Let's ask Eero about Primitive D&D

\n Hmm, you know, I've been thinking that I really should reactivate myself about blogging - I've been playing a homebrew D&D sandbox for a few weeks now (session 10 was today), and there's definitely a lot to tell about that. I also should discuss our Glorantha campaign that we played over the winter... really, I'm so far behind in my blogging that it's intimidating even to think about it.

To make sure we're on the same page: when I coined the term "primitive D&D", I did not intend this as a name for my personal set of D&D house-rules, but rather as a name for the practice of play that I was (and am) using in playing the game: instead of having a specific rules-text for the game we rely only on a roughly universal D&D framework (abilities, classes, levels, whatever else comes up), plenty of on-the-spot rulings and an organically developing "common law" set of judgments and practices, the best of which become enshrined as rules. I can totally discuss my own mechanical thinking for how to make D&D work, but to some degree this is not talking about primitive D&D: talking about primitive D&D is talking about improvisation, basically, and not about the incidental outcome of that process.

Anyway, this is pertinent because this current campaign is basically a continuation of the thinking I've been doing from 2007 or so onwards. (I'm pretty sure that the blog post you link is very near temporally to when I again started thinking about D&D seriously, after a hiatus of a few years.) The current game is not "primitive D&D" in the sense I meant when using the term in my blog, as it's not entirely improvised anymore, but it has many of those mechanical features you mention here. Perhaps I'm qualified to answer some of your questions on the basis of my current thinking and our current campaign:

Classes, fun to play
In primitive D&D you really negotiate the character classes on the spot, according to shared understanding of D&D conventions. What works and what doesn't is therefore very personal. The occasional experiences with primitive D&D have since led me to the slightly more fixed system I currently use:\n

• The campaign so far has three character classes: Fighter, Sage and Adventurer. These are extremely flexible general frameworks that do not have much in the way of fictional traction: the character classes are defined in terms of problem-solving tools and problem-solving philosophy, not so much by fictional social details. The Fighter is a class that is best at resolving problems by the use of force; violence in D&D-world is always the court of last resort, and it always works, but if you only have a hammer and you encounter somebody with a bigger hammer you're basically screwed. Sage is an amalgam (or rather, a generalization) of wizards, priests and bards, pretty much: they resolve problems by recontextualizing them, such as by discovering weaknesses, discovering stronger leverage, discovering new tools and so on. Adventurers are basically my replacement for thieves in trad D&D: they resolve problems by maneuvering them into crucial turning points in the fiction and then acing the necessary dicing by the way of exotic skill proficiencies or dice rerolls they get; basically, an (high-level) Adventurer will probably win a situation mechanically as long as the player can frame it all to rest on one dice-roll, even a rather unlikely one.
• D&D is by nature a system where low-level characters are all similar to each other, while high-level characters become more dissimilar, as their resources and abilities grow apart according to their character class. This is also a feature in my current D&D, so players tend towards cross-class behaviors at this point. (The highest-level character just got to third level this session, then lost half his xp as he fell from Paladin status.) I expect that around level 5-ish the players start to feel a serious mechanical pressure to shape their thinking to accord with the means their character classes allow for them, but for now it's not at all unreasonable for a fighter to make use of plentiful Learning checks or for a Sage to fight on the front-lines of a battle.
• I'm not entirely sold on my idea that character classes are "philosophies of problem-solving". Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. The system would not break mechanically if I introduced more character classes on top of these "big three", perhaps something more fictionally specific or something with a different problem-solving philosophy. For example, I've been thinking about perhaps seeing a place for a Monk-type class in the campaign; on the one hand it'd be cool, but on the other hand I can easily "model" a monk as a fighter, so it'd sort of be extra crunch for no good reason. On the other hand, I've been also considering dropping the character classes entirely and only having levels; the only reasons for having classes at the moment in my thinking are character speciation (a secondary concern in low-level play) and the fact that I've grown to like the asymmetric xp tables used in older editions of D&D. Tricky, and the system is definitely still evolving.

\nAs for which class is the most fun to play, and remembering that I'm talking of my slightly abstract treatment of character classes here: I'd have to say that as far as I can discern, the players are enjoying all types of character classes in the game as we're playing right now. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the primary subgames engaged by each type of character are viable and interesting: the fighting system is exciting, the knowledge-gathering and -recall systems are pertinent and useful, the ability check system used to "do stuff" allows adventurer-type characters to take risks and succeed now and then. If I had to pick a class that might potentially not be as much fun as the others, I might choose the Adventurer/Thief sort of characters, sort of: on the one hand they're supposed to be a bit wimpy to compensate for their flexibility, but on the other hand they've had slightly dull mechanical feats available to them lately. I probably should fix this by sitting down and writing some Adventurer crunch soon.

