Exchange

A recent exchange on JB's Blackrazor blog:

sevenbastard: I should have been more clear. I think running a mafia style campaign is great fun. But the rules and adventures presented in AD&D are for dungeon crawling and some high level domain management.

Alexis: They're for whatever we want, seven.

sevenbastard: For sure the rules are for whatever I want, but the rules on treasure as xp are there to get people in the dungeon. The players are not greedy for money, they are greedy for xp. Because money could be earned a lot safer outside the dungeon.

The AD&D DMG and PHB section on gold for xp explicitly states that if thier [sic] was minimal risk the gold doesn't equal xp but some portion of it.

If you are going to use AD&D to run a campaign that's about con men, shady merchant's, and protection rackets you are going to need to modify how xp is granted.

Sure you could go with 1 gp equals 1 xp no matter how it is gained but the you get "How did Bob hit third level in the first session? he placed all his starting gold on red 5."

So many things to deconstruct.

Let's concede that seven's writing this off the top of his (or her) head, most likely in a passion.  I don't believe that a dualistic perspective — D&D is either about dungeons or its about confidence games and gambling — was intended.

I don't believe that treasure as x.p. are there specifically to get players to the dungeon.  Remove treasure for x.p. and players will still run for the dungeon, so it's not the if-then causality that seven argues for.  But again, let's shrug that off.

Yes, Gygax does write in the DMG that the DM should ad hoc, by fiat, decide how much experience per treasure the players should get, according to what the DM feels is appropriate.  This is one of the shittier things Gygax argues for in the DMG; the fellows I played in my early days, both my friends and the adults I hooked up with, would have screamed bloody murder at a DM who made that argument and stormed out ... just as you would today if you were charged more money for a cone of ice cream because you're fat, or if your food costs were higher because you were retired and "didn't work as hard" for the money.  It's descrimination, it's bullshit, it's not how games are played and whether it's in the book or not, its a stupidly bad argument.  But let's hang that scarecrow on the noose and move past it.

Should character's get experience for gold if they gamble for it, as opposed to fight for it?  The question comes up.  Was there a risk?  Arguably, yes.  It's a die roll made to win money ... which is fundamentally NOT different from a die roll in a combat which wins money.  Emotionally, we can pretend it's different, because the player character's life is at stake, rather than the loss of a road stake ... but so long as the odds for one are the same as odds for the other, a game is being played, a character stands to win or lose, and the die roll might come up either way.  If someone wants to make an argument that characters gain treasure, and thus x.p., through some factor involving RISK other than rolling odds on dice, I'll listen.  Please don't waste my time with arguments that the player has to convince the monster to give over the treasure, which might or might not work out, as this involves suckering the DM ... which implies the DM can be suckered.  I can't be, not that way, so no: I don't consider "role-playing" an argument to be a "risky" venture.

I feel I need to point out that for "Bob" to succeed in becoming 3rd level on his first session by placing his starting gold on red 5 (if he's playing the number, the colour doesn't matter; and in any case, the "5" is an odd number and is therefore black; research, people!) he'd need 72 g.p. starting coin if he's a thief, 143 g.p. starting coin if he's a mage and 158 g.p. starting coin if he's a paladin.  In my game, before he could get into a casino (and with my game world taking place in 1650, there's only one in the whole world, The Ridotto casino that was opened in Venice in 1638, the very first casino that ever existed), he'd have to (a) have some kind of status before he could get in the door; and (b) would probably have to had to purchased at least 5,000 g.p. in clothes and jewelry before entering.  In fact, it would cost him at least 200 g.p. just to tip the concierge and other casino staff just to get seated in a chair anywhere near the roulette wheel ... which doesn't matter anyway, as the roulette wheel we're familiar with wasn't invented in 18th century France.

But, yeah, except for these few minor considerations and impracticalities, effected by some form of Biribi perhaps (though that game was so crooked that it was outlawed in Italy, and a tall tale involving Casanova is associated with it because the famous lover would tell people he'd actually won at it), maybe in a very badly-constructed game world, Bob could become 3rd level by slapping down somewhere between 72 and 158 gold.

All this is to highlight the truly ridiculous argument that seven makes ... that might have popped out front for the reader anyway, though it was fun for me getting here around this large barn.  There is no "safer" way to earn a lot of money than to adventure in a dungeon.

The odds of your character living are a damn-sight better than 1 in 35, assuming we're not talking about some abattoir-based dungeon concept as were popular once upon a time.  Maybe it's just me.  I've run scores of dungeons over the years, and so long as the party act together, watch each others' backs, refrain from pvp and other stupid choices, they're quite able to slip in, kill some monsters, locate a small up front treasure worthy of kicking them up to 2nd — and at worst lose one or two characters on the way.  With a good chance these dead characters can be hoisted out and raised.

A DM would have to be some kind of H.H. Holmesian nightmare of a game master to slaughter whole parties with such spectacular regularity that the chances of winning a 1 in 37 roll on a roulette table (the actual odds) were consistently better than entering and surviving a dungeon.  Whoa.  Hold me back.  I want to play in that fucking game.

Seeing such comments made from the larger perspective, I think passionate people slapping out an argument on the internet fail to recognize how poorly thought out our statements can be.  And let me be clear: I really do mean "OUR."  I've caught myself spouting some truly bonehead shit this last 15 years ... most of it by rushing to spew out some passionate rebuttal as fast as I can make my fingers fly over the keys.  It's an extraordinarily bad habit — and one that's extraordinarily hard to break.  I personally would do remarkably better in the world if I wrote every comment separately on a word file, waited a week, and then decided if it ought to be posted or not.  I'm quite sure that if I did this, I'd realize there's never a good comment that can be made on any site, ever.

Just look at the one I added to this exchange: "They're for whatever we want."  Man.  Captain Obvious to the rescue.  Why in fuck did I even write that?  I just gotta let stupid people be stupid.  There just isn't a reason to weigh in, ever, on anything that anyone ever says ... unless, perhaps, it's a private conversation between the creator and me.

Explaining, once and for all, why my getting comments is an insipid thing to worry about.

Eureka.