Challenge the Player, not the Stat Block (D&D)
LandonSuffered:
Just one more AP post (hopefully with more AP), since I seem to have a great deal of trouble falling asleep tonight….
Again, regarding AD&D and the “old school” insights of James Meliszewski…there’s this wonderful entry on his Grognardia blog that paraphrases the mindset of old school D&D games with contemporary RPGs (specifically “New D&D”):
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The crux of it, though, is this: challenge the player, not the character's stats. That's probably the single most important difference between old school and contemporary roleplaying games. I think that it's at the root of why most old schoolers have an instinctive hatred of skill systems in RPGs. Skill systems often imply not just what your character can do but also what he knows. That creates both a powerful separation between player and character knowledge but also creates the expectation that a character's knowledge ought to be able to give the player the solutions needed to solve in-game puzzles, tricks, traps, etc.
Wow…for me, this really opened my eyes to the differences between past D&D games and ones I’ve played in recent years.
Case in point: old school adventure modules like…well pretty much any module pre-1983...is filled with tricks and traps that will kill characters dead without planning, caution, and or forethought. Many folks have run (or run through) the Tomb of Horrors, and have war stories regarding it (I DM’d that module at least 4 times and I don’t remember any group “winning”). But how about the Hidden Shrine of Tamochan? Or White Plume Mountain? Or Dwellers of the Forbidden City? Talk about gamism at its most primal…players would talk and brag about the adventures they “survived” and or “defeated”…that’s what instilled such a love of the game in players.
My own group switch-hit between two DMs (I was one) and we used these adventure modules as dastardly inspiration for our own fiendish dungeons. I clearly remember one my friend designed, based on a magic contest or tournament that required the characters to navigate a straight up labyrinth looking for some prize trophy…basically, now that I think of it, it was extremely similar to the Harry Potter Tri-Wizard Cup, if the whole thing had taken place in a hedge maze…and if Harry Potter had been around in 1986! But I still remember coming up on dead ends with these statues that would ask riddles (in rhyming couplets!) that needed answers to proceed…what a bitch! I mean: check out Trail of Cthulhu or Mutant City Blues whole philosophy about giving the players the clues they need to proceed (a philosophy I agree with FOR THOSE GAMES). In D&D 4 you probably would need to make a Knowledge skill roll or some such shit.
No, in the old days it was…how the fuck smart are you, punk? And if you couldn’t figure out a riddle or a puzzle, or map your way out of a maze, then who cares what kind of magic sword you were swinging?
Ha! I remember a deadly maze I designed where the badass fighter got cornered in a dead end by a black pudding…she escaped using a potion of gaseous form, but all her gear got cooked!
Back then, you could have rope bridges over lava or bottomless pits, and someone in the party was always carrying a ten foot pole (and that poor sucker was always walking point!). Sure, the game could be whimsical…but it sure did provide some great challenges for one’s inner gamist. Hell, even a small dragon was going to cook most player characters, save or no save…there were real reasons to try to talk your way out of some encounters!
Ahhh…the good ol’ days.
: )
Callan S.:
I think the need to generate material to actually play within plus the practical ramification that dead PCs might mean a significant portion of that material doesn't gets used or seen (and all the heart and effort in it essentially get discarded) was a conflict of interest against gamist play that was set to boil over, and eventually did so at a global level ("OMG, it's about the story!"). Or something else and I don't know what the hell happened? Anyway, that problems still there and in addition a culture where people make a dex guy (or similar) simply so he can be a guy who jumps over or dodges around things - not in the cause of winning, not as an attempted winning stratagem, but simply to depict a dex guy. Even if you solve the problem, there isn't a culture that's looking for a solution to it.
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hi Jonathan,
Good point, one that always strikes me, too, when reading all those “old school” manifestos of lately. Not so much because I played all those modules back in the day (I didn’t), but because I actually feel much the same way about story-oriented role-playing.
I sometimes have a feeling that in building all these nifty rules that facilitate and shape distributed authoring and conflict and significant choices(tm), some “modern” games are doing the same to human/moral challenges that “modern” trad games do to tactical/strategic challenges. You go through the motions, following the lead of the game system, but actually the system does it all for you, many choices are obvious and/or empty, you don’t really make the game your own, not the way you used to in the “old days”.
What I’m seeing from over here among the trad games in the US is a bunch of very well designed games that work in both directions, D&D 4E being the most prominent one of the “new school” and others like Savage Worlds or Labyrinth Lord presenting an “old school” that’s stronger and better than ever. I think what I would like to see, and maybe help create, are the Savage Worlds and Labyrinth Lord of story-oriented role-playing.
