May 24, 2022·edited May 24, 2022Liked by Brian Scott Pauls
What distinguishes for you fun versus not fun uses of the dice?
As I understand your sense of it, reaction tables add elements of surprise or serendipity, but using a die roll to check whether characters spot the McGuffin amidst the piles of books with unwritten pages and blank spines is uninteresting. Does it have to do with the fact that determining the outputs of the black box minds of NPC combatants or job applicants randomly allows them some semblance of autonomy, while allowing player characters to pick out the right book without having (getting) to muse about all the other titles highlights the cardboard cutout nature of the setting? How do we know that none of the rest of the books or data bricks could in any way be useful unless we actually get a chance to read the spines and open the pages, or decrypt the data?
The challenge, of course, is that the characters are not the players, and at least some essential traits of the characters must necessarily be abstracted and gamified in the mechanics. We don't expect people playing fighters to actually have a warrior's physique, or have real-life skill with a sword. But then why stop there? Should a player necessarily have 'perception' greater than or equal to any character they play? Is allowing them to 'dice out' the situation necessarily a tedious exercise that detracts from the player's skill in navigating the situation, or solving the 'puzzle' of the adventure? Could that puzzle simply be defined, at times, by allowing the players to choose at which level of detail they want to engage the game world? Is cutting the Gordian Knot always the right answer, always the wrong answer, or 'it's complicated'?
In a sense, making a 'perception check' can also cut through needless slogging just like a morale check can reduce the unnecessary grind of every combat being a fight to the death. Similarly, it may be more realistic in that a character trying to find a needle in a haystack is likely to tune out anything that is yellow instead of silver. On the other hand, that very focus may cause them to ignore other useful treasures hidden in the chaff. If the players choose to cut to the chase with a perception check, they may miss opportunities to be found in saying, e.g. "I scoop all the straw onto the table and toss each stalk individually back on the floor while the troglodytes pound on the door." Of course, there are always trade-offs, and people will usually take the most expedient path they can think of to reach the goal they think they're aiming for. Providing the expedient of dice-rolling may permit this while not precluding exploration for its own sake. But it does put the choice in the hands of the players, and the onus on the GM to be able to generate or imagine infinite gradations of detail on the fly.
I have recollections of die rolling adding a lot to the fun of RPGs back in the day, but perhaps more so in other games like MERP/Rolemaster and Tunnels & Trolls than in D&D. Rolling dice can inject a sense of suspense into a situation that might otherwise be too abstract to gin up much real tension. Ideally that sense of suspense gets attached to the action of the adventure instead of remaining stuck to the rolling of the dice themselves. The open-ended rolling of the Rolemaster system, coupled with some visceral, if unlikely outcomes in critical hit tables, with more varied and colorful combat results than simply hit point loss made combats feel a lot less like the last 45 minutes of Monopoly or Risk. It may have been slightly more 'bullet time' than D&D, but in exchange, you could hear the bones cracking, and see the blood spurt in 3D. In T&T, the absurdity of the sheer number of D6es rolled by each party in a combat was at least humorous, if tedious to add up at the end. OTOH, the entire party rolled at the same time, so there was no time wasted between the thief's attack and the wizard's. Having played a lot more MERP/RM than T&T, I suspect that the potential wild variability of the former would have more 'replay value' than the goofy giddiness of the latter.
It's totally legit, I suppose, to enjoy the meta-game of character creation, though for myself, I find the mini/max optimization to be boring. Everyone who's played the game 'knows' the 'right' formula, and if you don't, there are an endless number of people who would stand in line for an opportunity to tell you exactly what it is for each edition -- and most of them would be in the same ballpark of agreement. So if there's an optimal, and well-established way to make characters, what's the purpose of having any choice in the matter? In that event, the extremely simple archetypes of B/X D&D are all you would ever need, and it's just a matter of tweaking the mechanics of those character classes to perfection.
If the end-game to the character creation sub-game is a foregone conclusion, and the optimizations are known quantities, then why play in the first place? Either go with the brutal simplicity of the early D&D character templates, and find extra-mechanical ways of differentiating the individual characters, or come up with a system where the rewards of playing the game (and mechanics for advancement?) are varied enough that there is no clearly optimal solution. Optimization for one trait always means suboptimal fit for another.
I enjoyed the character creation process in MERP/Rolemaster on its own merits, even if it was a bit involved. And a big part of what I liked about it was that while there were character profession (class) templates, just about every aspect of them could be tweaked by the players -- at a cost. The question of why a magic-user literally could not use a sword in early D&D, when Gandalf swung Glamdring to good effect, was one that I simply couldn't get over, and "it would throw off the balance of the game" simply didn't make it any easier to accept. By replacing almost all absolute cross-class distinctions with varying development point costs, the RM system at least made the meta-game of character creation a more open-ended sandbox. Awarding XP for successfully completed skill maneuver rolls of all sorts, as well as travel and other potential game objectives opened up the narrow end of the optimization funnel.
As an 'early adopter', more familiar with the Holmes formulation than the Moldvay, I think it would be really interesting to compare and contrast Moldvay's approach to D&D with his "Lords of Creation" RPG for Avalon Hill. That's a single-volume game, plus a monster-manual-like Book of Foes, that starts characters out with minimal capabilities but allows them to develop powers that eventually enable them to create their own 'pocket universes' and, in a sense, become game masters to new groups of players. It would be fun to see if your characterization of Moldvay's writing and organizational style holds for LoC where he was not just reorganizing existing rules, but (I believe) fabricating the entire system from the ground up.
