What if...?

We had a discussion before the D&D session started yesterday, which though disjointed in the direction basically revolved around the question, "Was D&D destined to become what it has because that was really the only way it could have?"

Now, I have to be very careful here, because Matthew Colville wants us all to know that "some folks", a "they" who want to rally a community, manipulate the community. And how do "they" do this? You can tell that someone is doing that because "they" begin their message with, "Does anyone else..." or "I think players would prefer it if..."

Sorry, couldn't help dragging this in. You can find this piece of genius at 54:23 of the video, in which Matthew explains how some people invoke some people to make an argument that justifies they're cause. It's a delightful piece of recursive cognitive dissonance, said with the straight face of a man who has utterly no clue that he's engaging in it. The youtube video is a day old as I write this.

My reason for bringing that up is that it would be impossible to argue about anything related to human endeavours without supposing some kind of imagined collective preference: players wanted a thing, audiences rejected a thing, the community moved towards a thing.  Arguing that we can't argue on what groups do fits is a profoundly blind way to suppose we can argue about anything except whether or not we like vanilla ice cream.

I don't wish to argue about my favourite ice cream flavours, so I'm going to have to engage in some discussion about trends. That will, of course, be unlike every other writer and creator on the internet, so please forgive me.

On the whole, I tend to agree that D&D was destined to turn out as it has — but not because the game was inherently written or designed in a specific way, which a spectacularly waffling Mike Mearls more or less blathers about in this interview, from about a year ago — but because at some point the makers of D&D decided that it needed to be a "business" rather than "game designers." This makes sense, and there's an argument to be made that this was inevitable also, given the lack of foresight, intuitiveness or social intelligence of the creators, especially Gary Gygax. In 1973, "game designer" wasn't a profession or an ideal one sought to achieve; what one imagined was that having created a great product, it was a chance to become Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley... or, at the very least, Avalon Hill. That is the message behind the creation of Tactical Strategy Rules. The designers of a few wargames built more or less upon a single concept with various flavours supposed that they were suddenly going to propel themselves into the world of Corporate Scale Wealth. They had stars in their eyes and, as usual with such beings, they tripped over a straw in their blindness... that straw being that none of them knew jack shit about business.

No one can argue that D&D didn't "take off" as a phenomenon. Within just a few years it had reached a scale where mainstream media was aware of it. The problem being, of course, was that mainstream media's approach was all bad. 1982's Mazes and Monsters — funnily enough not mentioned at all in this very good two hour interview with Tom Hanks, where he spends a lot of time talking about how he got started in Hollywood (or, possibly, I missed it), was a mainstream media disaster for any company thinking it was would become huge based on the game's popularity. Further media investigations, which gave equal air time to D&D's detractors, did not promise a rosy future. But by then, the die had been cast, the cubic gate had been crossed. TSR was churning out modules instead of game structure, Gygax was bloviating egomaniacally upon the pages of the Dragon instead of accepting his responsibility as a guru and the rotunda was full of other game companies with knives waiting for TSR to come through the portico. Money merchants would seize the body, stand on it to orate their justifications in butchering the game as it had only barely become known and now, here we are, with Augustus gasping his last while we wonder what sort of Tiberius will next take over the company. In fact, the time frames almost match perfectly to the metaphor.

D&D was never going to be a financial success for numerous reasons, the first being that adults did not understand the premise of the game. That's not a judgment or an accusation, or a measure of adult imagination, it's a simple recognition that the game as structured did not fit with "game" in the minds of older, contented people who had been playing games all their lives. My parents and those of everyone I played with were not "bored" of board games or cards or backgammon or chess or, hell, horseshoes. They appreciated all those traditional, direct, sometimes gently physical games, which could be played competitively or not, restfully or not. They enjoyed those games, they could understand them, they could be explained in five minutes and a pleasant evening could be had taking tricks, pegging, jumping and getting kinged, hammering a couple stakes into the ground twenty paces apart and playing with a beer in hand. Those things were, in 1982, still universally viewed as fun and, more importantly, enough. They felt no special urge to spend hours to understand hundreds of nitpicky confusing rules to produce an experience not unlike, as my mother would say, "playing house."

Second, the "success" among it's adolescent audience was just as constraining. In the 1700 person high school I attended at the start of my game experience, about twenty students altogether played any kind of tactical or role-playing game... and even they could not agree on what was better in 1980. Some preferred Rolemaster, others Chivalry and Sorcery, others Traveller, others Top Secret... D&D was the premiere game among that set, but statistically that meant it was played by 12 out of 20 of that 1700 student body. One does not build a successful corporation on this kind of market share.

Third, the game had a time clock built into it's practical age window. Children become adults who don't have the time to spend six hours in an intellectual activity when what they really want to do it spend Fridays and Saturdays washing the intellectual out of their brains with suds, nachos and yes, obviously, far harder things. This isn't to say that we didn't, our small groups, prefer an intellectual activity of our own rather than spend Friday nights either drunk or stoned, but it is relevant that we were in a very, very small minority, that dwindled frequently as we aged. Again, while Janie and Jimmie could still get together for a rousing game of poker on a Friday night at 20, and continue doing that for the next twenty years, our experience was filled with excuses like, "Um, sorry guys, but I've got a trig final on Monday and I've got to study for it." Followed by steadily and slowly never seen Nathan again.

One realises that the hobby they love isn't really popular when it loses players because they get cars and can run off to the mountains and ski all weekend, among actual thousands and thousands of people. Our little rooms of a few score obsessionists did not compete, nor did we imagine in our wildest imagination that they ever would. When I hear people like Mearls say, "12 million" play D&D, I think, um, yeah, sure. So many that when I say I play in a room with three people in it, I still get blank stares or, at best, that look that conveys, "Oh, you're one of those people."  12 million people my ass. There's a corporate fiction.

ChatGPT tells me that,

"The much-repeated 2017 claim was actually “12 million to 15 million in North America alone,” offered while the executive declined to disclose concrete sales numbers. That substitution is significant: the measurable commercial fact was withheld and replaced by an enormous, unverifiable population claim.

"The category has only become looser since then. Wizards described D&D Beyond’s ten million users as everyone who had used the service since 2017, while Hasbro later announced more than fifty million “fans” and D&D Beyond thanked eighty-five million people worldwide. Those statements do not measure the same thing, and the steady inflation from players to users to fans allows almost anyone who has passed through the brand’s orbit to be counted."

Far be it for me to argue with that level of market research.

To get around to the point, then... given the way the game was approached in the 1970s, given the priorities that were asserted, given the media's reaction to the game, given the limited viability among participants — the inevitable poison was that what was valuable about the game was mercilessly exploited in the same manner as "junk bonds."

I'm begging the metaphor here, so I'll admit that I don't mean the phrase in the manner of promising exceptional returns for an instrument, whose underlying condition is doubtful, because at this moment it can be sacrificed for greater profit. In a sense, D&D was treated that way, because I believe the corporate engine that took over TSR did not believe, truly, that D&D as a concept was going to last. As such, they changed the focus of the game's gestation for considering what might improve the game's value to one where exploitation of the existing asset — that being the players — was best achieved by offering modules that ignored any pretense of improving play or game development. What modules did do, and any other product that could be sold on the backs of the aforementioned asset, was make money, today, for the money managers. No one, I think, was as surprised as they were when D&D proved resilient enough to keep growing as a culture.

By the late 80s, though, seven years of junk shit had been moved onto the market, complimented by additional junk shit that tried to exploit new young players by literally rewriting the game as "basic D&D," so that as an intellectual property, D&D was done. The masters at the helm were all like Mearls — dumbass fan boys bent on doing whatever felt "keen" today, which amounted to shit thrown at walls and then scraped off even after it did stick, because more wall was needed to throw more shit at. I've covered all that part after 1989 before, so I don't want to do it again now.

To write it in the shortest way possible, "developing the game" hasn't been a relevant principle underlying D&D since 1979. Everything since, beginning with the death throes of a badly run TSR under Gygax flopping around like a fish in a boat, followed by money merchants who did not care at all, has been about maintaining a product cycle. Every product produced since 1979 has been produced for that purpose, to make money because money was either needed, and desperately so, or because money could be generated from doofs who did not fucking understand the game they were playing even as more of them grew to like it. The business history of D&D is founded on the simple reality that there are plenty of people dumb enough out there to believe that D&D is played by 85 million people worldwide.

Because there are those who will quibble, let me be frank. Yes, individual designers since 1979 have sincerely attempted to improve the game. There have been rule books that have included good rules and settings, with good material, that can be advantaged by a present-day discriminating DM. But none of those things occurred because the company deliberately set out to empower those designers. They happened because the designers found a large enough gap in the surveillance that they got away with producing something viable and sometimes brilliant inside a corporate structure that simply failed to catch them at it. None of those brilliant designers were regaled or shown appreciation; all of them were eventually moved out the door, in favour of people who would just shut up and take orders. If a product did happen to advance the game, it's important to understand that product wasn't commissioned to do so. Sometimes, smart people just won't take orders.

