Assassination Experience Points

This has nothing to do with the subject matter, but ... I had my procedure today for cancer and I'm okay.  Two tiny polyps, removed, everything else looks good and I was sent home.  I'm still waiting on a final test but the expectation is that I won't need to repeat the procedure for five years.  Once home, I crashed.  I woke up about two hours ago, watched a very good movie about an assassin, Nobody, which I highly recommend, and now I'm settling in at 11 pm to write a post.  Got my cup of coffee and everything.

When I came to D&D as a young kid, I took most of the rules at face value.  I tried to remain true to Gygax's descriptions of the character classes and the DMG in general, getting frustrated like most people but believing in the words and the ideas with the dim-witted trust of a 15 y.o. in love with this game.  Sometimes I feel I have to stress that I've been playing this game and reading these rules for a loooooong time.  If I'm cynical these days, if I betray a hard-bitten grudge for Gygax, if I grind my teeth over various phrases and notions presented in the books, I must stress that I come by my resentment honestly.  No one hates an ex-religion like an ex-fanatic.

I haven't had reason to comment on many of these passages in the DMG, as I've had lately, with digging through the books section by section.  Gygax's vision for the assassin, in particular, baffles me.  I mentioned earlier that he seems to have wanted the class to be some kind of weird 13th century James Bond.  This is emphasized a bit more by this inclusion of special rules for the assassin gaining experience points specifically from committing assassinations.

For myself, experience is awarded on a flat system.  I don't care who causes damage or under what circumstance, as long as the damage is caused by the character.  This includes pushing a victim off a building and letting the ground do the hard work.  It does not, however, include pushing a victim into a shark pool and letting the sharks do the work.  I know, I know; but sharks need x.p. too, and there's only so much that goes around.

Gygax's logic goes like this, and I quote from p.20:

"An assassin receives 100 x.p./level of the character assassinated minus or plus 50 x.p. for every level the assassin is greater or lesser than his or her victim. This is modified by multipliers for the degree of difficulty of the mission - simple (x ½), difficult (x 1). or extraordinary (x 1½) ...

"Therefore, if an 8th level assassin snuck up on and surprised a 10th level magic-user in the dungeon and successfully assassinated him, the assassin would receive 1,ooO x.p. plus another 100 x.p. since the magic-user was 2 levels higher than he. However, since it was a simple mission, the total 1100 x.p. would be multiplied by %, giving 550 points ..."

 

Let's not waste time discussing how silly this is, or how meaningless 550, or even 1100 x.p. is for an 8th level character.  Let's consider instead the purpose of this rule and ask why does it exist?

Was Gygax trying to encourage assassinations and felt that a special bonus mechanic was needed to make them happen?  Did he think that either players weren't killing enough other players and non-players at his table, or that they wouldn't want to?  It's interesting that the basis of this above experience is a straight percentage roll, success/fail, which can be found in the combat section, on page 75.  There it tells us that the chances of an 8th level assassin killing a 10th level victim is ... 30%.  Ugh.  7:3 odds against the assassin, for a lousy 550 x.p.  There's some weird thinking going on here.

It's not a wonder players in my game never pursued this.  The odds always needed to be better, which challenged a thinking process that continues to pervade adventure-design.  It's something I keep doing, that I trip on and have to remind myself is a bad habit.  It goes like this:

A first-level character should not be able to easily kill a 10th level character.

Taking the example above, a 1st level assassin is sitting in the study of a 10th level thief.  They've known each other for ages, so the thief trusts the assassin; the thief notices a picture on the wall is crooked, so he gets up, crosses the room and straightens the picture, turning his back on the assassin.  Little does he know the assassin has been extorted and also paid to kill him, so the moment the thief is fixing the picture, or perhaps cleaning it, the assassin leaps up and stabs the thief in the back, taking him by surprise.  The chance of the assassin succeeding in this assassination according to the rules?  1%.

Why so low?  Why not 50/50?  Or better, since the thief trusts the assassin.  The reason is apparently simple.  Because the thief is 10th LEVEL, that's why.  And this is supposed to be some sort of mystical, super-protective fairy-dust plot armour.  We can't have 1st level characters just willy-nilly killing HIGH level characters!  It would be chaos!  The rivers would boil!  Fire would rain from the sky!

In Gygax's system, if the assassin rolled the magic 1%, the reward would be 550 x.p.  If we forewent the special assassin experience rule and used the X.P. table on page 85, and supposing the thief averaged 5 h.p. per level, for a total of 50 hit points, the reward would be 1600.  Yes, that's right.  Gygax's special experience for assassins is markedly less that real experience.  But stick a pin in that.  I want first to say that if the x.p. were being awarded by my system, the experience would be 500 x.p., for the thief's hit points, no matter how the thief was killed.

My experience points and Gygax's special experience wouldn't get the thief halfway to 2nd level.  So what, exactly, is the big deal?  What horrible thing happens if a player gets lucky, even if I give him a high chance, like 60%?  He gets 500 x.p.  A 10th level dies.  It's not like the world can't go on without that 10th level.  It's not like there aren't other high level characters around to take up the slack.  It's not like a 10th level isn't a thing I can "invent out of thin air" at my will.  Therefore, SO WHAT if a 10th level dies?  So what if the player slips in and knocks off the wizard by using stealth, guile and cleverness to get set up for the kill!  Why are these chances to kill by assassination so low?

Possibly Gygax didn't realize it, but he actively invented rules to stop assassins from being assassins.  An 8th level assassin has a better chance of killing a 10th level character by bringing along a party and doing the fighting hand to hand, and gets better experience in the bargain, even by the AD&D system.  There's no logical reason for an assassin of less than 5th level to kill anyone by assassination, as decent odds only exist for people who are easily killed in straight melee.  Even if you do kill someone, unless it's someone of 7th level or less, the assassination bonus system works against the method.  Why would someone build a system this way?

I think there are two possible explanations.  1) and this is dead certain: Gygax took credit for writing the book, but did not write large sections of the book and did not even vet them.  2) someone, either Gygax or one of the other writers, really liked the assassin, while someone else really hated the class.  Apparently, they worked hard to goof on each other ... and then they sold this book to an unsuspecting public, me, who eventually had to pull this thing apart and burn parts of it to the ground.

This in-fighting was not adequately settled by the editor, Mike Carr; meaning this is absolutely Carr's fault, not the petty squabbles of the staff writers.  But perhaps Carr was just a figure-head, some dupe who was there to correct spelling and set type.  More's the pity, because nuttery like this is one of the reasons why any original faith in the texts faltered after a few years, leading to poorer efforts like the Unearthed Arcana and Wilderness Adventures ... which descended into the miasma that ultimately became an edition multiplicity syndrome.

Perhaps that's too much to hang on one little passage, just two bewildering paragraphs stuffed into a large book full of enigmatic game design choices.  Like the next one I'll discuss, soon.

p.s.,

The example of assassination I've given really happened.  Feel free to shout it out in the comments if you know.