Gelatinous Icosahedron

 Last post, I came to the conclusion that the vast majority (if not all) D&D classes are, functionally, built around three primary approaches to adventuring: combat and physical prowess (fighter,) magic (magic-user,) and mundane non-combat skills (thief.) By hybridizing these three, you can adequately model almost any sort of character without creating a new class for every single variation on a theme.  There are a few different ways we can go about hybridizing classes. One way is to make the new class fully functional in both of the basic classes, or nearly so, and making XP requirements much higher to compensate and/or applying a level limit. It's essentially a "best of both worlds" concept, applying the most advantageous aspects of each class, e.g. the higher hit die, the less restrictive weapon and armor strictures, the better combat, spell, and/or skill progression of the two base classes. Basic D&D does this with the Elf class. Except for the d6 hit die inst...

 How many classes does D&D need? Some editions, especially OD&D and the "basic" D&D games (B/X and BECMI) stick to a few essentials, at least in the core game. AD&D and its supplements add quite a few more that are considered iconic to one degree or another, and have been adapted innumerable times for basic D&D and its retroclones, but I don't believe any of them really breaks any new ground.  I suppose how many classes you need depends on what exactly a character class represents to you. Is it a broad archetype, a representation of a specific legendary or literary character, or does it encapsulate a particular approach to the business of adventuring? For me, it's this last definition. Building upon that, three character classes seem most essential to the game (and it's not the original three, oddly enough.) The first approach to adventuring is to face it with physical prowess and skill at arms; the way of the fighter . This simple class model...

 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...

 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...