Fair enough. This is what did happen. And arguably, the pips were going to come up that way from the start... and that being so, if I'm going to blame anyone, it has to be Gygax's parents. They're the ones obviously responsible for producing a puffed-up pompous blowhard of a son, one incapable of self-awareness or humility... the damage being done sometime in the 1950s, before two D's were put together.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can get into a time machine and show a video to Gary's parents of their egotistical magniloquent of a son, causing them to hit him more or perhaps less or maybe increase the amount of greens in his diet so that he grows up able to play nice with the other kids. What then?

A less vain, more self-aware Gygax might have recognised that D&D was not the foundation of the next Parker Brothers, but a difficult specialist game with a small, unusually committed audience. He might have accepted that the real task was not to expand the company as fast as possible, but to spend twenty years discovering what the game actually was.

This was more or less what half the players argued in the session last night. Effectively, if D&D had been freed from proving itself on the market, if it had addressed the inconsistencies, if it had not struggled to add excessive irrelevant details to play in the manner of "alignment" and deliberately urging the DM to be a morality cop, perhaps D&D wouldn't have gathered the reputation it did as a socially immoral culture exploiting children's morality to sell content. Less visibility in those early days might not have ultimately solved those problems, but perhaps it could have mitigated the narrow market, the aging-out problem, the media panic or the difficulty of sustaining long campaigns among the players. If the designers, not organised into a non-human faced "TSR," but as a bunch of ordinary dudes just playing with the concept, had better managed their presence in the Dragon magazine by actually having a plan for what they published — that magazine being read by literally every player, pretty near fanatically — then perhaps some kind of rational forward momentum could have been created that would have made 2nd and 3rd edition unnecessary. If they had simply ignored the need to be "more popular," because they were hobbyists rather than corporatists, then perhaps in the long run they'd have ended up owning their game rather than having it eventually delivered to Hasbro — a corporation so evil that they considered the children's toy market a fair game for fucking over people younger than 12... and their parents too.

The most important difference is that Gygax might have understood his position as a responsibility rather than a coronation. He might then have realised that importing moral language such as good and evil as characteristics the players were expected to functionally play, was bound to attract the wrong kind of attention from people who treat these matters way too seriously. Had Gygax been willing to step back and let other voices be heard, or have the capacity to encourage frank debate instead of viewing himself as God Almighty, D&D might have found a greater support from that intellectual community willing to view the system in terms of its opportunities for education, social support... even as therapy, which people do use it for right now.

But, of course, many of the beloved products would never have been made. And these are all a lot of "ifs," requiring faith and human patience and unimaginable levels of restraint for people engaged in what remains, after all this time, still essentially a "children's game," played by those who are still expected to quit when they get to college.

I do believe that other "beloved" material would have been produced... that would have been, really, far more popular and valuable than what the community tends to bleat habitually about today. But that is neither here nor there, since we will never know.

Distributing Magic Items

The first step it to identify some 475 magic items that appear in the DMG, which is more than enough for my campaign. I've never felt much need to create more than a basic few items of my own, simple stuff, refilling jugs, flasks that provide healing salves, that sort of thing. But those can be left off the table for now and we can just use what's there in front of us. This collection of items appears as a list from pages 121 to 125 of the DMG, with a lot of description afterwards, most of it inadequate to the purpose.

The next step is to identify all the "sub-types" for those listed. For example, from the list shown, we have "dragon control" potion, but not which dragon is controlled, just as we don't know which giant is controlled or which giant's strength is obtained from the giant strength potion. These sub-types are determined by an additional roll that is made in the description of the potion: for example, the dragon control potion type is determined by a d20 roll found on p.125.

The reason this matters is because what's wanted is a likelihood ratio for all items as if they they were listed together in one table. To determine at the start whether to roll on the "potions" table or the "scrolls" table, and so on, there's an initial table at the top of page 121 that one rolls on first. To get the result of a white dragon potion, one has to roll first on that top table to determine a "potion," then on the potions table to get a "dragon control potion" as the result, then that d20 table to get "white dragon control potion." That's three tables. The total chance of getting that specific potion is therefore 0.2 x 0.02 x 0.1, which equals 0.0004. What's wanted is that universal number for every magic item, so that they can all be compared with each other, dispensing with tables that need us to roll on tables that in turn need us to roll on another table.

The system is fine. But what's wanted to is to create a new set of tables, from scratch, and not use that are pre-existing... while at the same time not actually changing the chance of each item in and of itself occurring as something the players can find.

Why accept the DMG's numbers? Because I've play-tested them for 47 years and those averages may be close to the best organisation of any part of original D&D. The only real problem is that they offer a chance of getting an incredibly powerful item when rolling for things that are much more common. That's not desirable. Not at all. What we want can be found on this page of my wiki.

The concept for determining a randomly given magic item is essentially this. First, we build a separate but easy to make table for the monster being plundered:

This is the troglodyte treasure, as discussed on this post, discarding the "treasure type A" moniker completely by merely designating the amount of treasure per individual, the only number that actually matters. From the above, if you kill ONE troglydyte in his personal lair, where he's just been hanging around a bunch of time, his wealth will equal 65 c.p., 137 s.p., 326 g.p., less than one gem and therefore none, less than one jewellery and therefore none, less than 100 magic item experience (the bare minimum needed) and therefore none. This total treasure compares rather fairly with how much a 2nd level fighter player character tends to have from adventuring, so why should the trog be any different?

Of course this can be viewed as an average. The single trog may have more, or it may have less... and logically, if this is what the trog keeps as wealth while not adventuring with others, this wealth may be secretly buried in a forest (in a "lair" some 8 inches cubed that consists of a hole, a bag and a large rock on top) where its not likely to be found. That's not the point. What matters is that we have a rational total, perhaps balanced by a die roll, that assures to things: a trog definitely has something, and it isn't the ridiculous 3-18 c.p. that orcs in the original game are assumed to carry around, for purposes that are never explained, since there are no stores to spend copper pieces at where the orcs are, and in game you can't buy much more than a chicken with that kind of scratch.

What matters is not what "one trog" carries regardless — because as a DM, you're never going to throw one trog at the party anyway. You know that five first levels are going to waste the trog forthwith, so logically the trog knows that too... and knows that there is safety in numbers. A lone trog is only "lone" for one reason: it's lost where the rest of its kin are.

The Magic Item Distribution page on the wiki, linked above, includes the following line: "With 22.3 x.p. per troglodyte, the total is 691, the fraction ignored. As such, one roll would be made on Table I and one upon Table III." Table I is sketched out on the page, broken into "Common Magic Items" with a sub-table for items so unlikely that they don't fit easily into the d100 format. The Rod of Absorption, with 1 charge, for example, has a 1 in 10,000 chance of being rolled randomly. That is also the likelihood of three other rods, one staff and two different wands. The reduced likelihood deserves an explanation.

Table I accounts for magic items with 100 to 200 x.p. value as rated by the DMG. Rods have 50 charges in them and the DMG states that a fully charged rod of absorption is worth 7,500 x.p. That makes each charge worth 150... so, a rod with 1 charge fits into the Table I range.

However, the base chance for rolling a rod of absorption from all possible magic items is 0.5 (the rods, staves and wands table) x 0.03 (1-3 of one hundred of the table itself). This equals a chance of 0.0015;
but importantly, a 1 charge rod has only a 1 in 50 chance of being found among all the rods of that kind out there (by the logic I'm using), so that chance is reduced by another 0.02 to a final chance of 0.00006. Considerably less of a chance than finding a healing potion.

Here's my workup of Table I in excel (please just ignore the shading):

Everything that didn't produce enough chance to push the die roll another point in the main table was shoved into the rare item subtable, which is rolled on if 98-00 is rolled on the common table. The numbers all reflect how many charges at this table rank count against the total charges of that item: a wand of magic has 8 out of 100 possible charges, while the wand of metal & mineral detection has 13 out of 100 possible. Together, that's why these are more likely, along with the fact that the DMG makes them more likely overall.

At this point some wise ass raises a hand and says, "Hey, if the wand of illumination has 20 x.p. per charge, why can't the single troglodyte have an illumination wand with 1 charge? Huh? Why not?"

Because, totally arbitrarily, I'm setting a 100 x.p. minimum for magic. Point in fact, by the logic I've just explained, the 1 charge illumination wand would have a 0.000025 chance out of 1 (0.0025%) chance of existing at all. Thus out of 40,000 single troglodytes out there, one of them would have a single charge illumination wand. Yeah. I'm drawing the 100 x.p. line against this sort of nonsense, and pegging the table at 150 x.p. average for distribution purposes. You don't like it, you go ahead and do it your way.

