classify traps, but here I'll be looking at them according to their purpose in the dungeon, both in-fiction (i.e. the purpose they serve to their creators in the game world) and in-game (i.e. what they add to the experience for DMs and players.) Of course, there is a fair bit of overlap, and any given trap might fit into more than one general category.  HAZARD: Not truly a trap, per se, but some feature of a dungeon that presents a danger to explorers. Unlike a true trap, a hazard is not intentionally constructed, but functions in the game in a similar way. Hazards may be natural features, such as a sinkhole, an unstable pile of rubble, a pocket of toxic volcanic gas, or the result of deteriorating structures, such as a crumbling bridge or loose ceiling block.     Purpose:  In the fiction, being products of impersonal forces, they have no purpose per se. In a game sense...

 Factions add an extra dimension to the role playing part of RPGs, allowing players to ally with some and play others against each other. Probably the most well-known examples of dungeon factions are the various humanoid tribes of the Caves of Chaos in B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. Not only is the opportunity for politicking, diplomacy, and subterfuge prominent in the module, but arguably a vital part of any viable strategy for dealing with all the orcs, goblins, bugbears, and other assorted nasties far too numerous for a party of beginning characters to tackle with brute force.  Factions in a dungeon or dungeon complex like the Caves of Chaos tend to be limited in scope (usually to the dungeon itself and possibly its immediate environs) so they're relatively easy to handle, but it's worth fleshing them out a bit so you can role play them with confidence. Here are a few details you might want to consider having ready to go in advance of actual game sessions: What does the f...

 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...

 This post is the first in a series loosely conceived as My Old School Manifesto, where I look at ideas and principles which, to me, are important to the concept of "old school" gaming. "Rulings not rules" is one of the most oft-repeated mantras of the OSR and old school gaming generally, but in my estimation, it misses the mark. Taken literally, it implies no rules are necessary at all; that a DM has only to make rulings, and I highly doubt anyone takes it that far. In spirit it means that you don't need codified rules for every situation and trying to attain that standard is a quixotic endeavor at best. It would perhaps be more accurate, though less catchy, to encapsulate the intended spirit in the phrase "Rulings informed by rules" or "Rules sufficient to provide benchmarks for rulings." What I want in an old school or old school-esque game is a body of broadly applicable rules for the types of situations most commonly faced in the game. T...

 Thinking about dungeon design and mapping today. I've always had a tendency to cram as much into a sheet of graph paper as possible. Sometimes this makes sense due simply to the type of structure, but I'm starting to think that however paper-efficient it may be, it's often suboptimal in terms of a fun, playable dungeon. Thus, I'm exploring another dungeon paradigm, one featuring lots of long corridors connecting clusters of rooms. Don't underestimate the importance of corridors. I've drawn a fair number of dungeon maps in my time, and I've tended to think of corridors as simply connections between one chamber and the next. This, I believe, has been a mistake. Look at any large public building with many rooms -- a courthouse, a hotel or convention center, a school, even a shopping mall. In all of them, corridors aren't connections between rooms, but more like roads through neighborhoods. Roads provide access to each lot, not connection between rooms of a...

 Well, it's been months since I've written or thought much about D&D, and a lot longer since I've actually played it, but I've recently been mulling the idea of writing and publishing some sandbox adventure settings. In that vein, I've been thinking a bit about adventure design: specifically, encounters. Not combat encounters vs. roleplay encounters or anything like that, but the big picture way in which encounters are integrated into the matrix of space, time, randomness, and player agency that makes up the game. The encounter types listed below may be incomplete, but at least serve to illustrate how the different types of encounters serve different purposes. A good mix of encounter types ensures a balance between DM preparedness, unexpected twists and complications that enrich the game, and respect for player agency. Random: An encounter that occurs when and where the dice dictate, fixed neither in time nor space. It is procedurally generated during play by r...