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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.

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Thanks for such a well thought-out response, Joel. I need to chew on it, to give you a worthy reply. For the record, however, I'm not disparaging those who would rather roll for their searches--it's just not what I personally prefer. For me, exploring the imaginary world--"pulling the levers and pushing the buttons" (or creating the opportunity for others to do so) is a big part of the fun. :)

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May 26, 2022Liked by Brian Scott Pauls

I don't think it reads as disparaging, and for my part, the questions and curiosity are genuine. The reframing of the differences between combat and, say, searching the room, isn't driven by a specific rhetorical endpoint in mind, so much as just trying to really dig into the issue. I agree in principle about pulling the levers and pushing the buttons, but that leaves open the question as to what the levers and buttons are made of, in the game world and in the game system, and whether each one is a bespoke creation or an off-the-shelf widget.

Maybe another way to paint it is with a computer metaphor. You can control a computer by entering programs in machine opcodes in binary with toggle switches and bit indicator LEDs on the front panel, with an editor/assembler on a terminal or teletype, in BASIC or C on a console, or by clicking icons in a GUI with a mouse. You can run a program somebody else has written, or you can write one yourself if the angry wight of Steve Jobs doesn't slap your hand away in a pique of ideological prohibition.

What are the levers and the buttons of the game world? Do they exist at different degrees of resolution for different kinds of activities? (Combat, Magic, Skills, what Rolemaster called "Interaction & Influence") Do we have a BIOS call for swinging a sword, but insist that players write out a separate assembly language routine every time they search a room, for instance? If so, what are the criteria we use to determine which kinds of activities are represented in game mechanics, which in ad hoc player/GM interactions, or something in between?

Can the GM express the puzzle of the world in terms of skill or ability checks such that the characters can do things that play out with dice which, in effect, unlock a collection of words that the players then need to put together into a sentence? (Metaphor smoothie -- don't mind the chunks.) I tend to think that the ideal RPG rule system would provide multiple levels of access into the game world. It would make allowance for bare metal machine code in a way that maintains coherency with the rest of the system, but would also provide OS calls and APIs for high-level programming. Maybe the challenge is, as always, in engaging players in interacting with the game world in a way that's fun. It can be fun to toggle those switches, and it can be fun to code in Python, but both can also be agonizing depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

Gamma World 1e is very old-school, and in terms of its reward system as written, simply substitutes the artifacts of the Ancients for B/X's gold. In our game, I've taken an old-school cue from B1 (In Search of the Unknown), and put in various micro-games of an IF-THEN/%Chance nature, that are very much about the levers and buttons of the world. What are the chances you can find artifacts in a crushed barracks room in an underground bunker, and how useful should such artifacts be in the game?

The problem is that the UI is like Myst -- anything could be a button, or not. As a GM you need to be able to let the players crush a security robotoid under a gigantic hydraulic lift, or whatever else comes to mind, with a minimum of "you can't do that because you just can't".

Inevitably, clues that you think are going to give too much away too soon go entirely unnoticed, and things you think are diabolically obfuscated get noticed right away. That all can be part of the fun. I waver between nudging the players to notice details through the characters, and reveling in what they miss. Should I let them play in the sandbox, or turn up the heat? A strict old-school approach leaves that stuff entirely up to the GM, and doesn't really even provide them with many ready-made tools for dealing with the outcome. What are the chances a character will fall to their death when attempting a risky climb on a badly corroded ladder? Several scenarios like this are explicitly spelled out in the B1 module that came with my Holmes Basic D&D set in 1979, but there was no coherent system, and other places in the dungeon where similar risks might exist, depending on what players choose to attempt, no such provision is made. Of course, the DM could simply transplant and adapt the system presented for an explicit trap to another situation, but then you might as well put that into the rulebook. The DM could just arbitrarily make the call, but if it's obvious that that's what's going on, it can feel capricious, and either unfairly mean, or too easy. Do I feel like teaching the players a brutal lesson, or making sure they see my hand-crafted detail? Neither extreme feels very fun.

As a gamemaster, that's not the kind of detail that I want to have to try and invent on the fly every time it comes up in game play. The more easily I can make the game world feel like it has its own depth and integrity that even I have to respect, the more immersive it becomes for everyone. Inevitably there will be times when you've got to just wing it. Not having to do that for every possible character interaction with the world except for combat gives you the psychological breathing room to fill in those gaps when you need to. And having a regular and consistent system already in place to handle much of the unexpected poking of the scenery and props gives you a template and a starting point to adapt. Having to figure out exactly how the GM wants the world prodding to be expressed in order to get anywhere feels a little like playing an adventure game written in BASIC where TAKE GOLDEN SWORD works, but GET SWORD doesn't. And from the GM perspective, it's like, "do I toss them a hint, or not, and if so, how obvious do I make it?"

I've been enjoying watching the "Questing Beast" YouTube channel, with Ben, who is a great proponent of the OSR. In the most recent video, which was a Q&A session with two other YouTubers, the idea was put forth that representing character skills in the game killed the players' inclination to interact with the world _except_ where they have an explicit skill to do so. While I can see how that might happen -- especially when a skill/feat/ability system is bolted onto an underlying system that is very strongly character-class-based -- I can make a strong case for the opposite as well. When the system has built in game mechanics for combat and magic, thieves opening windows, and clerics turning the undead, and nothing else, well, those are the things the players are likely to try doing. In playing lots of Rolemaster (where combat ability is just a skill like any other) and Hero System, I recall the various character skills feeling more inspiring than limiting. No, I don't have a skill that directly addresses this situation in the most straightforward way, but how can I use a skill I do have to come in the back door? How far can I bend this skill to approximate what's really called for?

I think we're having fun with both B/X and Gamma World. Part of what's fun for me is comparing different RPG systems and styles of play. If I hadn't already had loads of fun playing D&D in the first place, I might not have fallen in love with the MERP/Rolemaster system when I encountered it. And I always like reading and hearing what people enjoy about old-school RPGs and the OSR. It's by thinking carefully about, and naming the fundamental problems and challenges of roleplaying games, that we can craft better gaming experiences regardless of what tools we choose or devise to meet those challenges.

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"No, I don't have a skill that directly addresses this situation in the most straightforward way, but how can I use a skill I do have to come in the back door? How far can I bend this skill to approximate what's really called for?"

D&D 4e offered a limited set of 18 skills, and introduced "skill challenges" as a more structured method of dealing with non-combat challenges. DMs were actively encouraged to allow characters with high skills that weren't directly relevant to the challenge to use them in creative ways. This led to situations where (in one example I read somewhere) a low-Charisma, high-strength fighter might pick up the king's throne in an attempt to impress the monarch as part of a social encounter. Overall, the system had mixed results, but it was an interesting and innovative experiment.

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May 27, 2022Liked by Brian Scott Pauls

Heh.

A moderating factor in the way Rolemaster implements skills is that the GM specifies a difficulty level (Routine, Easy, Light, Medium, Hard, Very Hard, Extremely Hard, Sheer Folly, or Absurd) which determines a die roll modifier, or which column in a maneuver table to roll on. Sure, you can try to impress the king, but it will be Sheer Folly, and the results of a fumble could prove disastrous. Wanna take the roll, or not?

Never played 4e, and it's been a while since I read through 5e, so maybe there's some similar DM involvement for skill resolution.

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Added link to article "Here's what irritates me most about B/X..."

Added "Subscribe" buttons.

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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.

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Thank you! I got those swapped. Correct now.

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