I think this about covers it. I tried to manage the same process with determining the percentage of scrolls based on the scroll table in the DMG and, I must say, I'm not really satisfied that my judgment was sound there. I'm okay with the result... and at some point screwing around getting more accurate so that a number can be changed from 15 to either 14 or 16 just doesn't become worth the skull sweat. Like a bad accountant, I tend to think, "Well, I'm close... so fuck it."

See, it's the way Gygax conceived of scroll distribution on that table... which is really, really annoying. Go look at it.

That's about all. I still have to make table III (I have it in excel right now, but not laid out on the wiki) before Friday's game... unless, of course, the party all die or they fail to get the treasure. But I don't know they will, so I have to ready that table in case they succeed.

Are we all having fun?

Calculating the Value of Pretty Stones

I haven't touched on this for awhile, but it's relevant so I'll give some background.

Sorry I can't publish this in a larger format. It opens fine in another window, though.

The list here includes "ornamental stones," the commonest sort, the kind that Blaine recently referred to as "fish tank" rocks, which isn't far wrong. Yet while it's true that a "cherry-sized" rock that's an agate is worth a mere 30 c.p. in Budapest, I rush to point out that 30 copper coins weigh about 1.62 pounds, the same size agate weighs just less than 2/5ths of an ounce. Chat tells me it takes about 540 such rocks to fill the bottom of an 18 by 12 inch fish tank, which equals 16,376 copper pieces of value, or about 85 g.p., at a weight of about 13 pounds. 85 gold pieces weighs about 21 and a quarter ounces, so polished agates clearly aren't worth their weight in gold, but still, not bad.

I think the real issue isn't that "low price gems" don't have a meaningful value, it's rather that the encumbrance of things really isn't considered very closely, and most every "value" is compared to the player's need for the next experience level. 85 g.p. is not going to get a group of 5th level players very far down that road, so it feels pretty silly when that's all the gems are worth.

The table above is highlighted where the gemstone of that size is worth 5 g.p. or better on it's own. For the agate, that's a chunk the size of an apple, 8.65 cub.in., about the size of a Spartan. 540 of those would fill a chest that's two feet long, 18 inches high and 18 inches deep... or about five to six standard bushel baskets. Their total value would be 2,951 g.p. and their weight about 447 lb. That amount in gold pieces would weight 46 lb., for the sake of curiousity.

I promise, if I give that weight of agate to a party, they're going to figure out how to move 447 lb.

But, all this is old news. I've had these elements as part of my gems table for a long time. Why bring it up now?

Well, because the standard AD&D table produces a "10 g.p. gem," not a "10 g.p. agate," and I've never been able to reconcile the old table and my new work in a way that I could produce it quickly in game play. But, thanks to ChatGPT, I can now.

This is a basic, simple table, with every line representing a randomly generated gem. I've replaced the DMG labels of "ornamental, fancy, semi-precious..." et al because I've repurposed those labels for the gems themselves. The "bead" essentially equals the 10 g.p. category from the DMG, with the "bauble" equalling the 50 g.p. category and the "gemstone" being the 100 g.p. Here, the combination of "stone" with "gem" is meant to convey that we're not talking about shining glistening jewel that the hero reaches for in hand of the enormous statue in some treasure room... that would be a "brilliant." Gemstones are just the everyday decently valued "stones" that have beauty but a fairly ordinary presence in a lapidary's shop.

Simply explained, the "gem" (used as the general term) is rolled on the far left on a d100, adjusted from the DMG. I'm using 01-44 (bead), 45-69 (bauble), 70-85 (gemstone), 86-95 (gem), 96-99 (jewel) and 00 (brilliant). That's a sharp change from page 25 of the DMG, if you want to look it up.

The formulas get so long here that it's not practical to show them inside the table... so this part is just for the excel nerds. Normality shall ensue soon. But, here's an image for framing what's going on, showing just ten generated gems



The DMG stipulates that each stone gets a d10 rolled for it, and if a "1" is generated, then that stone goes up to the next category: that is, a bead becomes a bauble, a bauble a gemstone, a gemstone a gem and so on. I wasn't sure how to do this in excel, but ChatGPT managed it of course. This is the formula appearing in the M column:

=IF(L3=1,IF(B3="sm bead","bead",IF(B3="bead","bauble",IF(B3="bauble","gemstone",IF(B3="gemstone","gem",IF(B3="gem","jewel",IF(B3="jewel","brilliant","lg brilliant")))))),IF(L3=10,IF(B3="lg brilliant","brilliant",IF(B3="brilliant","jewel",IF(B3="jewel","gem",IF(B3="gem","gemstone",IF(B3="gemstone","bauble",IF(B3="bauble","bead","sm bead")))))),B3))

On a 10 rolled (no examples on the table), it downgrades the stone to the category lower. If a "brilliant" is pushed up, it becomes a "large brilliant;" if downgraded, a "bead" becomes a "small bead."

Thus, you can see that line 9 changed "bead" in column B to "bauble" in column M. That allows column N to reassess the value:

=IF(L3=1,IF(M3="sm bead",C3,IF(M3="bead",D3,IF(M3="bauble",E3,IF(M3="gemstone",F3,IF(M3="gem",G3,IF(M3="jewel",H3,IF(M3="brilliant",I3,J3))))))),IF(L3=2,K3*2,IF(L3=3,K3*(1+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)/10),IF(L3<9,K3,IF(L3=9,K3*(1-RANDBETWEEN(1,4)/10),IF(L3=10,IF(M3="sm bead",C3,IF(M3="bead",D3,IF(M3="bauble",E3,IF(M3="gemstone",F3,IF(M3="gem",G3,IF(M3="jewel",H3,IF(M3="brilliant",I3,J3))))))),K3))))))

This is doing a bit more. A roll of "2" doubles the original value, a roll of "3" adds 10-60% to the value; a roll of 9 reduces the value by 10-40%. All this is done automatically, so I don't have to think about it.

Column's O through R then do a second basic check, in which another 1 doubles the size of the gem. I did not use any other modifier for this column, because I really don't want to generate smaller gems. 5 g.p. is about as small as I want to bother about.

Then, the fun part. And oh, how I like this.

This shows the calculation for fitting in those gems that have been created by the pricing table correctly to the value generated by the table. Here, I'll show this without the formula, adding a few more lines and all the relevant columns:

There we are. Look at line 3: a roll of 78 produces a "gemstone" with a value of 100 g.p.; two worth checks adjust the price not at all, so that it remains what it was. BUT... and this is the absolute bliss of this thing for me:

Never again do I have to tell a player, "you find a 100 g.p. gem." Nope, it's a "tourmaline the size of an almond." The actual price of the thing is not a 100 g.p., as it happens, but that's how much x.p. I'm going to give for it. The price will matter as to where it is sold.

By the way, I don't know why there are five walnut-sized fire opals... I pressed refresh and got none. Just coincidence. Here's the lookup page for those interested, though it's not easy to read in this format.

For the first time in, what, nearly 20 years, I feel like I don't have enough varieties of gem. That's just awesome, I think.

This same structure more or less can be applied to jewelry, but I've just done a little bit of work with that so far. The look-up page can be effectively endless, but it is also has the unbelievable potential for work that will never end.

As such, when I pick up the next post on treasure, it'll be about magic.

Session 12: Round and Round

The party re-entered the trog dungeon for the fourth time, though it is a significant sized space, especially considering there's a whole other half that is utterly unexplored. But this night, the fight was here, with the players entering at (1) and entering the area that had been mapped out previously. They caught sight of troglodytes at once, who promptly skedaddled, as they were just there to track the party as it entered. It did not take the party long to remember that the space was a roundabout, and that the intention of the trogs was to trap them somewhere and attack them from two sides. So they left a hireling, Oddsdrakken, at (2) and proceeded towards (4). The two trogs they'd seen at the corner of (3) assembled with others... the first group attacked at (5) and the party was able to make good meat of them quickly, unlike the earlier combat. For one thing, most of the party had made their saves this time and were sustained by the presence of Zoltan, whereas in their first meeting with the trogs they'd been down both Zoltan and Ti; this time, Ti still couldn't make it, but the extra body made a big difference.

The second group attacked at (6) and, amazingly, Lexent, his dust devil spell and the man-at-arms Fenwick did a pretty good job against them until Zoltan could come down and join them from the other fight. Both fights ended quickly enough, though there were some moments of tension that had plainly worried the party at points. Nonetheless, it worked out in their favour and they chose to continue.