I'll answer more questions soon; let me know if I'm discussing the sort of things you're interested in, or if I should reorient my treatment.

\n Is there still "alignment" of any sort?

Also, where did that paladin guy fit into your class structure?

\nPlayer trust in the system
The way this sort of system works is pretty GM-centric, but it's not arbitrary unless you allow it to be. The way we play, any judgment calls may be and are questioned, and I will discuss my reasoning immediately if desired. Doesn't seem to cause any major problems. This is probably helped by the fact that the math of the system is pretty simple. Here are the basics:\n

• Abilities are rolled on a 3d6 in order, so their average value is 10. Player characters develop their abilities semi-dynamically (this is very important for me psychologically, it justifies the random initial ability matrix that you're not stuck with it), so they tend towards 20 (natural human maximum without magic) over time. However, one of the more typical critical injuries is that an ability is halved for your character, so the average ability level still veers around 10-ish. Whatever, the point of ability distributions here is not to be predictable or balanced - that role is for the xp bonuses and such, abilities are supposed to be the wildcard element.
• The basic checks in the game are all ability checks: I could go for roll-under here easily enough, but at the moment we still play 3rd edition style, with [Ability score]+[possible other bonuses]+d20 against a difficulty level. This means that the basic check result for the average character is around 20.
• Target numbers for checks are sometimes resisted, but the great majority of time they are static: you roll against 15 for absolutely routine stuff (I mostly only call for this for aesthetic reasons, not seriously expecting failures), 20 for default difficulty (something like 70% of my calls are for this), 25 for challenging and 30 for heroic level feats. Something like 95%+ of the checks are either against 20 or 25, so there's not much GM adjudication called for in this.
• Basically all checks make use of degrees of success in multiples of five points. For example, one of the most typical check types is a knowledge check: base difficulty 20 (or higher for more esoteric knowledges), and the player gets an extra clarifying question for each degree of success over the target number. Similarly, you get one "stunt" (an opportunity for changing the fictional positioning) in a fight for each extra degree of success. Another typical use is to go all Otherkind about situations and require players to allot successes to various things they want to achieve. Basically, degrees of success are the minigame currency engaged after an Ability check.

\nThe above principles are adjudicated naturalistically - based on GM perception of realism, that is. This makes the numbers pretty easy to predict most of the time once we've played enough together for the players to get on the same wavelength about matters. Additionally, the players have various security mechanics that protect their rights in utilizing the system:\n

• You only roll after hearing the target number from the GM, unless the GM declares the target number secret, which he may only do if the outcome of the check is secret as well. You can ask for an explanation for why a target number is higher or lower than you expected, and you can decide to not roll once you've heard the GM's "offer".
• Often the GM will outright reveal the likely consequences of different actions to highlight the strategic choices involved in a situation; other times the GM will only reveal these sorts of background thinking after a suitable perception or knowledge check, forcing the players to potentially make choices with incomplete information. Typically players will have a good sense of the involved risks and uncertainties when they make choices.
• The GM's task in the game is to offer challenging choices to the players, and for this reason all situations are generally formulated in the form of player-initiated actions or forced choices, not merely forced ability checks. This means that the relationship between the player and the GM is negotiation-based in that the player is, most of the time, the one who decides whether his character will try to cross that chasm on that single rope or not. He has plenty of information to base this decision on, as discussed above. The GM is not misusing his power in making the chasm difficult or easy to cross; not only is his mandate only to judge the fiction impartially, but he is also entirely unable to force the player to take a deal that the player does not consider worthwhile. Whether the chasm is too wide or the monster too strong, that judgment is on the player, not the GM.

\nAs for standardization, that definitely happens under the "common law" paradigm we play in. Typically a sort of situation that comes up time and again will gain an organically evolving subsystem of its own. For example, I'll discuss the evolution of our bless action (available to cleric type sages) from memory:\n

1. When the ability was first used, I didn't really know more about it than written above: we just made an Ability check against the default difficulty of 20 and then decided that the blessing would provide the +1 bonus to the blessed characters for the particular activity they were doing at the time.
2. Later the characters were blessing some cross-bows. I decided that the difficulty could be the same, but this would take much longer; from then on, it was decided that blessing activities is a matter of a few minutes, while blessing an item such as some water or a weapon or a tool takes several hours.
3. When undead were turned, I hacked up some arbitrary stuff about extra degrees of success causing multiple undead to get turned, as seems obvious as a solution.
4. When the players rolled really high on some blessing actions, I've alternatively given a higher blessing bonus or maintained that the bless bonus can never be over +1, and only the length or applicability of the blessing would change with a better success. This is definitely a soft spot in our practice, but it will solidify in time: either I accept the idea that you can get more than a +1 out of this low-level priestly power, or I'll reject this and figure out some other ways of making those degrees of success matter.

