Moldvay - There's always a chance.

In this section, Moldvay says:

"The DM may want to base a character's chance of doing something on his or her ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, and so forth). To perform a difficult task (such as climbing a rope or thinking of a forgotten clue), the player should roll the ability score or less on 1d20. The DM may give a bonus or penalty to the roll, depending on the difficulty of the action (-4 for a simple task to +4 for a difficult one). A roll of 1 should always succeed, and a roll of 20 should always fail."

Not only is this an elegant way of handling all those little actions in the game that shouldn't be an "auto-success", its also a good way to put emphasis on those six ability scores, which otherwise really only come into play on a regular basis for combat resolution. It also is a handy tool to get players who have only had later edition gaming experience get over the mindset that a character has to have a particular "skill" rating to do something like decipher some old runes or catch a fish.

This is such a simple little resolution system, its easy to overlook how huge of an impact this can have on your game, again reinforcing creative play. When players have the mindset that "There's always a chance", they should actually start taking those chances more and more.

It might be a good idea to read the above quote aloud at the beginning of each session, just to remind everyone and keep the concept fresh in the players' minds as the night's adventure begins. When the players are actually looking for something to test their "skills" against, it leaves a whole lot less empty space for the DM to fill.

Moldvay - "That's not in the rules!"

"The players will often surprise the DM by doing the unexpected. Don't panic. When this happens, the DM should just make sure that everything is done in the order given by the outline or sequence of events being used. Minor details may be made up as needed to keep the game moving. All DMs learn how to handle both new ideas and unusual actions quickly and with imagination."

My favorite part of this is "minor details may be made up as needed to keep the game moving", or, more specifically, "keep the game moving". Few things can derail the sense of immersion and involvement in a session than stopping to flip through a rule book to look something up.

This is probably one of the hardest aspects of DMing to "teach", it must rather be learned from experience. When faced with a dilemma, it is the DMs responsibility to react, quickly, with a ruling, rather than stop the flow of the game to look up, or worse - debate!, a rule. Its important to remember that your fairness, impartiality and sense of balance play a huge part here - if your players trust you and trust that your rulings are fair, even if they don't necessarily always hew to the letter of the rules, you're going to be able to implement this a lot more effectively.

Lets say, for instance, the party is battling trolls. One of the players, in the midst of combat, wishes to light a torch and start burning troll bits to stop a defeated troll from regenerating back up into the fray. In a "DM vs. Players" scenario, the DM would most likely be inclined to favor getting "his" troll back into action to whup up on the PCs some more, and tell the player its going to take a couple of rounds to light the torch, a couple more rounds to effectively burn troll bits, and all the while suffering the undefended attacks by the remaining trolls.

Unfortunately, what this DM is actually doing is punishing creative play. "Get back to unimaginatively rolling 'to hit' and damage", he might as well say, "or you're going to get pounded on."

This results in one or both of two things - the player demanding rules to back up the difficulty of burning some troll bits, and/or not trusting further rulings from the DM.

A little leniency in situations like this can go a long way towards not just getting the players to trust your rulings, but not have to worry about stopping the action to back up every single ruling, and it encourages more interesting and creative player actions (ie. cutting back on the "roll play"). Make up your "minor detail", such as "a torch can be lit this round, and you can either move somewhere with it or burn something next to you", and make sure this fits into the sequence of events, and get on with the game.

Moldvay - Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art

If you flip to the back of Moldvay's Basic book, p.B60, you get a nice 3/4 page detailing "Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art".

It covers the following:

"That's not in the Rules!"

"There's always a chance."

"The DM is the boss."

"Everyone is here to have fun."

"Everything is balanced."

"Your character doesn't know that."

Seeing as Moldvay managed to produce, in my opinion at least, the most concise and user-friendly version of the D&D ruleset, I feel it's worthwhile taking a look at his opinions on the more ephemeral and arbitrary elements of running a good session. So I'll be writing a bit about the above elements over the next few posts.

Introducing this section, Tom says:

"It is important that the DM be fair, judging everything without favoring one side or the other (BtBG - something I like, and talk about a bit more here). The DM is there to see that the adventure is interesting and that everyone enjoys the game. D&D is not a contest between the DM and the players! The DM should do his best to act impartially when taking the part of the monsters or handling disputes between characters."

The bolded portion above (and this is bolded in the actual text, not by me), is deservedly so. Again, as Tom does so well in every aspect of his little corner of the D&D library, he sums this up very concisely. Its a little like dropping two scorpions into a jar and letting them duke it out, only one scorpion is the players, the other is the adventure you've designed, and the jar is your campaign setting. Fudging/cheating in either party's favor defeats the purpose. The reward for the DM is not "beating" (or coaching, or assisting) the players, but rather the pleasure of watching all the variables and challenges the players bring to the table unfold as they react to your creations. As Tom mentions, there are many players, and only one DM!

I behooves those of us who are DMs to take this advice to heart.

Hmmm

What should we play tonight?

As is obvious from the ragged covers, these books have seen a lot of use. But its been a long time...

Incidentally, wouldn't it be something if, assuming WotC's 1E reprints sell well, they reprint these awesome books as well? Probably unlikely, they seem to favor the Mentzer stuff, but (no disrespect to Mr. Mentzer), the Moldvay/Cook stuff was always my favorite.

The Death of the FLRS

My first year of college, 1989, my first year on my own, I would take a walk down the street to the nearest "record" store, Specs, to grab a new album. I had heard rumors that a favorite group of mine, Marillion, had reformed with a new lead singer after the exit of its former front-man Fish. No, I'm not going to get into Fish-era Marillion vs. Hogarth Marillion here (maybe a future post?), this is about record stores in general.