A point about combat... because for the last two runnings it has pretty much been two combats in each session. This really was two combats taking place at the same time, though as the one at (6) was starting, (5) was in the wrapping up stage. I've had some argue that they can run five or six combats in a 4 hour session, but I'll be damned if I know how. At a few points during the combat I was pushing to roll and call the party to act as fast as I could; I did miss some details and was reminded about them, which I always appreciate. I told the players that I was merely trying to keep the pace going as rapidly as possible, which means someone pretty much talking non-stop. There were no moments of reflection during the game; no one made an outside reference to a film, a product, another situation that had happened at some other time. The players were utterly into the combat, 100%... which means, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter how many combats were getting played, the ones being played was utterly engrossing.

That is what should matter, nyet?

Pushing past (7) on the map above, the party searched this next part of the dungeon, found upon the adjoining page.

This image shows the battle in progression after the party had made their way to the trog's personal lair. The two other passages might have given the trogs an opportunity to get behind the party and trap them in a dead end, but the party picked right of the three choices before them, and thus the final battle is on going. The party were mid-round when I looked at the clock and found we'd already passed our assigned stopping time; I pointed this out and everyone was surprised. We were all in flow, utterly unaware of the time or anything except the game, which I count as a successful run. In fact, I'd call it the best session I've had with this campaign, and among my best ever, so far as engagement counts. I felt a rush the rest of the evening and experienced none of the usual emotional "drop" that follows post-game. This session just went too well.

So, there are 11 trogs left; one is apparently glowing without anyone knowing why, while two are glowing with the party's faerie fire spell just now. Four of the trogs are stunned (red stops) while those players who have yellow crosses have failed their save. The green number is counting the number of rounds the nausea has been in effect (I do not give it a limit, like it has in the original Monster Manual). The green dot is Lexent's loaded sling for the next round to fire. I use the purple dot for someone casting a spell, because I do not permit casting and release of spells to happen in the same turn. This weakens my mages and gives more purpose to the fighters. The two purple dots atop the trogs are the cantrip twitch cast by Mikael the mage.

You can see plainly the trogs will be fighting first when the game re-commences, this Friday.

The Beach

Spent the day at Sylvan Lake Beach today, temperature 30-31 C (84-86 F), with a humidity index of 33 C (91 F). I am now nicely boiled like a lobster, with putting sunscreen on twice. Now rich with medicated cream and comfortable. It was a very fine day, plenty of play with my grandson, water, sand, a terrific spot on the beach and great food. Just wanted to write this for the sake of days come this winter, so I can look back on this and sigh.

I will get that Session report out as soon as I can.

Fixing Treasure Tables

I should be writing a post describing the events of the Discord Campaign, Friday the 10th, but I've been working on a different project related to that campaign... in fact inspired by it. All this is old school stuff, so it won't help you with your later edition game. Sorry. My fixes are always in some way related to AD&D, not because it's "good," but because its familiar. I know where all the bugs are.

As such, this post isn't going to make a lot of sense to many except us old farts, but...

This horrid piece of trash is the infamous Treasure Type table from the original Monster Manual:

This is as much as the screen capture would produce. I could pull out my own manual, put it in my scanner and give the whole thing, but as I don't care (and it's probably somewhere on Google), it's sufficient for my purposes. The concept is more or less this: a monster such as a "troglodyte," which the party has been fighting of late (31, by my count), has a specific "type" of treasure, as shown below, beneath % IN LAIR.

The trog's "treasure type" is A, the first line on the above image. It shows a 25% chance of 1-6 thousands of copper, a 30% of 1-6 thousands of silver... and so on. We don't need to get excessive with listing things there. The idea (and no, this isn't the whole story, but it's the part we're going to use, so just roll with it) is to roll these and then compare the numbers obtained with the "No. Appearing" on the trog page. Thus, if you get 5,000 c.p. on the treasure type table, and you find 1 troglodyte in his "lair," then presumably he has 5,000/100 = 50 c.p. in his possession.

Like I said, no, it's not exactly like that. There's a lot of silly rules that are in no way consistent throughout the books about lairs and minimum numbers and so on, but please ignore that. It's not relevant.

Like most people, I've always hated the treasure table. The players always wind up fighting something hard and a bunch of bad rolls arise so the players end up with a paltry amount of treasure... so you have to ignore the shitty table and just give straight treasure as seems best. Or the players fight the easiest battle they've ever had and suddenly the treasure table works in their favour. It's too random, too inconsistent...

And yet, I've always felt that on some level, it was the good root of an idea. Only, I spent about fifteen years occasionally trying to find it to no avail. No matter how I turned the numbers around or made the rolls, it just wouldn't provide a consistent, practical number. A certain number of troglodytes should consistently have a certain amount of things, just as any large group of people that act independently accumulate a reasonable wealth merely by existing. Trogs have a fairly decent treasure, compared to orcs, say. And they ought to. The trogs my players have fought over two sessions have killed one of their party and have come very close to effecting a total party kill. The question, though, is how to produce that treasure logically, without pulling a number out of our ass.

But after years of failing to produce such a number, I sighed and, before launching this blog in 2008, I'd long since quit trying. Now and then, someone here has asked me about assigning treasure, and I've had no answer.

Until, I think, now.

Starting by compiling the original numbers for Type A treasure:

Those are the excel functions. We start by ignoring the "random" generation and just multiply the percentage of a type of coin against that amount of coin, doubling the chance of each type. Thus, it's 50% for 1-6 thousand copper (average 3500), and 60% for 1-6 thousand silver. The number of gems is 100% times 4-40 (average 22), while jewelry is 3-30 automatically also (average 16.5). We treat magic as special, ignoring the percentage, counting 3 treasure. Magic items are a special category and are dealt with differently, as I shall get to eventually (and not with this post).

It'll be helpful to see the calculations of the above and here they are. Adding up the total experience from each, we get a total of 113,076 for 100 troglodytes... dividing that between the 100 possible appearing, that's... 1,131 per creature.

Wait a minute. What?

Is that 97,000 g.p. next to jewellery a typing error? Why the hell is it so bloody high?

Well...

The "jewelry table" (American spelling) appears on page 26 of the original DMG, reproduced below, with it's description intact.

For reasons that surpass all comprehension, there's a 60% chance of getting an average piece of jewelry that's worth more than 1750 g.p., and an incredibly 30% chance of getting a piece with an average of 5,000 g.p. altogether. In fact, if you balance out the average across the table, the average is 2,910 g.p. per piece on the first roll.

However, the rules state that you should roll a d10 and a d8 to see if the "workmanship" or the "inset gems" are exceptional in some way... and if you use this rule, you get an average of 5,919 g.p. ... not because rolling a 1 on either die is likely, but because the cumulative effect of rolling said dice on multiple items creates jewellery of simply extravagant results. Jewellery by itself totally dwarfs the rest of the treasure types table, whenever it occurs... and frankly, though I've been at this game a long time, I can't ever recall having noticed this before to this extent. It's enough to convince me that I must have the math wrong, somewhere. Still, I can't help looking at those odds of getting an average piece over 5,000 g.p. That alone, even if I've screwed up the average (and I may have, I'm not perfect), is enough to make me feel that jewellery table needs serious adjustment.

Here's my new table... formula version first.

This really isn't a complicated calculation. It generates a d1000, then divides the chances of that between "wares," "valuables," "treasures," "adornment", "regalia" and "masterpiece."  A big problem I always had with the DMG table was that "gold with gems" doesn't really mean a damn thing since I don't know the type of jewellery (necklace vs. earring, for instance) or how much actual gold vs. amount of gems is being used. So, that's tossed in favour of trying to capture a "use" principle in these expressions.

"Wares" (20-80 g.p.) are valuable things one might own in a living space. "Valuables" (80-480 g.p.) are things that someone of the merchant/artisan class might especially esteem, but really is still just a higher quality ware. "Treasures" (240-1920 g.p) are the sort of thing that are kept either hidden or under lock and key; they're just too valuable to leave lying about.

"Adornment" (480-4800 g.p.) falls into things that are designed specifically to be worn or carried on a social-authority level, short of an actual monarchy: a guild or captain's crest, a lord or bishop's evidence of office, that sort of thing. "Regalia" (1440-7200 g.p.) thus fits the category of what a monarch wears; logically, one monarch may wear or carry half a dozen such items. Finally, the last category, the "masterpiece" is a one-of-a-kind artwork, worth (4050-13500 g.p.). Said regalia may be something that is in fact being sought after; or it may be something long forgotten from another age. Masterpieces might have a lineage of who made them or where they're from... but that's not necessarily something that needs tracking in the creation of the table.

If you transpose the above formulas, you can create a series of lines in which each line produces a result:

To be honest, I've played with this and regalia/masterpieces come up a bit too often... that might need some work. But as it's built now, the table produces an average jewellery value of 376 before checking for special... 414 if a "1" rolled merely doubles the value of the jewellery.