\nThere's a lot of these standardized difficulties for various things, but the nature of the organically growing game makes it a bit difficult to arrange the ducks neatly into a row, as one might imagine. Examples I might cite are pit traps in the Tomb of the Iron God (all seem to be at difficulty 20 to perceive before you fall in; not very difficult as long as you're actually looking where you're going), saving rolls when you run out of hitpoints (against 20+your negative hit point score, I think), turning major undead (DC = their current hitpoints), pricing found art objects (20 + 1 per hundred gp in value) and so on.

The combination of simple basic roll system, open mechanics and open GM reasoning gives us a pretty trustworthy overall system landscape, I feel; I particularly emphasize that the GM is responsible for verifying his difficulty calls against the fiction whenever the players feel like running an audit. (Auditing a system like this is pretty interesting if you haven't ever seen it done: what happens is basically that the facts about the fiction are verified - the wall is so high and made of so and so materials, whatever - and then the GM demonstrates how these facts translate into this particular magic number in his head, as opposed to some other magic number. We actually had an itty-bitty audit today about whether the difficulty of dodging a charging brain leech should be 20 or 25; no big deal, as I was only too happy to take whatever number the players thought reasonable when they were surprised by my judgment. As it happened, they agreed with me after we described the positioning and nature of brain leeches a bit more carefully, and it didn't take more than half a minute at most.)

\nSpell difficulty
As discussed above, my current system has partially gone back to D&D-style package magic. Or rather, I'm running all seven sorts of variant magics at once, all rooted in the fiction: clerical powers are basically ability checks derived from loosely defined ordinations, while "arcane" magic is traditional D&D style. In the fiction these two domains are not neatly separate: priests of different institutions rely on clerical magic and arcane magic to different degrees, in a manner reminiscent of classical sword & sorcery. (Conan stories, for example, do not distinguish between a priest and a wizard: a priest is just a wizard with particular beliefs and social position.) There is no mechanical reason for a character not possessing both "Goetia" and "Ordination", the two basic Initiations I describe above; I expect the wizardly/clerically inclined sages in the crew to do just that if they get a chance, in fact. The difficulty is that you don't get to be a goetic wizard outside chargen without learning the secret knowledges from somewhere, and you don't get ordained without a religious society to ordain you. Both of those are untrivial in a rolling campaign game.

Even arcane magic, however, does use ability checks: I allow characters who are too low-level to memorize higher-level spells to cast them as ritual magic, which is done via the use of ability checks. I'm also sympathetic to the idea that a wizard might use a memorized spell for cantripping without expending the magic; have burning hands memorized and use it to flick light into your candle without losing it, for example. I suppose a wizard might also hack a spell as he casts it; I'd go for it if a player declared in desperation that his character wanted to risk the consequences and try to cast a spell and keep it, too, for example. All of this uses ability checks routinely.

Anyway, difficulties on all of this are very, very fuzzy compared to the mundane stuff at the moment. I'd have to say that the main reason is that we haven't had very strong wizard characters yet. The campaign spent the first eight sessions on first level (fatalities and careful play, you know how it is), so even the wizards we've had haven't really had a lot of juice for magical marvels. Clerics have had more action, so I can speak to those difficulties better: a blessing action apparently won't do anything much if you can't beat a 20, and additional successes seem to obtain extra targets (bless three crossbows instead of just one) or duration or something else, depending on what the players want. Turning undead depends on their type, I'm almost certain: skeletons are DC 20, zombies DC 22 (I suspect; nobody's tried it yet), ghouls DC 25 and so on; extra degrees of success translate to extra turns, or the decimation of a single target if there are no extra targets. So basically you could turn a single undead skeleton into dust by the power of your faith by rolling a 25 or better, it seems to me.

As discussed above in the metholodology section, all of these numbers are potentially mutable: tradition will stabilize them to a degree, but if we notice that something's not working because it scales wrong or is too easy or too hard, then we simply change that thing and speak no more of it. No big deal.

\nThe role of knowledge checks
Textual sources on how others play D&D often leave me wondering about the intellectual facet of the pursuit: apparently people use intelligence rolls now and then in enabling ways (check whether your character knows how to read this ancient script), and there is the traditional rumour table at the beginning of each adventure module, but aside from that it seems that the game's genre is sort of understood to be about raw force. I find this a bit one-sided, so ever since my first D&D campaign in 2003 I've tended to have a soft spot for philosophers, scientists, sages, bards and other such character classes that facilitate and encourage the subgame of information management.