What distinguishes for you fun versus not fun uses of the dice?
As I understand your sense of it, reaction tables add elements of surprise or serendipity, but using a die roll to check whether characters spot the McGuffin amidst the piles of books with unwritten pages and blank spines is uninteresting. Does it have to do with the fact that determining the outputs of the black box minds of NPC combatants or job applicants randomly allows them some semblance of autonomy, while allowing player characters to pick out the right book without having (getting) to muse about all the other titles highlights the cardboard cutout nature of the setting? How do we know that none of the rest of the books or data bricks could in any way be useful unless we actually get a chance to read the spines and open the pages, or decrypt the data?
The challenge, of course, is that the characters are not the players, and at least some essential traits of the characters must necessarily be abstracted and gamified in the mechanics. We don't expect people playing fighters to actually have a warrior's physique, or have real-life skill with a sword. But then why stop there? Should a player necessarily have 'perception' greater than or equal to any character they play? Is allowing them to 'dice out' the situation necessarily a tedious exercise that detracts from the player's skill in navigating the situation, or solving the 'puzzle' of the adventure? Could that puzzle simply be defined, at times, by allowing the players to choose at which level of detail they want to engage the game world? Is cutting the Gordian Knot always the right answer, always the wrong answer, or 'it's complicated'?
In a sense, making a 'perception check' can also cut through needless slogging just like a morale check can reduce the unnecessary grind of every combat being a fight to the death. Similarly, it may be more realistic in that a character trying to find a needle in a haystack is likely to tune out anything that is yellow instead of silver. On the other hand, that very focus may cause them to ignore other useful treasures hidden in the chaff. If the players choose to cut to the chase with a perception check, they may miss opportunities to be found in saying, e.g. "I scoop all the straw onto the table and toss each stalk individually back on the floor while the troglodytes pound on the door." Of course, there are always trade-offs, and people will usually take the most expedient path they can think of to reach the goal they think they're aiming for. Providing the expedient of dice-rolling may permit this while not precluding exploration for its own sake. But it does put the choice in the hands of the players, and the onus on the GM to be able to generate or imagine infinite gradations of detail on the fly.
I have recollections of die rolling adding a lot to the fun of RPGs back in the day, but perhaps more so in other games like MERP/Rolemaster and Tunnels & Trolls than in D&D. Rolling dice can inject a sense of suspense into a situation that might otherwise be too abstract to gin up much real tension. Ideally that sense of suspense gets attached to the action of the adventure instead of remaining stuck to the rolling of the dice themselves. The open-ended rolling of the Rolemaster system, coupled with some visceral, if unlikely outcomes in critical hit tables, with more varied and colorful combat results than simply hit point loss made combats feel a lot less like the last 45 minutes of Monopoly or Risk. It may have been slightly more 'bullet time' than D&D, but in exchange, you could hear the bones cracking, and see the blood spurt in 3D. In T&T, the absurdity of the sheer number of D6es rolled by each party in a combat was at least humorous, if tedious to add up at the end. OTOH, the entire party rolled at the same time, so there was no time wasted between the thief's attack and the wizard's. Having played a lot more MERP/RM than T&T, I suspect that the potential wild variability of the former would have more 'replay value' than the goofy giddiness of the latter.
It's totally legit, I suppose, to enjoy the meta-game of character creation, though for myself, I find the mini/max optimization to be boring. Everyone who's played the game 'knows' the 'right' formula, and if you don't, there are an endless number of people who would stand in line for an opportunity to tell you exactly what it is for each edition -- and most of them would be in the same ballpark of agreement. So if there's an optimal, and well-established way to make characters, what's the purpose of having any choice in the matter? In that event, the extremely simple archetypes of B/X D&D are all you would ever need, and it's just a matter of tweaking the mechanics of those character classes to perfection.
If the end-game to the character creation sub-game is a foregone conclusion, and the optimizations are known quantities, then why play in the first place? Either go with the brutal simplicity of the early D&D character templates, and find extra-mechanical ways of differentiating the individual characters, or come up with a system where the rewards of playing the game (and mechanics for advancement?) are varied enough that there is no clearly optimal solution. Optimization for one trait always means suboptimal fit for another.
I enjoyed the character creation process in MERP/Rolemaster on its own merits, even if it was a bit involved. And a big part of what I liked about it was that while there were character profession (class) templates, just about every aspect of them could be tweaked by the players -- at a cost. The question of why a magic-user literally could not use a sword in early D&D, when Gandalf swung Glamdring to good effect, was one that I simply couldn't get over, and "it would throw off the balance of the game" simply didn't make it any easier to accept. By replacing almost all absolute cross-class distinctions with varying development point costs, the RM system at least made the meta-game of character creation a more open-ended sandbox. Awarding XP for successfully completed skill maneuver rolls of all sorts, as well as travel and other potential game objectives opened up the narrow end of the optimization funnel.
As an 'early adopter', more familiar with the Holmes formulation than the Moldvay, I think it would be really interesting to compare and contrast Moldvay's approach to D&D with his "Lords of Creation" RPG for Avalon Hill. That's a single-volume game, plus a monster-manual-like Book of Foes, that starts characters out with minimal capabilities but allows them to develop powers that eventually enable them to create their own 'pocket universes' and, in a sense, become game masters to new groups of players. It would be fun to see if your characterization of Moldvay's writing and organizational style holds for LoC where he was not just reorganizing existing rules, but (I believe) fabricating the entire system from the ground up.
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Great article. Just a small correction: The AD&D MM came out in 77, the PHB in 78, and the DMG in 79.