Lost? I hope not. I've tried to explain this as carefully as possible. Multiplied against those 16.5 jewellery in our original table, the total value of jewellery is down to 6,837... very close to the gems, though the two numbers are arrived at separately. So I'm fairly pleased with that amount.

But what about the 90,826 experience lost from the treasure type? Do we just throw that away?

Here's where things get fun.

Starting with coins. I don't use "electrum" and "platinum", so the latter is folded into the value of gold (125*5 = 750 x.p.)+4400 g.p. (4400 x.p.); this is then added to 85%*that 90,000 we lost from jewellery... and the total of all three of these together is divided by three. The total is that shown: 32,696 g.p. per type A lair.

Electrum's 1225 x.p. is added to silver's 105 x.p.; then 10% of the lost x.p. from jewellery is added to this and again, the total is divided by three. THEN, importantly, I give players 1 x.p. per 3 silver, rather than the silver value in gold. Thus, we get a nice tidy 13,756 x.p. for the silver that's here.

Finally, copper's 4 x.p. is added to 5% of that lost from jewellery and the total is divided by 3. I give 1 x.p. per 4 copper, so we get 6,528 x.p. from the copper found. With gems, jewellery and magic, the total is 54,804... without my needing to build a new treasure type table from scratch.

Crazy? Perhaps. But I like the number 553 x.p. per trog. Since my experience system gives 10 x.p. per hit point, plus another 40 x.p. for every point of damage the players suffer, the party has already achieved more than a thousand each from getting banged around during their various fights. Another total of 17,000 x.p. on top of that (yes, party members, there it is in the room with you, right now, just waiting for you to win one more battle) seems perfectly fair.

I could build in a 25% swing, so that dice are rolled to permit 75% to 125% of the totals shown here... but just now, I don't see the sense. These trogs have a reputation as raiders, so it doesn't make sense for them to be short of treasure from that. Just now, I want to see how it plays out.

The next post I write will be the campaign, and then I'll pick this up again... if you're interested. I swear to St. Crispin's ashes, if this post doesn't get at least five comments, I'm not writing another word on this subject.

D&D vs. Sports: Part 2

In my younger days, I played a lot of sports: baseball, hockey, soccer, football... all pretty much except basketball, which I have zero talent for. Hell, occasionally, on D&D nights in the summer, we'd occasionally decide to skip the game so we could play some scrub ball or play four-on-four tag football; because we had the warm bodies and it felt wrong to be inside a stuffy room when the whole outdoors was cooling in the evening. I don't hate sports: I respect them. This is why when I want a metaphor for D&D, I automatically reach for sports and not some board game.

During those league or scrub games, one of the conversations on the table was not how the game needed to be changed to make it "more interesting." Habitually, those who watch sports are quite comfortable that the game being played between the Stars and the Broncos this year follows essentially the same rule set, structure, field size, strategy set and guts as a game between the two teams in 1994. Nobody minds. It's time to ask ourselves why.

The interest in sports does not arise from what the rules will permit "this" time. It comes from watching an ongoing process in which individuals are dealing with difficult situations in real time, then producing strategies to manage those situations on the fly, not knowing for certain that they will work. This creates a constant sense of urgency, impelled in part by a clock but also by a willingness to force one's way past an opponent in order to succeed against unknown odds. The spectator can watch those plans unfold; they can watch players make instantaneous choices, produce unexpected intuitiveness in a throw, a catch, while overcoming failures such as being hit with the ball, tripping, falling, the ball being caught in one's glove, the ball taking an irrational bounce that is still, miraculously, fielded despite the discrepancy. Sports aren't always logical; goofy things can happen and the sport permits that... it even thrives off that.

This is a distinction that D&D combat fails to achieve. The dice are supposed to introduce the equivalent of the above "goofiness"... but the game as written is too simplistic for that. The battle map is often too small for free action, the number of choices a player has is limited by "what is most effective" because each ability is designed unto that player class; there are too few rules that define how one player's actions adjust another player's success in real time, as opposed to merely being a spell that A uses to enhance B. Most war battle games introduce uncertainty through defensive fire during an enemy's movement, morale checks, the presence of rout, support weapon malfunctions, repair attempts, leader loss, concealed units, the presence of mines and other hidden hazards, smoke, wind... D&D has critical hits and fumbles. The battle sequence is too static, too sequenced... and the attempt to alter that, by having everyone roll initiative separately, only creates a repetitive, tired additionally predictive sequence. The game doesn't sustain the sort of uncertainty sports does, not because rules can't do this... but because D&D chooses not to.

In researching this post, I watched too much of this video, from which I am now suffering tramatic blackouts. At 28 minutes in, Mercer produces a set-piece of the battle map with is split into multiple parts, to the unquestionably sincere OOOO's and AHHH's of the players.

At 33 minutes, Mercer is still wetting himself about it:

"...each floating island that used to be the top of Entropis as they slowly shift, held in place and rotate around, the storm still cycling around you... they're floating, and now held in place by these green tethers, and they're slowly shifting."

And the immediate answer to this?

Travis: "Hasted, can I attempt to leap from this island to the one that Vax is currently on?"

Mercer: "Yeah. Make an athletics check."

There you are. That's the whole problem, right there in a nutshell.

Oh, you don't see it?

Yes, true enough, "hasted" related to running distance, launch speed and reaction time, but it's not an increase to dexterity, so the referent here is immaterial; and yes, there is an issue that with the islands sweeping around, Mercer simply reduces that to a "check"... a decorative distance overcome by a die roll. But the larger point is this:

After FOUR minutes of blather, and physical models, and all this hype and bullshit, the player's first question is, "Can I perform an action that ignores all that?" and Mercer's answer is "Yes."

Uncertainty is what makes sports interesting. D&D, and games like it, have abandoned uncertainty because, gee, despite all this prep, we can't actually make the player fight on his own island... can we?

A football field, a clock, a recently injured player and the decision whether to pass, run or kick has more gravitas. Without even trying and without that decision being unusual to any given football game. Even if we reduce the pass, say, to a die roll, then the snap has to be one too, and the centre's ability to block, and the other blockers beside, and the quarterback's ability to back, and the runner's ability to get clear, cover the ground, get into position, be seen by the quarterback, who has to dodge a tackle the blocker failed again, throwing the ball, the ball flying right, the receiver catching it, the receiver getting such-and-such number of steps before getting hit... what, that's twenty die rolls? A lot with low thresholds and not all of them needing to be perfect... but it's not ONE roll, now is it? Just give it a moment and think about that.

The snap need not be perfect; it needs to be manageable. The block need not stop the defender indefinitely; it may only need to delay him for two seconds. The quarterback’s retreat may be shortened because pressure comes through. The receiver may be forced off the intended route, forcing the quarterback to notice the change. The throw may be slightly behind, requiring an adjustment. The catch may be insecure, but held long enough. The receiver may then gain three yards rather than twelve because another defender arrives. Success is not singular... but the pattern of successes and almosts and outright failures produces a wide range of possible outcomes that in turn produce situations that must be managed if we're going to consider the game consisting of more than one pass. This is the structure D&D flagrantly chooses to ignore. It isn't willing to consider the detail of how a ball that is snapped well but not perfectly affects the whole performance down the line. There's no room in that for the game's play, which permits no play. It permits pass/fail results, and only that.

Can I ignore your set up if I roll a 15 or less? Sure.

Is there more to the Vecna battle? Yes, of course. Apart from the two meteor swarms, Grog at one point gets removed from the field, Vecna repeatedly targets Scanlan, Scanlan is reduced to one hit point and then knocked unconscious, Vecna attempts to teleport away. But the party's position is never really threatened. They're never in the third quarter and ten points down; it's not the bottom of the eighth and they've got two outs. It just isn't ever like that. It just rambles on and on with descriptions, before conveniently Grog's banishment is broken, outside allies arrive in waves like the cavalry, Pike's Mass Heel returns every member of the Voc to full health... it's a five hour horror of shite-blathering on an epic scale. Of course they were going to win. The channel needed them to win.

In essence, present D&D, with the way setbacks are reversed, is like playing football if the stadium owner can simply tell the techies at some random point in the game to add "15" to the home team's score. And this being considered normal and acceptable by all the club owners.

It is this last corrosive element that has brought the entire culture around to believing this is an example of "good play." None of the players get dead, right? Then it's fine.

Yet it isn't about just the dead bodies. AD&D has plenty of dead bodies and the combat system is still shit... which is why I beat that one to death with the last post. A system that merely includes a "wait to die" feature as hit points run out is not a "better" game... it's just still shit for other reasons. Those who relish that system have just convinced themselves that there's a tension in watching hit points decline, knowing zero is nearing... but that doesn't make the preceding rounds more interactive, more positional and more responsive to player choice. AD&D combat is essentially watching a slow moving roulette wheel where one has to wait seven to ten rounds to pass before learning if it landed on red or black. If red, where we bet, sure, of course we cheer. But cheering because it's not black gets tiresome for most people.