(I should clarify that even if D&D doesn't have much in the way of rules for this, I think that what I'm doing is still nothing special as a D&D practice; the game surely involves known facts and unknown facts, and it has a huge set of divination magic tools that only deal with information, so it can't be said that the game doesn't recognize this facet at all. It's just that I want it to be even more central and more explicit than it usually is.)

When characters in our campaign consider a new adventure location, they try to find people who can tell them about the place, or textual sources, or whatever else they can think of. Ability checks are made to find out how well the characters use the rare books and libraries, how much they get out of the fearful populace who know more than they let on, how much they might know just off the top of their head and so on. Later on in the dungeon, whenever something new and weird is encountered, the first thing to do is usually a Civics (Intelligence; I've fiddled with the ability set a bit) roll. The usual subgame for knowledge checks is that I set a DC where I start blabbing, and the player gets extra questions about the topic equal to extra successes. This system has a purpose: while the basic DC will give the players whatever I can think of about the given topic, I often don't realize what actually interests the players and why they're asking me about the given matter; by allowing extra questions I ensure that the players actually get the information they want and think they need.

Being liberal about giving out potentially useful information is absolutely crucial to a knowledge-based character class to even function in D&D. If your philosophy of the game is that everything in the setting is standardized, an orc is just an orc and there is no infinite detail to fall back on at will, then information will not be valuable simply because the dumb player who never asks questions will already know everything there is to be known. If, however, you treat the setting as a real world and are willing to ad-lib new detail endlessly about whatever the players might ask about, and if you're willing to not censor yourself about potentially useful tidbits, then useful information will emerge: the orc will be a member of a particular tribe with particular customs, the architecture of the fallen temple will follow certain esoteric geometric principles, the old coins are unexpectedly valuable, this particular demon belongs to a court with particular weaknesses, this well-known ancient fortress has a less well-known back entrance. I usually generate this detail by relentless free association off my general aesthetics for the campaign and genre conventions, taking anything and everything in the adventure prep and play so far as jumping points. I don't seed the information with particularly useful or useless detail, except for the fact that I try to make the players feel that they're getting what they pay for when they roll well in knowledge checks; might not be useful, but at least it'll be interesting.

A side effect of this "textured world" approach to GMing is that you tend to generate a lot of stuff that has actual meaning for play, stuff that might not fall directly into the knowledge check territory. For example, stirges in our campaign have been established as sounding very much like a small moped, and their method of flight is analogous to a moped as well: they can get up to a good speed when they rev up the cycles, but they'll also need a bit of time to get their flight on when action-time comes. I could also discourse on their biology and mating habits and whatnot, a player rolled a critical success in their stirge knowledge check when the players encountered some a few sessions back; a lot of that stuff might not have been very useful tactically, but some was (might seem obvious, but often the players are very grateful when the GM tells them that "your character knows that stirges fear fire, like most animals" - something to do with having a fact affirmed by authority, probably), and it certainly painted an intricate and memorable image of the monsters. This in turn helped make the longish fight interesting and exciting, when we could do sound effects and speculate on the stirge behaviors and whatnot all through it.

I should note here that knowledge-based play has a dark side: while I allow the players huge amounts of information, I also limit much that is apparently usually considered a given when others GM the game. For example, I tend to run time-critical situations with sort of speed-stress filter where players only ever get descriptions of what is happening on the basis of their Wits (Dexterity) checks and initiative scores and whatnot. Go berserk and I'll tell you nothing except for some lurid heavy metal imagery. Lately the players, having worked on perfecting their fortification-based dungeon fighting method, have actually been using a spotter/leader whose only job in a fight is to keep a calm head and observe what the fuck is going on, how many enemies there are, what they are doing, what our guys are doing and so on. This is sort of a mirror image of the general information thing: whenever the game goes into action mode the characters lose access to their normal faculties for observation, and they need to make actual ability checks to gain those back. Works for us.

Another example of how annoying I can be in information control is lighting conditions. I don't usually give very useful room descriptions before the players egg me on by stating out loud how their characters move forward, closer to the object of interest, raising their lanters up high. I don't know, but I imagine that most GMs would probably be pretty straightforward about giving the room description when a door is opened, but with me the players have to be pretty explicit about their positioning and use of light and/or other observational tools to get more than vague shapes and darkness out of me. I find that all this heightens the clarity the group has on the fictional positioning: we get less of "oh my character wasn't in the room, he's in the next tunnel" when we keep the communication cycles of GM narration -> PC positioning -> GM narration short.