- Frank
LandonSuffered:
Callan wrote:
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I think the need to generate material to actually play within plus the practical ramification that dead PCs might mean a significant portion of that material doesn't gets used or seen (and all the heart and effort in it essentially get discarded) was a conflict of interest against gamist play that was set to boil over,
Well, one of the things I’ve realized from Mr. Maszewski’s blog (fairly well researched it seems to me) is the preponderance of the “mega-dungeon” as the central campaign piece to these earlier gaming groups…a dungeon (like “Blackmoor” or “Castle Greyhawk”) that could never be completely cleaned out and which would be constantly revisited by the player characters during the course of the campaign.
Actually, reminds me a bit of the background for Dragon Fire Castle if anyone’s familiar with the old Dungeon Quest board game.
Anyway, I can certainly say that when I created “dungeon adventures” back in the day, I put my coolest encounters/traps at “bottle neck” points which makes certain characters will encounter them if they are going to “complete” or “beat” the objective of the dungeon. I believe this is inherent in old school game design…some encounters are neat may be circumvented, some cannot. I recall specifically the Hidden Shrine of Tamochan…there is a vampire encounter (probably the strongest monster in the dungeon) that plays no central part to the adventure objective (i.e. “finding a way out before poison gas kills you”) and which can be completely bypassed without any repercussions in the game. On the other hand, some of the cooler traps/puzzles (the animated “ball game” the imprisoned quetzacoatl) require the players (note: PLAYERS, not characters) to solve them in order to progress…they cannot be avoided in game play.
Sure there are completionist-types who may want to poke and pry into every nook and cranny and pull out every last copper piece, but I don’t remember ever having those types of players. As long as they were receiving rewards (i.e. a steady stream of treasure for challenges solved), they were content to move onto the next objective adventure. Actually, I believe completionist behavior comes directly from video games (where there is only a finite amount of play available, one wants to squeeze as much gameplay/content as possible from the experience), but I could be mistaken.
Frank wrote:
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I sometimes have a feeling that in building all these nifty rules that facilitate and shape distributed authoring and conflict and significant choices(tm), some “modern” games are doing the same to human/moral challenges that “modern” trad games do to tactical/strategic challenges. You go through the motions, following the lead of the game system, but actually the system does it all for you, many choices are obvious and/or empty, you don’t really make the game your own, not the way you used to in the “old days”.
You know, even in Story Now-type games (perhaps in all games that facilitate “story now”) it’s the same deal…challenge the player, not the character. In this case, you’re challenging the player to address premise…either during character creation, in game play, or (preferably) both. I think that games that give a system for this and provides direction in how to use that system is still keeping with the “old school” spirit, but the challenge (which leads to intense role-playing experience) must be to the player or yes, as you say, your “choices are empty;” you are going through the motions of creating story and addressing premise but getting none of the “juice.”
Hmmm…back to the subject at hand: just to give another AP example, I remember my old Stormbringer (1st Edition) games I used to run. We used to love this game, and its inherent craziness…how one person could be playing a Young Kingdoms farmer while another had a Pan Tangian sorcerer with full on daemon equipment, yet either could get felled by a critical hit or falling off a cliff with an unlucky role. However, none of these games ever lasted more than one or two sessions, as there was nothing to it to sustain interest in a long term campaign…characters were completely random and with the Chaosium skill system, most of your challenge was trying to find the right skill for a task (i.e. playing your stat block against the game).
Contrast this with a Basic D&D game wherein I penned a castle under siege and directed the players to find a way to break in and sabotage the defenders fortifications. How were the players going to do this? I had no idea (honestly, I hadn’t really thought that much ahead…I just drew a cool map with some encounters). The players simply had to come up with plausible ways to do this and I said “ok.”
I suppose that some might say any stat/skill-based game could be played the same…or the complaint could be made that when DM fiat has to come into play the game is too “incomplete” or is ripe for abuse by breakdowns in social contract. Personally, I think this misses the point. The SPIRIT of the game which I think is implicit in the language of the design is to challenge the players…and with a sparse set of rules (you’ve got armor class, hit points, saving throws…now go!) it IS the players that get challenged. A poison arrow that has a chance to KILL you is a lot scarier to deal with then one that causes “D6 damage to Strength,” and encourages a different kind of behavior because of it. Games that only challenge the stat block of a character simply become games of resource management…and if I wanted to do THAT I’d be playing one of those German style board games.
: )
Caldis:
My experience with those old modules was markedly different. When we played we very rarely found the modules to be challenging. I dont know if it was a comprehension problem on my part as a young teen reading these modules and running them for my friends but I never got that impression of how to run the game. Of course I was big into Tolkien and fantasy novels in general so that influence affected me, how do you get play like those fantasy novels if you are trying to challenge the player and risk the characters death at every turn?
So when I ran games they werent really challenges, they seemed like challenges that threatened the characters but they didnt really. With the general power creep that happened in Ad&d products (and it was there in dragon magazine at least long before 83) it became easier and easier to have situations that seemed dangerous but really werent. The death at -10 hp rule was a big one and that came in the DMG, characters could be bashed around and knocked unconcious but it never really hampered the game.
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