Most people who play D&D quit D&D. That is a hard pill to swallow for the "I'm still playing after 30 years" crowd. But there are far more of them than there are of us. Thirty years of play may demonstrate commitment, but it doesn't answer why so many people experiencing the process quit after a few years. It's easy to dismiss those people as "not the D&D type," but that sort of self-selection among the fanatics is suspect. It's far harder to admit that maybe D&D in the long run isn't sustainable because it is, in large part, actually a pretty shitty game.

I'm not going to get into why I purport to love the game, or the evidence that my solution for this has been to redesign the thing entirely, so that I'm not actually playing the same D&D as anyone else. Instead, I'm going to simply draw all this out as evidence that those who argue that the game must be played as written for "reasons" like "it's a better game" or "it makes more sense when played that way" are really just talking past the problems the original game and all it's illegitimate children have: an effectively defective DNA problem related to a combat system that has never been meaningfully addressed in any significant way. I think it falls into the classification of those who argue vociferously that the Masarati is a "good car." It's good in a few ways, a few specific ways, having a lot to do with feelings and emotional gratification and status. But the distinction misses the point when something that has to spend so many months out of a year in a shop that finds it difficult to make new parts work on the device is called a "car." The Masarati is a good toy. A good car is something that a person can count on for transport every day.

D&D provides the same kind of defense. It has evocative classes, a rich concept, monsters, spells, advancement, treasure, fantasy identity and a long, emotional history as a social phenomenon. But do these things actually make a "good game"?  I don't think they do. I think, for some, they form some kind of deeply felt sort of process that serves a specific need that some people have. It's not a sustainable service for that need, because it has to be shifted and changed and adjusted constantly, like a house that in constant renovation not because the bathroom, the kitchen or the rec room need to be sorted, but because the renovation itself is the point.  A sport, on the other hand, is the sort of game that works because it does... most of them have been in existence for more than a century and they seem to be doing fine. D&D has been around for half a century and it still doesn't work properly. Maybe that's because the whole thing as manifested now simply shouldn't.

The classes, monsters, spells, treasure and fantasy identities create attachment. They give people something to imagine, collect, discuss, revise and identify with. The game then survives by continually supplying new arrangements of those elements. New editions, subclasses, feats, monsters, settings, encounter procedures and balancing revisions keep the renovation going. That is why the game can remain perpetually defective without collapsing. The defect generates capital for those who benefit from making changes; those who seek stability get nothing. Unlike sport, there's no way to capitalise "established" D&D because the participants have been trained to deny such a thing should exist.

Makes me feel, generally, like the last thing a person should get interested in should be this game... because if they do, it has no good place to take them.

D&D vs. Sports: Part 1

Whereas most people tend to think of the quintessential depiction of D&D as four or five adventurers sitting around a tavern, either getting the adventure given to them or celebrating their success, I'm apt to think instead about the above: the moment when the party, consequence be damned, hurls themselves into an enemy of unknown power and size, only to then let the dice sort it out. This is the game as originally conceived: a war game. This is the substance of the game when it really grabs at the emotional strings of the participants, when FEAR is actually something that's felt, because one's character, one's effort to reach this point with that character, one's faith that the party'll think their way through the struggle, whatever happens, is at it's peak.

Yet most game rule changes that have happened in the last four decades as been designed to alleviate that fear and, in consequence, make the above scene boring. Dice rolled in succession, to produce numbers that don't matter, in a procedure that's irrelevant because we know we're either going to win, or we know we're going to escape with our lives, even if one of us has to die and be raised, so we can come back and win. There is no "losing" here. The game is rigged.

Even if this is one of those campaigns where a group of characters CAN die, the next group of characters will get better die rolls when they try and they'll win. And that is the relevant point, because it's not that the next group of players will have learned anything, except maybe which enemy to attack first. D&D as written, early D&D, isn't a very tactical game. It is a very roll-and-slog designed game, which is why Chainmail never became remotely as popular as Squad Leader, Panzerblitz, System Seven, Axis & Allies or even RISK. Tactically, Chainmail sucks. Which is why the D&D combat system sucks. Which is why the game's combat system alone was not sufficient to maintain the game as it was... in the end, after all the cleverness with character class creation, spells, saving throws, to hit, hit points, levels, magic items and monsters... the actual combat system was a flop. Still is. But a flop that people pretend isn't, because all that other stuff is so cool.

Don't misunderstand me. I thought the combat system was awfully rich and neat when I first began to play; but the bloom was falling off the rose about four years later, which was something that my players and I, a group all raised on many tactical boardgames, began to discuss at length. It was clear that the error wasn't any of the things named above. And it was clear that the turn-based-system was not the issue. All strategic combat games are a turn-based-system... and it was possible, obvious even, that it was possible to simulate the sense of two great armies slamming into each other despite that. No, the problem was something else.

This post is not about the solution; I did solve it, ages ago, but that's not the subject material here. Rather, the subject here — to start — is to explain why the system as written, with the basic structure that has not been changed, because it's baked in, is fundamentally weak without appearing to be. I'll start with a portion of D&D that, at the time I began writing this blog in 2008, I still considered an excellent description of how combat should play out. Ah, how I have changed.

On page 71-72 of the original DMG, an example of melee is given, which I'd like to break down section by section. This will take a while.

"Party A (player characters) is composed of Aggro the Axe, a 4th level fighter; Abner, a 5th level magic-user; Arkayn, a 4th level cleric; and Arlanni, a 2nd level thief. They are hastening down a dungeon corridor in order to avoid an encounter with a large group of goblins, whose territory they are now leaving. It is a ten-foot wide corridor and they are moving with the cleric, fighter, and thief in a line in front, followed closely by the magic-user. Suddenly they round a bend and confront Party B, who are earnestly engaged in squabbling over some treasure. Party B is composed of Gutboy Barrelhouse, a 6th level dwarf fighter; Balto, a 1st level monk; Blastum, a 4th level magic-user; and Barjin, a 4th/5th level half-elf fighter/magic-user."

Let's start first by pointing out that most of the above is window dressing. "Hastening" is immaterial to the example, as are the goblins being left behind or the limits of "territory" the goblins have. The width of the corridor is mentioned but, as you'll see, it is irrelevant to the fight that's described. We are given everyone's class and level, which does matter... but as will be seen, again, these classes are more or less just shells that the players wear around their form of attack and the number of hit points they have.

So you can see, we're inventing a lot of prose that more or less romantises detail, which is then discarded almost immediately.

"The first thing the DM must do is determine if either party is surprised. He rolls a d6 for Party B (where the players can see it, since there are no secret modifiers) and a 2 comes up. The leader for the players rolls and gets a 4 for Party A. Party B is surprised (since they rolled a 2), and will be inactive for 2 segments."

The fact that Party A is "hastening" ought to make it clear how they are coming around the corner; the noise they're making in a 10-foot wide "dungeon corridor," almost always depicted at that time as stone, would announce their arrival at least a hundred, more likely two hundred feet away underground. Party B would not, in any realistic way, be surprised, since they'd have heard Party A coming and would be lying in wait. Even if they were arguing, the argument would be suspended at the sound of four persons, two in armour, coming closer and closer and closer. So, right off, "surprise" simply ignores reality. It is a die roll that permits no context.

Further, as written, the players have no engagement here. The DM rolls for both the players and the NPCs (whichever is which). Why not let the players roll for the players? It's more or less a largely meaningless roll, but hey, why not? And why would the DM want it? There is enough for the DM to do, that the DM can assign tasks to the players, such as rolling surprise dice.

As a small point, that does rack up with a lot of combat play, the round/segment separation (10 segments per round) was always confusing and never properly explained. Yet the game, as written, insisted on embracing it when other, far more complicated systems, understood that fixing TIME as a non-changing but CLEAR variable, allowed the players to comprehend more easily what was going on. The confusion of two or three kinds of "time" (the "turn" was 10 rounds) tended to create comprehension difficulties that merely urged many players to simply zone out... not because the system was too difficult, but because it was so unclear why these stipulations existed. As well, the value in game terms of knowing the distinctions was non-existent. One did not become a better tactician by understanding the difference between a round and a segment.

"Next the DM checks distance, and finds that the parties are only 10' apart—sufficiently near to close and strike."