\nCombat system
I have several houseruled D&D combat systems that I like about equally much, but that differ from each other in some key matters of mechanical philosophy. A big thing for the system I'm currently using is that it uses hitpoints (should tell about how far and wide my "houserules" tend to travel that this is not a given). Here are some basics:\n

• You get hitpoints equal to d6 per level. These are not static, however, but rather rerolled after each rest. Healing magic tends to cause a reroll, too, and certain characters and situations might allow you to keep a good roll for a longer time instead of having to reroll. There's all sorts of little established detail, such as the idea that well-rested characters in town can roll a bonus die (dropping lowest) into their hitpoints. Basically I refuse to play the traditional game of treating hitpoints as a strange extra ability score, completely static; I don't even have a separate "maximum hitpoints" score, the only score is your current score.
• Hitpoints protect you from critical hits in a fight. If you go to zero or below, you have to make saving rolls to not get fucked up and die. You can only fight if you have hitpoints left (maybe, I'm not sure). Critical hits, when they don't kill you, are free cause for the GM to pee on you - a favourite is to take away ability points, that seems to make players cry. A character can survive at most his level in critical hits before dying for sure, and the player can decide that his character dies rather than taking more completely debiliating shit from the GM. (The crit system is really just an extension of my saving roll system, which tries to cut down on arbitrary deaths a little bit while making the players hate their crippled, sobbing characters a bit more.)
• At the beginning of a fight we roll individual initiatives, except if it's a fortified position, in which case each side acts in turn, and the defending side mostly just prepares actions for when the other side attacks. With individual initiatives the character highest in initiative starts the round and can opt to take an extra action: if he does, his initiative drops by ten points and his second action happens on the new score. The next round somebody else is likely acting first, so he gets the same option.
• Fictional positioning counts for a lot, monsters and characters are often unable to attack their best targets because the GM sez that they're too far or too awkwardly positioned. People seem to accept these claims without the use of miniatures or anything for some reason (probably easiest, or maybe I'm just so clear a narrator that everybody actually can keep track of where the ten stirges are at the moment). Monster intelligence also matters, stupid or automaton monsters often do completely useless things in a fight.
• Armor class is static: 20 for unarmored, 22 for light armor, 25 for medium and 30 for full plate. Plus one for a shield, minus one for low constitution in armor. Characters can often circumvent the AC difficulty by various special attacks. For example, soaking enemies in oil (not nearly as effective as trad D&D, but still has seen use here) is just DC 15, and the same for lighting them up with a torch. Aiding another seems to work, and you often get bonuses or penalties for things like facing multiple attackers, having high ground or whatever else we think of. +2 and -2 are typical defaults, +5 for decisive, dramatic advantages. Fighters seem to have an option to "clash" if both attack each other, in which case their ACs are ignored and the rolls are directly compared.
• Stunting is an important rule: when a PC hits something and scores extra degrees of success over the DC, the players usually spend these degrees for fight choreography: disarm enemies, confuse enemies, trip enemies, stand up themselves, move, even attack another time at penalty (the dreaded flurry attack). The result is a fluid fight that pays attention to the fictional positioning and fight dynamics.
• We technically use morale rules, but I seem to forget about them and just play the monster psychology. That is, I'd like to roll for the monsters objectively like in Mentzer, but apparently it suits me better to just model the monster psych and decide when they've seen enough violence for one day.

\nHuh, that was quite a bit of off-the-cuff writing. Perhaps that answered all questions.

\n

Eero, wow, thank you.

\n

What is an "extra success" in a knowledge check? Beating the DC by increments of 2? 5? You mentioned some tinkering there.

\n

From what you've written so far (unless I missed something, I'm kind of going topic-by-topic) it sounds like a lot of module-crawling - do they do a lot of interacting outside that, in terms of townsfolk or factions?

\n

Edit: changed the word whatever to factions since that was what I meant.

\n

\n

Posted By: RyWhat is an "extra success" in a knowledge check? Beating the DC by increments of 2? 5? You mentioned some tinkering there.From what you've written so far (unless I missed something, I'm kind of going topic-by-topic) it sounds like a lot of module-crawling - do they do a lot of interacting outside that, in terms of townsfolk or factions?

\nExtra successes are in increments of five points. This tends to produce 1-3 successes most of the time, but the critical hit rule we use (20s explode) allows more massive successes as well.

The particular campaign we're playing now has an ulterior motive in that we're specifically running a large bunch of OSR adventures. This is partly because I wanted to get some more familiarity with the product base, and partly because my own style of adventure prep is often so different that using adventure modules expands the repertoire of material in the campaign. Despite the source material I don't feel that our campaign is particularly doctrinaire: the players have absolute, primary choice as to what sorts of adventures they want to pursue, it's just that most of the opportunities that I put in their way somehow or other tend to circle back to some adventure module or other that I have lying around. While beginning characters don't have motivations aside from getting into a dungeon and striking rich, it seems that adventuring time will inevitably entangle the characters in on-going commercial, political, religious and personal concerns in the world. I expect this to ultimately cause the game to go beyond module adventure material altogether, we'll see; at the least I'll probably have to start providing more elaborate motivations for going into the dungeons than mere "there might be some purty treasure there".

