The Gamer's Journey

"The road (to adventure)
goes ever on and on ..."
(illustration by Theodor Kittelson)

Last week's article on "Fun Doesn't Mean Easy" pulled a long response from a player in an old school* game. The writer agreed with some of my points and disagreed with others. Reading it triggered a few thoughts that are worth setting down in writing.

The crux of the matter as laid out by the player seems to revolve around whether D&D** is a game or a collaborative story.

No one can answer that question definitively. It's both, of course, but we play it for different reasons at different times and with different people.

When I first picked up D&D, the only thing I cared about was the adventure. I came to D&D from wargaming, and D&D was an extension of that. We approached quests like military missions. That doesn't mean we were all about fighting. Everyone who's played early versions of D&D knows how quickly a fight can turn against you. If we could beat an enemy without fighting or rig the odds in our favor, those were plan A and plan B. When we were forced to use plan C--a fair fight--then we knew that casualties were almost inevitable, and the best we could do was minimize them. If you were smart and charismatic, you'd bring along sime hired muscle and let them take the brunt of the enemy's wrath. If you were dead but wealthy and high-level, you might get raised. But, as von Clausewitz stated, "blood is the price of victory."***

High Magic, Low Magic

There's no right or wrong side in the debate between high magic and low magic campaigns, only personal preference. If you're lucky, everyone in your group swings the same way. I've always leaned toward low magic campaigns. I don't expect to convert anyone who feels differently, but I can lay out the reasons why I tilt the way I do.

Before getting into the details, though--when I talk about low and high magic, I'm referring chiefly to how many magic items a character can expect to encounter and accrue during a career of adventuring. A secondary concern is the prevalence of magic-using NPCs. Player-character wizards are to be expected, but is yours an exceptional figure, or did he graduate 48th in a class of 650 that year at the wizard academy?

My preference starts with the influences that brought me to FRPGs in the first place. I "discovered" fantasy as an adult genre when an insightful high school English teacher steered me toward The Lord of the Rings, a distinctly low-magic tale. The magic of Middle Earth is subtle and seldom used--so unlike the structure of D&D that it's hard to mirror LotR with the D&D rules.

Black Powder--Friend or Foe?

It's Tuesday, which means Howling Tower does its thing over at Kobold Quarterly. Today's topic is mixing gunpowder with magic--a volatile combination. It's a subject that's been near and dear to my heart since I wrote the historical supplement A Mighty Fortress for AD&D back in the mid-'90s.

In this golden age when we have dozens of well-designed, polished FRPGs to choose from, gamer arguments tend to be about whether game A is “better” in some indefinable fashion than games B through Z. There was a time long ago when only a handful of FRPGs existed, and most roleplayers had tried all of them to one extent or another. Then, arguments tended to be about what you did or didn’t allow in your campaign. One of the most contentious campaign elements was gunpowder. If two gamers collided in a hallway, you could count on a “you got gunpowder in my magic/you got magic in my gunpowder” fight breaking out. (more at Kobold Quarterly ...)

A Few (Almost Certainly Not) Final Thoughts on TPKs

When old-schoolers and new-schoolers get talking about TPKs, I suspect there's a certain amount of rose-colored nostalgia at work.

It's certainly true that TPKs were more common in OD&D and AD&D than they've become since the latter days of 2nd Edition. But the notion that back in the day everyone shrugged off TPKs and character death in general as "just the way things are--take it like a man and roll up a new sacrifice to the slaughter god" rings a bit false.

Here's what I recall. Characters were fragile. Most of them claimed a spot in the bone orchard before they reached 2nd level, and it was no big deal. Rolling up a new victim took 5 to 10 minutes, and you might do it two or three times in an afternoon.

Character Setbacks Aren't Adventure Setbacks

Paul Unwin (@pdunwin) made some excellent comments over at KQ regarding "Dragons: A Soar Spot."  Paul is a sharp observer whose opinion I respect, so I'd like to repeat his comments and my replies here, then enlarge on them just a bit.

Paul: "I think if I found myself DMing a situation like this and the PCs were clueless what to do, that I’d say “Look, two people are down and dying. Going by the book, the dragon can simply chase you down if you run. So, you can either die and roll up new characters, or you lose and you accept the results I impose on you.” Then I’d give them a few options, such as equipment ruined, nearby town laid waste, lost in a forest/cavern the dragon can’t enter, and/or now in service to the dragon."

Me: "The time to have a conversation with players about their options is before the fight begins, not when they’re running around on fire. ... Players push ahead with foolish ideas because they interpret a DM’s silence to be a sign that everything is going according to script. They assume that the DM won’t let them do anything lethally foolish. If they’re lining up to do something that looks lethally foolish and the DM isn’t stopping them, then it must be OK. They could even be excused for thinking this way if it’s always been true in the past."

Fun Doesn't Mean Easy

Yesterday's column at Kobold Quarterly, "Dragons: A Soar Spot," touched on a point that's worth enlarging. That is, that players will still have fun if the GM makes the game hard.

Let me start by stating that I don't subscribe to the notion that the GM's job is guaranteeing that everyone at the table has fun. That's everyone's responsibility.

The GM's main job is to create challenges for players to overcome and to interpret the success of their efforts. Those challenges can be based around combat, puzzles, exploration, negotiation, or any of the other activities heroes engage in.

The job does not include providing ready solutions to those challenges. That is the players' part of the split. Not every gorge needs a handy log lying nearby. Not every trap needs a deactivation lever. Not every monster needs to be killable. Honestly, I don't believe the game master even needs to ensure that every problem has a solution.

Dragons--A Soar Spot

At Kobold Quarterly today, some howling about "Dragons: A Soar Spot."

Dragons are the most iconic creatures in fantasy RPGs, for obvious reasons. They ought to be among the most impressive and frightening, too, but that isn’t always the case. It’s not because dragons don’t have the chops; on a stat-by-stat basis, your average dragon is terrifying. Yet player characters bring them down with shocking regularity.

How can that be? I blame two popular fancies, both of which are variations of namby-pambyism. (more ...)