The "distance checking" here seems to impose a strategic factor, but it really doesn't. The DM has not "checked" the size of the corridor, the presence of the characters in it or presumably anything else they haven't seen. Presumably, if the DM has designed the dungeon, and the dungeon has Party B in it, then the DM ought to have provided the exact location of Party B at that time, and not now when Party A happens to turn the corner. Presumably, the rest of the corridor's length is accounted for beyond Party B, and the DM knows that as well. Therefore, the distance check is just window dressing, again. In any case, even if Party A were moving silent, if Party B were ten feet from a blind corner, then presumably they'd have looked around this blind corner before stopping here to have a parley about treasure. There are four members of Party B. Presumably they are not all engaged in an argument so convenient that they are together all talking at the same time, while having forgotten they're in a dungeon where wandering monsters occur (as they do in all D&D dungeons).

"Party A immediately recognizes Party B as a group of "evil marauders" they were warned against and moves to attack. First, Arlanni the thief, who had her sling ready (as the player had stated previous to the encounter), fires a shot at Blastum, who is obviously a magic-user. A sling bullet gains +3 "to hit" vs. no armor. Arlanni would usually need an 11 to hit, but now needs only an 8. She rolls a 5, and misses."

Now, here the combat begins to resolve. What matters here isn't the procedure or the manner in which a "ready sling" is interpreted... let's wave all that as irrelevant. The larger reveal here is that the set up, two parties not in conflict, permits no real "tactical judgment" at all. The characters have one attack; Arlanni's is the sling she possesses. We create a "logic" for her to fire at Blastum ("obviously" the mage) except the "obvious" is a metagame knowledge, i.e., only a mage enters a dungeon without armour. No armour, ipso facto, must be the mage. It isn't that another class might have had their armour eaten away by acid or dragon breath, no; it isn't that the character might not be able to afford armour; or that they've simply chosen not to wear it for encumbrance purposes. No, it is pre-determined that the character without armour is the mage... thus, flattening the procedure by telling the character with the weapon that gets a bonus against AC 10 should obviously attack the opponent with AC 10.

That sounds like a tactic, but it isn't. When the rules exaggerate one specific action by giving benefits to that specific action, then taking that specific action isn't tactical, it's falling off a log. This is something D&D does again and again with its combat system. It works because there are a lot of specific tactical benefits, but once the players know what they are, it's plug-and-play, not a tactical endeavour.

Moreover, we can't even argue from the above that Arlanni uses the sling because it brings the benefit: it states plainly that she had it ready before meeting the enemy, before the surprise check, before coming around the corner. It was use the sling or don't attack this round.

All this together makes the succeed/fail roll look worse. Effectively, the attack could be carried out by throwing the die in front of a stuffed dummy with an Arlanni name tag. And this is how a lot of players come to feel when someone shoves a die at them, then roll it, they get a 5, they're told they missed, and the play moves on to some other player. There's no sense of "engagement," because the others at the table are telling the player "this is what you do here." Again, this is an example of play equivalent to turning a roulette wheel.

"Aggro the fighter rushes forward to attack the nearest opponent, who happens to be Balto, the monk. Balto is wearing no armor, so Aggro needs a base 8 to hit Balto. However, Aggro is using a + 1 hand axe, and furthermore an axe is + 1 to hit vs. no armor, so Aggro's adjusted amount needed to hit is only 6 (or, alternately, the cumulative +2 could be added to whatever he rolls to improve his chances of rolling an 8 or better). Aggro rolls a 14 and hits Balto, but only 1 point of damage is rolled, plus a 1 point bonus from the magic axe (2 points total), and Balto can take 4."

The fighter has little else he can do; he might throw a weapon but at this range it's fight anyway and his hand weapon has a potential for greater damage. "Happens" to be Balto is an expression of the way that D&D was played in those days: there's no battle map, so the DM just states the character in front of Aggro, either deciding arbitrarily or having the dice decide. Aggro is not asked, "Which do you fight," nor is it expected he will obviously state that from the above. Players always do state it, in which case DMs often simply say, no, you can't fight the mage, he's over there, you can fight the monk. This again removes any tactical relevance to Aggro's efforts other than rolling a die to see what happens. He might as well be sitting on the sidelines of a game and urging on a batter, for all the relevance his decision makes in the process. The procedure then also resolves without him: miss/hit with calculated modifiers, roll damage, record damage. 

"Meanwhile, Abner and Arkayn have been preparing short (first level) spells. The cleric shouts a command of "surrender!" at Gutboy Barrelhouse, but Gutboy is 6th level and thus gets a saving throw. Furthermore, he is a dwarf with a constitution of 16, and thus saves at +4. He therefore needs a 10 or better to save (instead of a 14). He rolls a 17 and saves easily. Unfortunately, he is almost simultaneously hit by two magic missiles from Abner, the magic-user. Against these there is no save, and Gutboy suffers 6 points of damage (from a possible 4-10)."

Again... Abner is a mage, Arkayn is a cleric. Within the rule set, casting a spell is mechanically no different from Arlanni's sling. There's no cost to casting, except a temporary loss of the spell (a loss that would be "fixed" by later systems); they are not made vulnerable by weaving magic. Thus, there's no sense to their not using their sharpest weapon at this time.

Arkayn even at 4th doesn't have a lot of attack options; hold person would be more effective; perhaps he's used it or hasn't "loaded" it, as they say. Command is a 1st level spell, allows the use of a subjunctive verb (look it up) and a single one at that: "surrender" is a fair option. There aren't many good ones. Kneel, collapse, sleep... some of my old timey players liked "defecate" or "urinate," which is reasonably something that effectively distracts the recipient for the one-round duration of the spell. It doesn't matter. Arkayn, like Arlanni, is using the best arrow in his bow at this point and it's subject to a saving throw... so, in effect, it is the most obvious action with a succeed/failure roll and... not tactical, since any other better option would have been used here. Later, Arkayn gives up magic and just fights.

Abner's two magic missiles are the same logic: the best bullet in his gun. The "hit" is bookkeeping, automatic: needed to win the battle, perhaps, but the obvious thing done at the most obvious time.

Abner doesn't target the other mage (for reasons that aren't clear, since he can "see" what Arlanni sees, that the obvious mage is the more dangerous enemy, but the example here needs everyone in Party B to be threatened so, there we are. Nothing tactical is taking place here except the example is arbitrarily assigning everyone their individual target.

Would targeting the mage be the better tactic? Well, that's worthy discussion. But it's not part of the discussion in the DMG. And it should be.

My opinion of it after 46 years of D&D is that the magic missile does not do enough damage to meaningfully change either option. Either Blastum is such a low level mage that six damage is effective enough to kill him, in which case he was never dangerous, or he's dangerous enough mage that he can shake off six or ten points and still cast as soon as Gutboy puts himself between the mage and whomever else. Either the spell you've got can do the job against the dangerous opponent, or it can't, and you have no tactical control over that. Which, again, is why the system has flaws. Most tactical games are fought on open fields: large scale maps, open plains, desert scapes, street battles fought at a difference over scattered terrain. D&D is normally fought in a tiny enclosed spaces where the fighters can block access to the mages who can blast whatever they can reach. So, effectively, it doesn't matter who Abner targets. It amounts to "let's see who gets lucky."

"As Party B is surprised for 2 segments, Party A has a chance to hit in each segment as if they were full rounds (this does not apply to spell use, of course). In the second segment, Arlanni chooses to set down her crossbow and unsheathe her sword.

The example has forgotten that Arlanni is using a sling. The crossbow would take time to load, so that is a tactical decision... but loading it in this closed space would, from experience with battle, be the wrong decision, so she's again just doing what she most obviously should.

"Aggro would normally get another chance to hit Balto, who would be inactive for another segment, but Balto's dexterity allows him a +1 reaction adjustment, which means that he personally will be surprised for one less segment than the rest of his party. So this segment he IS up and on his guard, and Aggro does not get another hit attempt this round."

By sheer chance, though monks must have a 15 or greater dexterity to be their class, Balto happens to be the one among the enemy who is exempt from this second attack. However, the rules don't explain why or how Aggro is "engaged" with Balto in such a manner that he cannot instead swing on Gutboy or someone else, in this cramped 10 foot wide hallway where presumably everyone arguing was together, and are now not close enough together to be targeted as a group, though they were "surprised." Normally in D&D, if attacking two or more opponents, the combatant is permitted to attack WHICH opponent they wish. But here there is nothing to tell Aggro how far away Gutboy is, or whether or not Aggro is allowed to move away or around Balto now that they're engaged... no, it's described above as though Aggro's feet (being the one not surprised) are now stuck in amber after having attacked one of the enemy's number.

This is the game strategic limitation imposed by non-map tactics. A segment is described as "six seconds." In six seconds, in my youth, I used to be able to run a distance of 40 yards easily. That's 120 feet, twelve times the distance between the parties at the outset of this fight. But my fighter can't reach Gutboy, who must be standing to the monk's left or right, because somehow he successfully blocks me despite being surprised enough for me to fight him one round?

"Arkayn the cleric readies his mace..."