In terms of play technique we do a pretty even and organic development: a given session begins from a civilized home base (the players get to choose where in the civilized world they start each session; this so-called "logistics bonus" saves us time, as they get to start close to the adventure location they're going to each time), and then we'll just see where play goes. In practice each session seems to start with the players planning their expedition, after which they hexcrawl to their target (I have a pretty elaborate hex map thing for the world), go into the dungeon and ideally get out before the session runs out so as to have time to divide loot and take care of immediate consequences before the session end. Because the overall method is rather organic, there is no particular reason why the characters couldn't get sidetracked by random encounters, compelling NPCs and other concerns, of course. Characters might get temporarily taken out of play by their personal concerns (such as one guy who's going to have to waste some time in the bishopric to answer concerns about his purity of teaching, and to get himself nominated the abbot of the cloister of the Iron God), in which case the players just play with other characters until their primary character is again ready for action.

\n When we started the very first characters we did the 3d6x10 money thing and then proceeded to do some purchases using the LotFP price lists. With later characters and less initiated players I've just done "write down whatever you think reasonable as equipment, and roll 3d6 to find out how much spending money you have left in your purse". Chargen is simply the wrong place to start micromanaging money, I'd probably go with some default equipment packages if I wanted to formalize the game in this regard.

In actual play money is tracked by the players. We're on a silver standard in fantasy Netherlands (one silver guilden is equal to D&D gold piece for most purposes, and especially guilden = xp), but the GM regularly fucks with the players by going all historical and economic about precious metals, demurrages and such - we've got lead-mixed imperial coins (whose value tends to be roughly 2.5 guildens + .5 guildens for each 50 years of age, as the older coins tend to be more pure), electrum florins from fantasy Italy and so on and so forth. The players tend to do monetary conversions without asking for minor stuff that interests nobody, but they'll negotiate with me for trade values for gems, artworks and larger amounts of money they want to trade for. Prices are largely off-list in that while I check the LotFP lists as guideline, I deviate from those numbers all the time on a whim: in this town a horse costs 350 guildens, but go to the next one and have I got a deal for you, only 100 guildens, and it's only barely used, too. Basically I subscribe heavily to the idea that static price lists are the work of the devil, in real life the price is what you're willing to pay.

As you know, D&D adventurers amass large amounts of money, but we've yet to have real trouble about that. I've made it clear to the players that the responsibility for wasting their money so their characters have motivation for further adventure is on them; also, if they want to retire a character (win the game, basically), then a goodly amount of savings would be nice, as we'll use that to determine the character's social standing in the real world after they stop going all Stalker-y on ruins and dungeons. So far money has still mattered, as the characters don't really have the resources for goodly amounts of horsepower (up to several thousand guildens for a trained warhorse) or full plate mails (starting at 1000 guildens) or any of the really nice things in life. I'm fully willing to give out all sorts of laterally pertinent perks for spending money liberally, just to make it easier for the players to keep their characters poor and desperate - for example, anybody not of lawful alignment who wants to blow half their net worth on binge spending to gain some ability improvement checks or adventure hooks or whatever in trade is free to do so if they really don't have anything better to spend their money on. Invest it, whatever - up to the player to situate their character so that they'll have a motivation for going after more. The goal is to make money both matter (in that it can be used as leverage for solving certain sorts of problems) and not matter (in that anything money can buy is only ephemeral and not part of long-term strategic optimization in the way 3rd ed. D&D works).

Time is tracked as necessary, but in between sessions we have the "logistics bonus", which basically means that the GM won't be hard-ass about things. We can say that your character travelled back from basetown A to basetown B to meet with the other adventurers in between the sessions, yes. We can also say that it's now been enough time that the clerical party from the bishopric has had time to get here to basetown A, yes. The point of this loosened logistical phase at the start of the session is to negotiate the conditions where the players are willing to go into the adventure again, there'd be no point to get hardass about how this single character here needs to solo hexcrawl himself into a particular place or he's out of the adventure. (We do character stables, though - if a character has compelling in-fiction reason to not adventure, then the player needs to make or pick another character for the session. Good idea for suicidal missions, too.)

