Reversals

To continue, the players have collected their treasure and discovered that there's a dungeon below the kobalds. As the reader can tell, the aftermath of combat produces multiple issues and downstream effects well past the actual fighting. Those who disparage the inclusion of combat in role-playing games conveniently overlook these effects, and their games suffer on account of that.

Here is another.  As the players contemplate the possibility of going forward, they're acutely aware of their hit points.  Without doubt, they'll have lost some to the kobalds, probably quite a few given how many kobalds there were, and what's wanted is sufficient healing to bring them to full.  Only, as the game was originally designed, and as I still play this part of it, healing at lower levels is in extremely short supply in the game world.  There are lots of ways to get healed ... but instant healing any time the party wants, even limited by some number of times in a given day, isn't there.

The so-called value of "super"-healing rules, such as developed in later games, is that the party can continue to move forward, practically indefinitely if need be, so that the whole adventure can be managed as a single narrative ... just like heroes manage in literature, when all the cuts and wounds they receive are either forgotten or fall just short of killing the hero before the quest is finished.  Many players want that exact arrangement.  They don't want to admit they're human, having to give ground to the enemy, having to retreat home with their tails between their legs like cowards.

Yet notice how often in books and films that the characters have to do exactly that — the way that Luke, Han and Leia have to escape so they can fight another day in the original film; or the way that Luke in the 2nd film, having lost his hand, has to escape so he can return in the 3rd.  He didn't spontaneously regenerate all his hit points.  He lost ... but losing isn't the end.

Most D&D battles are set up to give the players a Pyrrhic victory — named after the 3rd century BC general from a tiny country in northern Greece who repeatedly kicked the Roman's ass in fight after fight.  Though Pyrrhus lost less men than the Romans in these fights, he had less men to start with.  He couldn't exploit his victories.  He had to give up the ground he won, eventually having to fall back from Italy altogether, because he never had an army that equalled his genius.

That's the players at a low level.  They're smarter than the enemy, they have more options and powers than the enemy ... but from the beginning of the game, they venture into each lair by themselves, without a proper support network.  Most that I've run won't learn from this, because they think somehow that the rules of the game dictate that to be heroes, they must do it all themselves.  Instead, the players should build friendships and allies, with fortified encampments two or three miles from the dungeon, filled with supplies, replacement equipment, additional soldiers, a friendly cleric or two to give a little more healing and so on.  All these things are possible in the original game, but they're not even considered by a player party ... no doubt because many DMs refuse to reward players for rational thinking, loving to produce a situation where the players return to their camp to find they have to fight their own hirelings for no good reason except the DM is a fucking prick.

So, instead, we invent bottomless magical healing to overcome the "broken" parts of the original game, to spare the problem of players having to think.  And this naturally leads to other designs that circumvent the deadly capacity of the game as designed, assuring that no one's going to get seriously hurt or killed, at least not permanently, just so that dungeon can get finished without anyone ever having to take a break.

Like the fallout after combat, there's fallout after the players retreating back to town that gives the game a greater richness that punching monsters until they're all punched.  Players have to make choices, which gives them reason to consider their priorities.  They're reminded of their humanity, of the simple fact that they can't endlessly wade against an enemy like gods.  This humanity serves them very well when they're much more powerful and they remember the time when they were very soft and vulnerable.  The retreat gives us, the DM, to remind them that there is more to the setting — remember those examples of adventure hooks we set up while the party was on their way to the dungeon, that we can now bring round to fruition.  Other things, too, may happen on the party's way back.  They may get so invested in something else that they don't come back to the dungeon at all, at least not right away.  We give them choices.  We give them perspective.  We assure them that no, the game isn't just an endless cycle of replacing all their hit points and going around again.

Before we get to that, however, we have to talk about the party that decides, "We're just going to camp right here, in the dungeon we just cleared, until we get our hit points back."

This is always fun.  I've allowed it at times.  Online, I had a party moving through a cave that had been sealed off for centuries, sitting literally miles from the inhabited part of the cave, who camped out for four or five days, sending one player character back to town for supplies.  So yes, in the right circumstances, it's possible.

That scenario doesn't really apply to this kobald lair, however.  There are, to begin with, a lot of dead kobalds and dead rats laying around.  Far from being sealed off for centuries, the outer door is open to the world.  Is there a party of 20 kobald hunters on a 2-day trip, about to arrive back?  Have they absolutely killed every last rat?  Won't the bodies of the dead kobalds start to smell?  And — according to the rules of my game — the unburied dead do tend to rise as undead.

Now, it may be that because I grew up reading Weird War Tales as a comic, I'm naturally attuned to this concept ... but resting amidst scores of dead is just begging for a very bad scene.  How long does it take a murdered kobald to decay sufficiently in order to rise as a skeleton, when it's home is being occupied who have such contempt for the dead that they won't even stack them together?  And is it even possible for a human/demi-human cleric to give a proper burial rights to a kobald?  Surely these are questions worth considering.

Even if that's not a thing ... me, the guy writing this, would have quite a lot of trouble resting in the tomb I'd just created.  And I'm a 21st century fellow with a strong knowledge of science and not practicing a religion.  What does a 17th century player character think when he or she's lying, trying to sleep, and some mouse somewhere near by starts chewing on a kobald corpse, causing a random arm 50 feet away to slip and fall to the floor?  "Oh, that's a mouse"?

Remember that healing without magical means (or rule changes) takes a good long time.  A cleric has to get a full sleep, to pray again for a spell that only cures a little bit of the player's total lost hit points.  The party would have to rest for days, hearing every tiny sound gently echoing in hollow stone rooms that would be eerily silent when something wasn't skittering across the floor ... while waiting to see if it's our imaginations or if something real is actually happening.  While all the while being uncertain whether or not we've definitely killed everything that lives in this lair.

Running this is easy.  It's just a choice of picking words.  "You hear something very quiet; it sounds like it might have come from around the corner ahead; but it's probably nothing."  "Falling asleep, you feel like clawed hands are closing around your neck; you feel the boniness of the fingers as you have trouble breathing ..." [pause for effect]  "You wake up, gasping for breath.  It was a dream."

Takes about twenty minutes of this to get a party to smarten up, gather up their shit and head back to town.