Arkayn hasn't another attack spell; a mace makes sense. It inexplicably takes him six seconds to get the mace off his belt and "ready;" Arlanni has the same problem above finding her sword. These are not weapons designed to take more than a second or two to "get ready," but that draw speed for different weapons, say a dagger vs. a halberd, IS described on page 66-67 of the same DMG (five pages earlier), where it's said that the "speed factor" is indicative of "how long it takes to reading a weapon against an opponent," but then it fails to give any hard detail for this "how long" that is applicable here or anywhere else.

Speed factor on those pages is not translated into seconds or segments, and no rule uses it to determine how long Arkayn needs to draw his mace or Arlanni needs to put down one weapon and draw another. The number is only activated under special initiative circumstances after combatants are already prepared to fight. Reading the text reveals it's an idea of a rule that never resolves into anything that's comprehensible. Even the book's own example of combat simply causes the character's to both skip their attacks on account of drawing weapons.

"...as Abner steps back and begins to unroll a scroll for use next round."

This looks like a tactical decision; Abner does not draw a weapon, he chooses to seek out a resource, a magic item, and use that instead. However, there's no explanation of where this scroll was kept on his body; the scroll is apparently not in a case, which would have to be gotten, then the case opened, then the scroll taken out, then the scroll unrolled, and all this presumably with him moving backward so he isn't jostled by the fight while all this is happening. Or did he have it in his hand when casting magic missile, or running down the hall from the goblins? How is it this relatively fragile thing comes so easy to hand? Why he is left alone to do this is explained only by the 1 segment he has left before the enemy is no longer surprised — so what then? Is there a risk involved here? If there is, it's potentially tactical for Abner to choose this option.

The missing map matters again. How far does he "step back?" Is Arkayn now between him and Party B? Does the corridor permit Aggro and Arkayn to form a barrier? Can an enemy move around them? The sentence gives Abner the benefit of positioning without requiring anyone to establish or defend that position. In like manner the scroll is treated as an option on a menu rather than as a physical object.

"Now initiative dice are rolled, and party A's score is lower, so party B gets to react to the assault. Balto attacks Aggro (who is in AC 2) with his staff. He needs a base 18 to hit, and the -7 armor class adjustment for sword vs. plate mail and shield makes this a 20. He (the DM) rolls a 19 —almost, but not quite! Gutboy Barrelhouse and Barjin the fighter/magic-user both attack Arkayn. That cleric's AC is only 5. Gutboy has +l to hit due to strength, and his hammer's armor class adjustment vs. scale mail and shield is + 1, so he needs a 9 or better to hit (1 1 before bonuses). He rolls a 12 and hits for 5 points of damage (including 1 point of bonus damage from strength). Barjin, with a sword, needs a 13 or better to hit Arkayn. He rolls a 13 exactly, and hits for 6 more points of damage. Arkayn is starting to have second thoughts about this whole affair."

At this point, we can see that the attacks above are utterly procedural and not tactical. Plus Balto's not using a sword vs. plate mail and -7 from a base 18 means he needs a 25, not a 20, so... let's just skip that. The point is, none of this makes sense. Gutboy's teaming up with Barjin is arbitrary; it makes more sense for the 6th level dwarf to go after the heavily armoured fighter Aggro, sparing the 1st level monk from fighting him alone; Barjin the 4th/5th level can master a flimsy cleric who has one spell to cast, and command at that. These are the tactical choices here, but there being ignored because... the lack of a map? The DM throwing arbitrary choices at the NPCs? Who knows.

This is a good time to talk about game damage in the original system. Damage, when it occurs, is meaningless if it does not kill. Arkayn may feel unnerved by how many fewer hit points he has, but his effectiveness in combat is unchanged whether he takes 1 damage or 11, as he does here. All he need do is have "second thoughts." His body, presumably the thing taking the damage, is not physically affected by the hits, nor does it get in the way of Arkayn returning an attack as though he's just been landed on by a fly.

This makes combat into bookkeeping in a most extreme way. At lower level, the "zero" is closer, and thus every point feels a little more important... so long as we understand this feeling rests entirely in the player's mind. At higher level, the distance to zero is so great, and the effect so meaningless, that it actively makes playing higher level characters less interesting. Combine this lack of effect with the mass benefits of healing at higher levels, and the combat system is positively a snooze-fest.

"Meanwhile, Blastum has been preparing a shocking grasp spell, and now he steps forward and touches (rolls a successful "to hit" die score) Arlanni the thief, delivering 10 points of damage (1-8 + 4). There is no saving throw: Arlanni has only 8 hit points, and dies."

Again, as a tactical system, this simply blows through several processes. One segment before this "round" began, Blastum was so inert he could not move, he could do nothing but defend himself while Arlanni's sling stone flew past his ears. Now, instantly (so far at the game round matters), he has the spell cast, has it invested into his body, has moved forward to where he can reach Arlanni (presumably not behind anyone, despite the 10 foot corridor and the people fighting), so he can reach out his hand and touch her, killing her instantly. They haven't fought hand to hand at any point prior to this, but she lost initiative so the other can move anywhere on the battle map he wishes as a mage and kill whomever he can hit with his hand. We do not even have a declaration that Arlanni advanced after drawing her sword. So, while Aggro cannot attack someone other than Balto, Blastum can walk past Aggro, past Arkayn, past three of his own people, in a ten foot corridor, and attack the thief at the back.

Nice.

If he could do this, why didn't he go after the mage with the scroll in hand? Because Abner "stepped back"? Is that all it takes to avoid all fighting thereafter?

This is sufficient to make the point. We have something that pretends to be a combat system, but isn't. And since, the same sort of assumptions that exist in the above still exist in the later systems that have copied this procedure, only making it more obstructive by having everyone in the combat roll initiative every single round, as though in any way that improves the tactical structure lacking here. We are still running systems that are effectively instant magic in the place of instant sword swinging, however complicated the kind of sword magic being done, to produce non-tactical results that are just "the next thing to do is to attack the next person."

Fifth edition improves the scaffolding that is missing, yes: it establishes combatants’ positions, gives each creature a definite space, reach and movement rate, restricts movement through hostile creatures, permits movement before and after an action... and provides explicit rules for dash, disengage, dodge, ready, grappling, shoving, cover and opportunity attacks. In a ten-foot corridor, Aggro and Arkayn can occupy the two five-foot spaces across its width; Blastum cannot simply walk through them to touch Arlanni. That particular absurdity has been corrected.

But in many games the map remains optional... and the rules still begin by saying that the DM establishes where everyone is. Consequently, theatre-of-the-mind play can reproduce the same problem in a slightly better-regulated form: the player asks whether a target is reachable and the DM announces whether the imagined position permits it. Fifth edition gives the DM firmer rules for answering, but unless the battlefield is visibly recorded, the player may still be discovering spatial facts only after proposing an action.

And though damaging a caster can break concentration, that's still the most obvious choice to make. And while shoving can move or knock down an opponent, and grappling can stop movement, that's still usually the most obvious thing to do when an opponent needs to be dealt with in some other way than attacking. These are not really a collection of choices one makes, it's just the next obvious action when the enemy is somewhere that they need to be pushed or slowed or toppled or sapped. Fifth edition has increased the number of things an attack can do, but that is not the same as increasing tactical judgment. It has mostly enlarged the library of prescribed responses.

A caster is concentrating, so attack the caster. An enemy stands near a ledge, so push the enemy. Someone needs to be prevented from moving, so grapple or slow that person. An opponent relies upon accurate attacks, so sap the opponent. Once the relevant condition appears, the system often indicates the appropriate button plainly enough that choosing it is little more than recognising a cue.

Genuine tactical decisions require competing benefits; arrange these defenses and those attacks to drive this enemy in this manner there, so they can be trapped thusly or split apart and attacked in smaller groups. Unless the players have the rule sets that allow them to organise themselves in such a manner that they can move over a map that permits BOTH freedom of movement AND rational obstacles that prevent it, then every battle becomes close, fight until the hit points go away and then slog forward.

The most telling demonstration of this is, I think, that there is a tendency among "let's play" video content to "spice up" combat scenes with meaningless non-game cutscene dialogue that the DM indulges in to provide more context and meaning to the ongoing scene... while, in fact, the dice seem to matter less and less to the outcome. It's rather egregious but it's also evidence that battle, as the game rules dictate, is boring. That does not venture well for the value of D&D as a construction other than collaborative inventive role-playing dreck. Which is why, I feel, the concept has drifted without restraint into that direction. We're not here to fight the monster. We're hear to listen to the DM describe how we fight the monster.

All this begs the question: why go into this level of depth on this process? What is this post trying to prove? That original D&D failed? If so, then the news is a bit behind the times.

Granted. All this, however, is not to prove that the combat system as written sucks, but specifically how and why it sucks: because it is not sports.

I've been writing this post since yesterday; I'm going to post this and continue on part two.