Within a session time and travel are tracked by what I think is pretty basic hexcrawl methodology. (Note that there aren't really good game texts for this, so I've just picked up how to do it from several sources in the Internet. My first large D&D campaign in 2003-05 didn't use hexcrawl.) I have a map of the northern parts of fantasy Netherlands and the southern parts of the empire (just some geography I threw together) mapped on a 5-mile grid, and there are some simple rules for travel and distances and such: adventurers travel 15 miles per day on foot (more in forced march, declared at the start of the day), which comes to three hexes. Horses and boats and such will modify this, but we haven't used those a lot yet. The initial bunch of adventuring locations we've discovered tend to be around 3 hexes from basetown Gnoomstraat (a small town in the northern areas of the fantasy Netherlands), but the players have already travelled the great distance of eight hexes to Markstad up in the imperial lands, crossing a bit of heavier wilderness on the way. For simple elegance I roll for random encounters on the world map once per each hex travelled and one per eight hours in camp - a '1' on a d6 indicates an encounter off my tables. The players are responsible for buying food and consuming it off their records, although I might do some spot-checking at some point to make sure they remember to do it.

Henchmen and hirelings are both well available, especially for the charismatic leaders who are reasonable about what they want. Hirelings will work for base pay that is pretty cheap on adventurer scale of things - a pittance, really. However, they're no use at all in dangerous situations and will refuse them; I've also made it clear that their reputation and legal status will be gravely imperiled if the adventurers lure honest plebs to the dungeons and then put them to danger; the players accept this, and mainly use hirelings to carry things for them, to build things and work on logistics and such. (It's a good idea to get a loyal man-servant; the luxury will allow you a better hit point reroll even in camping conditions!) Henchmen, on the other hand, are 0th or 1st level NPCs willing to risk their hides for a half share of loot and xp. The players make use of these when the party is otherwise thin (we have anything from two to eight players in each session) or when the player's style so dictates or when they're particularly amused by some henchman. PCs can also become henchmen for higher-leveled NPCs when they encounter those; it's half shares for the PCs in those cases, of course, as fair is fair.

A funny resource management detail that cross-cuts all of the above is the mantlet/pavise building and fighting strategy the players have started implementing to "break D&D", as I've jokingly characterized it. What they do when they arrive at an adventure location is that they start building these large, movable shields ranging from 3x5 feet to 5x5 in width and height. They're constructed mostly of wood, and the players have tried both on the spot construction and having them prefabricated in town and transported to the dungeon. These shields are very, very effective in low-level dungeoneering; in fact, I should start a thread to discuss any ideas people might have for challenging the players at this point. The major subgame related to the shields is obviously their construction: how much money will the players spend in hiring carpenters and buying tools and materials? How much time will they spend on preparing their movable fortifications? How many people do they have for carrying them? Our group seems to find these logistics issues rather interesting, and we have no difficulty interfacing them with fighting rules - the mantlets will provide various numerical and positioning bonuses according to their size and number and quality of construction, they will be worn and broken if not maintained, intelligent monsters will destroy them if left unattended, the party is slowed down in the dungeon a bit by lugging them and so on. A game-changer, and one that is pretty much only regulated by the logistics of time, tools, workforce and correct method of application.

Overall I would characterize our treatment of resource management as being creatively focused on challenges: we will happily ignore some things at some times when there is no interesting challenges to be had, but we will also go into the most intimate detail about how many hours it'll take to build a certain type of movable fortification when the building is being executed in the middle of a potentially dangerous wilderness under the knowledge that the monsters will come out when the sun sets. The actual numbers are usually provided off the top of my hat in my role as a GM, sometimes limited by ability checks to find out if the characters have the means to evaluate these things realistically. The players will gut-check my numbers, of course, and they're revised as necessary to keep the fiction coherent. When we introduce new logistical concerns, the current situation is usually established by negotiating a mutually satisfactory baseline: for example, when a player is first notified that yes, you do need a light source in the dungeon, we usually just establish that the character understood to take one along. Ability checks are used to establish uncertainties; I usually explain all this to new players by telling them that if they want to have some equipment or such available with no fuzz, they better write it down in their notes, but if it's something obvious, we can always roll a Wits check to see if the character understood to prepare even better than the player expected. This goes for all resource management, really - we assume that the characters are doing it even when the players aren't because we have more interesting things to worry about.

I'd say that the fact that we use adventure modules doesn't really influence the campaign structure; there are no cutscenes or such when the adventurers go into a new cave or anything of the sort, for instance, and I consider it my general responsibility to both take the module text seriously and adapt it responsibly to fit with what has been established in the campaign. We do enjoy our metacontext, so the players will usually know which book I work off off at a time, and we have a very meta-contextualized way of treating adventure locations in the hexcrawl, too: the maps I print out for the players now and then (to replace their hand-drawn ones) literally have special symbols and the names of individual adventures on them, and the players often read the back-cover texts of the adventures we play just for the extra context.