At the time, it was interesting that half the store was racks of CD's, and the other half was rows of cassettes. I ended up buying one of each (the system at my apartment was CD, but my car only handled cassettes).

What's interesting now, to me, is that this store was one of several in easy reach, and they all had a wonderful and extensive variety of albums and groups available for sale. A phenomenon that, like the FLGS, seems to be, now, lost in time.

About two years later, while pursuing my Bachelors in Archaeology, the cost of tuition necessitated me finding full-time employment that would accommodate my ever-changing school schedule, and I ended up working a a record store, one of a chain of stores, in fact. I'll reserve the name of the store, but it was apparently named after a certain Arthurian capitol, nudge-nudge, wink-wink. At the time, it was a cool job for a struggling college student, replete with seemingly endless backstage passes, informal band meet-and-greets, and piles and piles of "promo" albums months before actual release dates. In retrospect though, it was a front row seat to the death of an industry.

I could elaborate on the fascinating details of being the closest record store to Gibsonton FL, the Summer retirement community for the populace of Circus "freak shows", but again, that's worthy of its own post.

About half-way through my tenure with the company we instituted a new policy at home office's directive. Called "pull sheets", this consisted of lists of what we referred to as "deep catalog" (basically all the albums by bands that hadn't released anything in the last couple of years). We would get lists of albums by artists like Pink Floyd and Todd Rundgren, and the Who, and pull them off the shelves, shipping them back to home office to make way for overflowing boxes of stuff like GnR's Use Your Illusion and Coolio's Gangsta Paradise.

Yes, we would pull, say, 500 different albums off the shelves and ship them off to make way for 500 copies of the same crappy top 40 album (which would sell about 20 copies, really). What were we supposed to do with the other hundred people that came in looking for "Tales from Topographic Oceans" or "Octopus"? We were supposed to say "I can special order that for you, Sir or ma'am!" To which, invariably, the customers would invariably reply, "no thanks", and wander off to buy the album somewhere else.

See, what corporate offices never understood was that the other 80% of our customers, who weren't interested in Dr. Dre or Ace of Base, were also not interested in waiting 2-3 weeks for an album they could find elsewhere. And so, rapidly, the music store, nay the whole chain, and all the other chains, eventually and speedily died.

Unlike the FLGS, this was a sort of suicide the record store companies underwent, a decade before iPods and file sharing. Today, thanks to events like the Napster scandal, even up to recent events like the unceremonious deposition of Kim Dotcom, it has become popular fiction to blame the death of the corporate music industry on the internet. In fact, it was the opposite, as I can attest as someone who was there to witness the death throes. It was the record companies own fault, fueled by greed, a complete misunderstanding of the industry, greed, a complete disrespect for the customer base, and more greed. If you refuse to legally sell what 80% of your customers want, you actually force them to pirate or shop from secondary markets (at least those who aren't dumb enough to wait weeks for shipping at premium prices). Sound familiar?

Way back when, in 1989, there were 7 record stores in my little college town. Today, as of last March at least (when I had occasion to make a short visit), there was only Best Buy, and that with a dramatically atrophied cd section. I buy my own music mostly from iTunes these days, but do like to support a valiantly struggling independent record store in the arts district of my current home town when I can.

I wish I had more stores to choose from, though.

I wish I had more FLGS's too.

What works in D&D - part 5

One of the iconic physical artifacts of the D&D experience is the DM screen. I, personally have a kind of love/hate relationship with the cardboard wall. Its nice, every now and then, to take it down, roll your dice in the open, and be a little more engaged with the table. Nothing to hide, so to speak.

Which brings us to an interesting point. Is the function of the screen to hide what you're doing (notes, maps, dice, etc) from the players? In part, perhaps. But those screens aren't just blank on the Dm side, the side opposite all the pretty art. They are functional - the 1E screens have all the intricate combat tables, saving throw matrices, cleric turning charts, and so on.

And I love all those charts. They work - they provide an invaluable service, and they are why 1E adventure modules have a much lower page count than, say, 3E modules.

Because they eliminate the need for stat blocks.

Its an easy thing to overlook after 12 years of giant stat blocks, easy to compare a 3E gnoll stat block with a 1E gnoll stat line, and say, "aargh, 3E has all these bloated rules!" when in fact, we just aren't seeing them all every single time a monster stat is written out in a room's description. Because most of it is right there on that handy DM screen, no need to print it over and over again.

It can all be there on the screen because a lot of it is standardized. A 4HD ogre uses the same attack matrice as a 4HD Giblet Zombie. Later editions ended this standardization in favor of more individualized and situational statistics. Why? More realistic? How do you make an Ogre more realistic than a Giblet Zombie by giving it a better save vs. spells? Do players care if fourteen different 3HD monsters have 14 different chances to hit AC 0, or 14 different saves vs. fireball, or 14 different chances to spot a sneaking thief (something taken care of in early editions by the thief's percentage roll, rather than the thief's roll opposed by the monster's roll)?

A little standardization, in actual play, becomes almost completely invisible to the players. How they interact with the world is more easily defined by their own character stats and player ability than how they struggle against an endless array of largely arbitrary situational modifiers, conditions, and self-contradicting rules.

Standardization works, and furthers the emphasis on exploration over stat-based combat scenarios.

Lord of the... Lego?

Lord of the Rings is coming to Lego.

Great, another toy for me and my boys to fight over :)