(I should mention about character-player knowledge issue that we do not brook with any hang-ups in this regard. The rule of the campaign is that absolutely any information may be used by the players, no matter the source, as long as the player narrates an amusing reason for why his character knows this thing. This goes for previous experience with D&D tropes as well as players who might have literally played through the same adventure at some point. That latter player has voluntarily excused himself from that particular adventure in practice, though.)

\n Also, do any of your players read SG? I'd like to hear their perspective on it all.

\n Eero,

I know you mentioned in the past that you were a tunnels and trolls fan (or at least I thought you did) and you've run that multiple times with success.

What was your motivation in using this re-built D&D based system instead of say, T&T, for your old-school Dungeon Crawling? What motivated you to do this?

\n

Posted By: agonyWhat was your motivation in using this re-built D&D based system instead of say, T&T, for your old-school Dungeon Crawling? What motivated you to do this?

\nWell, my very immediate motivation for this was that I've been buying a lot of OSR modules for our webstore, and thus I had all these nice-looking adventures lying around, all for D&D. We have a somewhat shallow threshold for playing stuff around here, so why not start up a big D&D adventure and see whether it has legs for the whole summer. My brother Markku was also moving up here this spring, and I figured that because D&D is traditionally a game we see eye-to-eye on (enough to play together, anyway), it'd be nice to play something stable and widely appealing, something where Markku could get to know the local gamers. I was also interested in doing a hexcrawl, and while there's no reason why you couldn't do one in T&T, the textual sources for doing it in D&D are much more rich.

As I've discussed earlier, I like many of the mechanical solutions in Tunnels & Trolls a great deal. But then, I also appreciate many features of D&D. While developing my toolbox for both games I've tended to emphasize their differences, as otherwise considering both side by side would be rather pointless. Therefore I take T&T out for particular needs and D&D for others, and weaving a hexcrawl campaign out of OSR adventure modules is so obviously a D&D thing in my mind that I didn't even consider T&T there. (This is not to say that I don't have some ideas for a T&T campaign as well. When I'll do that one it'll probably involve a fantasy version of 14th century Finland with liberal Lovecraft influences. Just happens to be the sort of stuff I've been fiddling with around T&T, as opposed to D&D.)

\n

Posted By: Eero Tuovinenafter which they hexcrawl to their target (I have a pretty elaborate hex map thing for the world)

\nWhat rules are you using for hexcrawls, random encounters, site and location discovery, etc. if any?

\n Eero,

Do you use all the weird shaped dice as well? I mainly thinking about how damage is dealt in D&D with the variable die type (but elsewhere would be of interest too).

ara

\n

Branching off from damage and knowledge - Could you talk a little more about what, if any, "conversion" happens between an AD&D (?) monster statblock and what you use at the table?

\n

\n When I run D&D, I often run afoul of disappointing, "bummer" failures. I don't feel like the rules (written & unwritten) really sanction me to describe anything worse than a boring failure, and I'm as dissapointed as they are because success would have been neat. Do you run into that, Eero, and do you have techniques to work around it?

\n -How much prep do you put in, away from the table?

-Is there any "between dungeon" roleplay and/or shopping scenes? If so how are they handled?

-Speaking of which, how do you handle teh l00tz when they kill monsters?

Matt

\n Do you have a sense of how much this game depended on your particular group of players? Would you do things differently if you were running, say, a 3-shot arc for a local meetup of interested but unknown gamers?

\n

Posted By: Eero TuovinenWere I to have a group both flakey and only interested in a limited run, I'm not entirely sure if I'd play D&D with them; the game rather likes to have a few sessions to develop. I guess I'd go with a stylized campaign structure involving a deck of playing cards with micro-dungeons printed on them. Something with little structure from session to session, and sufficiently simple adventures to play 1-2 of them per session.

\nEero, this last thing is one I'm very interested in. So, if you've got any more detailed ideas about it, I hope you will share. And if you ever happen to actually try this in play, I want to know about it, please! ^_^

\n

Has there been any conflict within the adventuring party?

\n

I don't mean the players, it's obvious you guys get along. Would such conflict be frowned on as "not what we're here to do"?

\n

\n As I read this thread last night, an idea for a game starting forming in my head... ... ... not real surprising in the grand scheme of things but for me it was.
\n
\nSo after I completed that (lengthy but insightful) read I wrote for a little while and have some weird, loose semblance of a game based on a lot of what was presented here but with my own personal twists and tastes. I'm sort of happy with it, too, strangely enough.
\n
\nI mention this simply because I am grateful for this thread! Thank you OP and Eero!!!